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Elevate’s leadership keeps employees in the know

Elevate LLC (Elevate) is a grant writing firm based in Washington, DC. The organization builds smart, sustainable grant programs that help nonprofits succeed. Since they started four years ago, they’ve grown from two employees to 50 full-time staff.

Through this growth and change, the Elevate leadership team keeps the entire company up-to-date using their Jostle platform. Led by CEO Alayna Buckner, Elevate is the recipient of the Best Leadership Participation of the Year (<250 employees) award in the 2016 Jostle Awards. Elevate is currently achieving an impressive 98% employee participation rate.

The challenge

Elevate has a six-person Executive Management Team (EMT) led by its founder and CEO, Alayna Buckner. They hold an annual retreat focusing on team bonding, organization-wide communications, and department goal setting.

The Elevate staff were looking for more real-time updates about decisions the EMT was making, trade-offs the EMT was considering, future planning, and a greater understanding of new policies.

The solution

Elevate took this feedback seriously and began looking for a way to get more information into the hands of employees. Elevate launched the Jostle platform in August 2016, and their leaders have been using the platform’s rich feature set to connect with the entire company since.

How is Elevate using the Jostle platform?

CEO connects and shares with everyone

To respond to staff requests for greater insight into organizational decision-making, Alayna quickly introduced weekly CEO Updates. These articles include updates on policies and procedures, birthdays and Elevate anniversaries, information about new and departing clients, as well as new staff and departing staff.

Alayna’s updates are concise yet informative, and the articles reflect organizational changes since the last installment. She often makes her posts interactive by encouraging staff members to reach out if they have any questions or concerns about anything mentioned. Her articles are sometimes light, sometimes serious, but always include relevant GIFs and links to social media.

“Alayna has an adorable rescue dog, a Shar Pei and Pit Bull mix, named Tucker Q. Buckner. Tucker is a frequent visitor to the office, and Alayna’s use of Tucker pictures is aligned with Elevate’s value of authenticity and acceptance because a key element of Elevate’s culture (which is reflected in our platform) is to encourage everyone to be themselves and share what they most love with each other,” shared Alicia Elba Williams, Director of Operations.

Teams communicate openly and clearly

Elevate created private Discussion groups for each department in Discussions—Jostle’s chat tool. They use these chats to share information, ask questions, and stay connected as a team.

“This is helping us fulfill our mission and better serve our clients by sharing information about different funders,” Alayna told us.

Policies are easier to digest

Elevate has found an impressive use for Jostle’s Poll feature—they’re using it to ensure staff have read important updates and policies. “All members of our management team now use the Jostle platform to announce new policies and procedures. To improve our staff engagement with long (potentially dry) new policies, we started incorporating fun ‘Poll’ questions after we roll out policies to ensure people are fully engaged,” shared Alayna.

Results

Elevate is seeing an impressively high employee participation rate on the Jostle platform. They have met their employees’ desire to feel more connected to leadership. The entire firm is logging into the platform and staying abreast of company updates on a regular basis.