How Zentra Group built a workplace where every employee thrives

Zentra Group is a Supporter of the
Greater Manchester Good Employment Charter.

Zentra Group PLC (formally One Heritage Group PLC) employs around 30 employees. They’re a team of experienced professionals who work across property development and investment. In 2020 they became one of the first publicly listed residential developers with a focus on co-living.

Zentra Group launched Stribe as a way to capture employee feedback at every step, ultimately creating a workplace where everyone feels comfortable to talk. They’ve been using Stribe to understand what’s most important to their employees and using those insights to create change that matters. 

We spoke with Faye, their Office Manager, to learn more about how they’re using Stribe to build their employee voice and engagement plans from the ground up.

• What was your process for employee feedback prior to Stribe?

We didn’t have anything really in place for our employees to confidently but anonymously express their opinions and provide feedback.

When I started just over six months ago, I was the first person into the role for quite some time and realised that employee feedback was an area where I would like to spend some time improving. I spent some time working out what areas needed improvement. One of the areas I identified was around employee voice. People didn’t know who to voice their opinions to or how to share feedback. I spoke to Manchester’s Good Employment Charter to understand what options there might be for this, and one of the solutions they mentioned was Stribe.

• What’s the main purpose of Stribe within Zentra Group? 

We were finding out lots of useful feedback from staff during exit interviews, but they were never brought up because people didn’t feel confident enough or didn’t know how to. And it was things that – if they had been brought up earlier – could’ve been changed. We wanted to bring Stribe in to help us capture that feedback earlier. 

When we were introducing Stribe the goal was for people to be able to voice their opinions and not feel that there are any repercussions if they did so. It was something we needed to be really conscious of when we launched. Staff had never had something like this in place before so we needed to make sure we were building lots of trust as we launched Stribe. 

When we first launched Stribe we found that people were writing really big paragraphs, and even though they weren’t all positive, it was great that people trusted Stribe enough to speak out in such detail, and that we were getting the feedback we needed to make changes. I really do feel like it’s already making a difference which is a great thing. 

• How does Stribe contribute to the bigger picture at Zentra Group?

We’re focusing on a few key areas and using Stribe to send surveys to help us understand those areas and create change.

We’re still very much in the early days of using Stribe to understand how people are feeling and what areas are important to them. We’re then using that feedback to go deeper into those areas. At the moment we’re seeing a lot come through on mental health, work-life balance, and culture in the office which is now what we’re focusing on.

• What other initiatives are you working on that contribute to the people strategy at Zentra group?

Mental health is the area that we’re seeing a lot of feedback on at the moment, and the one we want to make the biggest change. 

We’re currently working on training staff to make sure that we have that support in-house. But we also have a lot of other ideas too. It’s a slow process because I am the only one working on it at the moment, but we are beginning to create a plan with the help of the Stribe data that prioritises the initiatives and helps us to create an action plan for those areas.

• How are you adapting the business using the feedback you’ve received from Stribe?

We’ve got a process in place to make sure that we’re running a survey and then a ‘you said, we did’ so that employees can see the results of the survey and hear what management’s feedback is from that. 

Following a recent survey, one where we received a lot of feedback, our CEO went through all of the feedback and gave responses to a lot of it, reassuring people that we were reading it all. That really helped because it showed employees that we are listening and we really value their opinions, we’re also building trust from employees and they can see we’re trying to improve. This is already a huge improvement on what was happening before when we didn’t have these things in place. 

We also really like that we can personalise the ‘You Said, We Dids’ with Stribe and send different messages to employees depending on how they interacted with the survey. That helps us go that extra step in showing employees that all of the feedback they share is valued, no matter whether it’s positive or negative. 

You Said We Did

The CEO finds all of the feedback really valuable, he really likes that the team uses Stribe’s messenger and surveys to bring up all sorts of different pieces of feedback, so he now has all of these insights that he never would’ve heard about before Stribe. 

It’s really important that we incorporate the feedback into our day-to-day work, so I present the survey feedback at the weekly management meeting. We discuss any trends and pieces of feedback. Everyone has found the feedback really interesting. We’ve all learned something new about our teams and the way we should be supporting them! It’s been really valuable in that regard.

Anonymous Messenger

• Armed with insights from Stribe… what’s next for Zentra Group?

What’s next? We really want to focus on our employee’s mental health and get an overall strategy for that. At the moment it’s something we really need to improve and it is so important. 

Stribe has also been great because it has prompted employee’s to share their own ideas about what they want to see from us. For example, they have mentioned that they want an external person to chat with about their mental health, or someone neutral within Zentra Group that is trained to support employees if they need to. We’re also looking into training for our Line Managers as well as that first line of support for their teams. 

We’ve also had a few employees ask that we explore providing mental health days off or working from home, and looking at ways we can provide flexibility so they don’t need to say it’s for their mental health if they don’t feel comfortable sharing that in the moment.

• How have you found working with the team at Stribe?

Everyone is great and so friendly! We spoke to Kieran when we were considering Stribe, and he is just the nicest person ever! 

The whole team are so positive and really helpful. I set up and launched Stribe all on my own, so it was nice to have Stribe’s team helping me. They were so friendly and could provide that extra support for me. Whenever I have had a question everyone has always been really quick to respond.

People Science Team

• How have you found the Stribe technology to use?

I’ve found it so easy to use. I think the platform is so simple to use, it’s a really nice experience when you’re on it! 

• Why did you choose Stribe as your employee engagement partner?

It was just how friendly and supportive the team was. 

The anonymity was important for us too, we wanted to make sure everyone felt comfortable using the tool.  

I also really liked the always-on messaging feature, where you can just message when you need to. That feature gets used the most here. It’s so great because someone can message in when they want to speak up, without needing to wait for a survey. It’s really captured all those smaller pieces of feedback that can be forgotten about between surveys.

We also really like the flexibility of creating our own Values to track within our surveys so we can look at the areas important to us to track and look at them over time. At the moment we’ve set Values up for Team Work, Mental Health, and Culture. I’m also presenting these KPIs in the weekly management meeting. It’s been great, the managers really like the insights and are always wanting to see more and more feedback.

• How have your employees enjoyed using Stribe?

 There’s only been positive things said! They really appreciate having a platform where they can say what they need to say. Everything has been so positive!

• Have you made any changes based on insights from Stribe?

We need to properly review the feedback to build an overall strategy – but small changes have been made and we can already see they’re making a difference. 

For example, we asked employees recently if they knew who to talk to if an issue came up at work. Off of the back of that feedback we realised we could make it clearer for them so we produced a diagram that made it clear ‘Who to talk to’ for different pieces of feedback. 

We also asked questions about team culture and if employees would make any changes. That was the question where the CEO addressed all of the feedback and made sure employees could see that we were taking their feedback seriously.

A lot of the feedback we needed to work on was around communication and receiving more communication from senior managers. I can see that since we shared the feedback with managers there is more frequent and open feedback. 

• What made you look for a tool like Stribe in the first place? Could you describe exactly what was going on at the time? 

We were seeing a lot of negative comments in exit interviews, and the general consensus around the office was that the culture wasn’t where it should be. We thought that Stribe would be a good starting point to improving these things. And it has been, the culture feels like it’s massively improved since we introduced Stribe. We really wanted to create a culture where people feel safe to speak up and Stribe has done that.

• Have you got any favourite stories where Stribe has really worked in your team? 

 It’s been really nice to see that when we send a question people are happy that we’ve asked it. I remember there was a question “Do you feel comfortable talking about your mental health?” and I could see that asking that question using Stribe showed staff that we were open to hearing about their mental health and they could talk about how they felt in the workplace. 

• What do you think is the key to a happy team? 

Transparency and feeling comfortable and able to talk. If you don’t feel comfortable where you’re working it’s never going to work out. Happiness comes from everyone feeling safe and comfortable. 

• What would you say to someone who is on the fence about taking on Stribe?

I don’t see why you wouldn’t take on Stribe! There’s always a positive in having people speak up. There’s no negatives that can come from a platform that ultimately is giving your employees a voice. 

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