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About ChalkBoard Ventures:
Chalkboard Ventures (previously Guided By Good) is a one-of-a-kind company built to incubate, accelerate, and grow new ventures that drive culture and commerce. The organization is an independent group of companies, focused on building adaptive, specialized, creative solutions that help brands grow and succeed by improving the lives of the people they market to. Chalkboard Ventures has over several hundred employees globally.
Challenge of New Remote Team
Chalkboard Ventures transitioned to a fully remote team during Covid, which was both incredible and challenging at the same time – incredible as it allowed them to attract the best and most diverse talent, but challenging because all of a sudden the natural connection building between employees was gone overnight. Having fully embraced remote, distributed work, Chalkboard Ventures was forced to look for new ways to connect and engage their team in the new way of the working world.
Solution:
Austen, SVP of Integration & Culture at Chalkboard Ventures came upon CultureBot late in 2023 and has since found it an incredible platform to help her team connect with each other, make new relationships, and meet people virtually – especially new faces beyond teams they currently work with.
The shoutouts and peer rewards feature of CultureBot helped her team to recognize each other for all the hard work they’re doing on a more continuous basis. It also helped give the employees of Chalkboard Ventures the agency to do this on their own, and without hesitation for a specific, designated more formal point in time to do it.
Another huge impact to the Chalkboard Ventures team, perhaps the biggest, was CultureBot’s ability to facilitate more “get-to-know you” exercises, not only forming team bonds but strengthening existing ones too through building a culture of recognition and acknowledgement with features like automated celebrations of work anniversaries and employee birthdays.
CultureBot also instantly opened up conversations that used to happen around the proverbial “water cooler” in the in-office days of pre-Covid by emulating this inside of Slack with the water cooler feature. CultureBot will allow you to choose from packs of well-thought out & hyper-engaging conversation starters (e.g. photo challenge, pets, this or that, etc.) but also allow you to use your team’s own hobbies and interests with their AI-powered topic generator. Overall, water cooler has helped Chalkboard Ventures’ employees get to know their teammates on a much more personal level than when they were even in the office.
Results
Overall, CultureBot has collectively enabled Chalkboard Ventures to improve their employee engagement scores and even their employee net promoter score (eNPS). They’ve seen a large bump due to a lot of the communication and connection-making features that live inside of CultureBot – “It has enabled connection-making organically, which is huge for us.”
In evaluating other vendors, Austin mentions that CultureBot felt (to them) like the right suite of tools – fully automated, low lift, really easy to implement, cost effective – the whole package. She would recommend CultureBot to any company looking to create more opportunities for visibility and building of inter-personal relationships – virtual or in-person.
CultureBot has enabled us to improve our employee engagement scores and even our employee net promoter score (eNPS). We’ve seen a large bump due to a lot of the communication and connection-making features that live inside of CultureBot – it has enabled connection-making organically, which is huge for us.
Austen T., SVP Culture, Chalkboard Ventures (formerly Guided by Good)
