It’s a true feel-good story when a one-person business grows to become an industry leader. This is the case with GWI, a consumer research company founded by Tom Smith in 2009, when he modernized the market research industry. Just over a decade later, GWI is close to hitting $100 million in yearly revenue.
The company is a leader in digital consumer insights. It combines global consumer data with clever tech to make audience insights easier and quicker to access and share.
As an innovator focused on maintaining its edge, the company relies on Slack to support its culture of collaboration, as well as scale and maintain efficient operations. Slack is baked into the business, and Vic Miller, VP of PR and Communications at GWI, comments: “Slack is part of our DNA. It’s central to the daily workings of the company, which is why we integrate our other tools into it. Because we have a team spread across the globe, Slack helps us work across different time zones like a relay race – it makes for smooth working where nobody drops the baton.”
“Slack is part of our DNA.”
Supporting a strong culture
GWI is experiencing significant expansion, now boasting over 500 employees spread across three continents. Despite this growth, the leadership is committed to preserving a sense of community within the company. This commitment is reflected in the company’s success channel, where news of new babies is celebrated alongside prospect wins and team achievements. The company cultivates an engaging social environment through dedicated channels for home cooking, crocheting, and pets. These channels are lively and often enhanced with in-house-created GIFs and emojis. Additionally, the regular sharing of ‘Humans of GWI’ stories provides personal insights into the lives of employees, further enhancing the community feel.
“All this is massively helping to reinforce a culture of global togetherness, and working together to achieve success,” comments Harriet Dempsey, Senior Internal Communications Manager at GWI, also noting one of the ways of tracking the success of this approach. “I regularly analyze our engagement on Slack; the ‘view message activity’ button shows me how many people are viewing posts, interacting with them, and clicking through. I’ve really noticed that the most popular posts are about people, especially ones about our new joiners and award winners.”
This is particularly important because, with part-remote onboarding, it’s a challenge to bring in new cohorts of people and make them feel part of the company. “We make the most of Slack for that a lot,” explains Kaheem Hutchins, IT Operations Manager at GWI. “It doesn’t feel as if you’re starting in a sterile environment where you don’t know anyone.” There’s a specific channel for all the new starters that includes the stakeholders to their progression, which means that employees can meet their peers and ask questions in one place. “It’s not exactly hand holding, but it’s helpful for the first couple of weeks so you don’t feel isolated. And I think that helps to develop and maintain the culture.”
Efficiency and support
All of these examples showcase the importance of connection, togetherness, and humanity within the business. But driving culture at GWI also means supporting employees in their work, and without Slack, and its impact on everyday tasks, this would be challenging. “Without Slack none of us would be able to do our jobs,” says Dempsey.
For example, every month the people team sends out a five-question employee pulse survey directly through Slack. “Regularly collecting feedback is a massive win for GWI – it helps to keep track of how the team is feeling,” says Dempsey. “And Google Drive integration is used heavily for collaboration. It’s so helpful to get a notification when someone’s editing something you’re working on together.”
GWI also uses HiBob, Kadence, and Freshdesk for incident management. The latter includes an IT chatbot – an out-of-the-box solution which the company has tailored to its own needs – that answers the most common IT-related questions. Its language learning model means that questions don’t need to be asked in a specific or prescribed way, and Kaheem stresses that using automation and integrations such as this one allows his small IT department to be more efficient. “Slack is more of a forefront tool than it is ancillary. And that enables us to move a lot faster.”
The legal department has implemented its own chatbot that is trained to answer common questions. It’s likely that the chatbot will save the team 10 hours per week by answering onboarding questions alone. This number will increase as the subjects covered by the bot expand.
“Slack is more of a forefront tool than it is ancillary. And that enables us to move a lot faster.”
Sharing knowledge
Even for such a connected company, sharing knowledge can be a challenge. Which is why Slack is so useful and why it was woven into GWI’s new intranet. It might seem counterintuitive for the company to add another level of communication, but the intranet was put in place to provide a single source of truth, enabling people to self-serve a lot of information. “We weren’t looking to replace Slack,” comments Miller. “Slack is part of everything we do. It’s central to how we get stuff done and we won’t interfere with that. But with the company’s growth, we wanted to simplify communications and to do that, we needed an intranet.”
The intranet combines pages of static information with channels for changing content. The former includes the People Hub with information about policies or annual leave, while the latter covers key company news and updates. And every time something new is added to an intranet channel, a short synopsis about it is posted on the Slack #latestnews channel with a link to more information, creating a smooth workflow between sharing on Slack and leading people to the intranet.
“When we fit communications into people’s workflows within Slack, it’s much more effective,” comments Miller. “This isn’t surprising, but it’s hard to do right.”
Dempsey adds: “Because we’re growing at such a speed, having the intranet in place is one of the big wins for us. We can’t keep relying on a few people answering and fielding questions because they’ve got things to do themselves. So driving that workflow through Slack is key for us to keep growing the business as we go.”
This is also true for external knowledge sharing, as Slack scales both internally and externally. For example, Miller’s busiest Slack channel is her external PR one. Quite simply, Slack is modernizing collaboration with customers, partners, and data providers, making it much easier to grow external as well as internal relationships.
Scaling the business with Slack
For Dempsey, Slack is a way to support messaging, collaboration, and culture. “We can drive key messages and strategy while having fun in between to support a feeling of global togetherness,” she says. Even small things, such as showing individual personality by customizing emojis and GIFs, contribute to the feeling that people can bring their true selves to work. At the same time, the ability to collaborate well means that cross-functional projects are run more efficiently.
For example, in a recent cross-functional project, Polly was used for scheduling while clever tagging inside a massive Google document allowed transparency about who worked on each section. “That was hugely helpful just to know where you needed to collaborate and how you needed to get involved,” Dempsey explains. “Without Slack, the project would have been really hard to pull off.”
GWI keeps growing and its reliance on Slack isn’t changing. Quite the opposite. Simply starting a channel for a new project can make the difference between solving something quickly or waiting several days for an email reply. “Even those little things that don’t necessarily mean that much at the time make you realize just how important Slack is for growing the business,” summarizes Dempsey. “Because it’s helping teams to collaborate and move forward so quickly and easily. It’s really driving and growing the business.”
