Weekly10 is helping this children’s skincare start-up overcome a range of challenges linked to rapid growth

With a dispersed workforce and a fast-moving business environment, frequent feedback and continuous performance management are key.

people-desk-spotlight

You might recognise Toddle from the BBC's Dragon's Den. Toddle has been on a meteoric rise since launching in 2017. They're the leading UK manufacturer of natural skincare products for children. The likes of Boots, JoJo Maman Bébé and John Lewis stock their ever-growing range of vegan products. Toddle are a rapidly growing UK start-up facing a common mix of challenges for growing companies.

Toddle employs a multi-skilled team across North Wales and the West Country benefiting from flexible and remote work opportunities. This keeps the business agile. Ideal for a growing independent company disrupting an industry full of big name brands.

Like many growing businesses, Toddle didn’t have a clear employee engagement strategy. And performance management was an ad-hoc approach of meetings and offline templates. As they grew, both employee engagement and performance management needed a greater focus. As did effective workplace communication.

We sat down with founder and Managing Director, Hannah Saunders. She shared why Weekly10 was one of the first pieces of software she introduced at Toddle. And how it helps boost employee engagement and allows her dispersed team to keep on task 24/7.

Weekly10 was one of the first tech we invested in. That's because employee engagement is a KPI for the business. It unlocks staff potential and encourages them to build a career with us.

Hannah Saunders | CEO

What challenges were you facing?

As we began to grow, I found some of my key challenges centred around people. Retaining my best employees, having them own their own success, and great workplace communication across multiple sites and working patterns.

I started life in the RAF where engagement wasn’t overly high on the agenda. And understandably so. With two appraisal periods across a year and not much else in between, you often had to assume you were doing your job effectively. Coming from that experience and knowing it wasn’t right, I knew I needed to look at a new way to deal with employee engagement.

After a fair amount of research and testing, Weekly10 offered the best mix of what I needed. And implementing Weekly10 was incredibly easy. A lot of it is automated, with anything that isn’t being a real quick and simple job to setup. I’m not that tech-savvy at all, so if I’m saying it’s easy, it really is!

Engagement became a business KPI

I felt that to keep hold of the best ‘Team Toddle’ talent, I had to ensure that employee engagement became a KPI for the business. Knowing the importance of engagement in not just unlocking the full potential of staff, but also enticing them to build a career within a company, it become our focus fast!

We have remote workers across multiple locations, meaning face to face time was and would continue to be limited. So I also knew I needed a focus on continuous feedback, and effective but efficient communication.

Weekly10 keeps people focused on performance

Performance management was also key. After all, monitoring tasks is huge for a start-up from the point of knowing what’s going on in an environment where events move at a hundred miles an hour!

Weekly10 helps all of my staff to know exactly where we are and where we're going. That's important because I don't get to see them every day, week, or month. The team all know what our KPIs are, what sales we need to hit, and what conversion rates we need to achieve. And they're reminded of this every time they complete their check-in.

Staff are able to give and receive regular feedback with their managers, recognise discretionary effort and have successes or issues raised straight up to me.

Employees are encouraged to use their initiative as they know where we are strategically. This improves self-ownership of day to day tasks by increasing their emotional tie to the projects they're working on.

Weekly10 allows us to really impact key employee engagement across the business and drive great workplace communication.

We’ve helped Toddle stay connected as they undergo huge growth and a shift to remote working. Keen to see how we can help you?

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