Blueberry Pediatrics Uses Motivosity to Connect Remote Employees to the Business, Their Work, and Each Other

Motivosity Products:

• Recognition & Rewards
• Surveys
• Spaces

About Blueberry Pediatrics

As a fully remote Bay Area startup, Blueberry Pediatrics offers 24/7 pediatric telemedicine as a monthly subscription. With these services, parents get access to pediatricians at any hour of the day—filling a great need in children’s medical care. The business operates with two main priorities—the platform experience for parents to request and visit with doctors and the medical practice that hires pediatricians for the group.

With just over 100 remote employees, Blueberry Pediatrics is focused on not just the patient and parent experience, but their own employee experience at work. Colton Richins, Head of People at Blueberry Pediatrics, started his search for a platform that could help the organization connect employees to the business and to each other. “As a remote team, there’s a natural lack of connection to the business,” said Colton. “And we needed a tool that could help us solve that and foster deeper relationships amongst team members and enable more fun work and non-work experiences.” The team was also looking for a solution to help them create more clarity and visibility into performance management—and if they found something that helped all three, it would be a huge win.

After implementing Motivosity, Blueberry Pediatrics found exactly what they were looking for—a suite of tools built to increase connection across the business and open up visibility. “I felt Motivosity could impact all three areas we needed help with,” said Colton. Since adopting the platform, Blueberry Pediatrics has seen incredible results. They’re connecting their remote workforce to the company and each other with Spaces—with Spaces for company information, onboarding materials, vacation ideas, recipes, book recommendations, and more. Employees are connecting with each other in a social space dedicated to connection. Plus, the business is seeing other tangible results including a 100% increase in recognition program participation, 30x increase in recognitions, reduced attrition, and increased engagement during all hands meetings. Blueberry Pediatrics also used Motivosity Surveys to establish an eNPS baseline of +50 with the ability to correlate engagement to performance. Now everyone has one channel for internal communication and questions to HR have reduced by a dramatic 50%. Motivosity is helping Blueberry Pediatrics build a better culture for their employees so they can provide better service to their end customer—parents and children.

The Challenge

Before Motivosity, Blueberry Pediatrics found themselves dealing with a few uphill battles—a remote workforce that struggled with connection, a problem with retention during slow business seasons, limited opportunities for employee recognition, and disjointed company communications to employees. Take a closer look at how each of the challenges impacted the culture and the employees at Blueberry Pediatrics:

• A disconnected and disengaged remote workforce

As a fully remote company, Blueberry Pediatrics struggled to create connections between employees and the business. “As a remote workforce, our people felt isolated and they just weren’t connected to their peers,” said Colton. The HR team tried to combat this problem with off-sites, but they weren’t planning these retreats very often—only once or twice a year was realistic for the business.

• Low engagement in employee groups and programs

Colton tried to build engagement with employees with a few G-chat groups—one for a costume contest and another for a book club. “We kept inviting everyone or forcing some people into it, but it just didn’t work,” said Colton. Their efforts only resulted in 20 or so employees participating, only 18% of the entire workforce. “I know people would have benefited from these programs, but it just got lost in their mix of communication channels,” said Colton.

• Limited opportunities for employee recognition

Before they implemented Motivosity, the Blueberry team only had one opportunity for employee recognition—a survey sent out to everyone before the all hands meeting. “We would recognize employees that were nominated in that survey and we typically only saw four or five team members recognized every month,” said Colton. Overall, this resulted in less than 4% of the employee base recognized for their good work.

• Siloed and disjointed company communication to employees

Communication was a major issue for everyone at Blueberry Pediatrics. When Colton sent out messages, he often sent the same message in every channel—email, G-chat, etc.—hoping that at least one of the channels would be read by employees. “We needed a solution that would help us communicate with our employees, scale as we grew, and wasn’t as expensive as Slack,” said Colton.

The Motivosity Solution

After adding Motivosity, Blueberry Pediatrics increased engagement across the business, boosted morale with more recognitions, and improved employee and company communications with a solution dedicated to all HR and company messages. Overall, they were able to implement one tool to help them solve their biggest issues—engagement, connection, and communication. Here’s how:

• Peer-to-peer Recognition

With Motivosity, everyone now has an opportunity now to recognize their peers for great work and accomplishments—all on the same platform. Recognition is timely, consistent, and peer-based, helping everyone feel a greater connection to their coworkers. Plus, peer-to-peer recognition in Motivosity is helping the remote workforce build better relationships with everyone—even though the team is dispersed and working remotely. “Now everyone has access and the ability to recognize anyone across the organization,” said Colton. “And just this morning, one of our doctors recognized our security engineer—the whole program is bringing everyone together, even across departments.”

• Employee Spaces

“When I saw the demo for Spaces, I knew that this is where our remote culture would be built,” said Colton. “We don’t have an office and we don’t have Slack, but Spaces is where we connect and create our culture.” The company is using Spaces to create specific channels for company news, All Hands meeting recordings, and onboarding materials. Plus, they’re creating areas for employees to connect—a dedicated Space for travel/vacation, book recommendations, a book club, cooking and recipes, kids and family activities, favorite shows and movies, and more.

• Awards and Achievements

To increase engagement and employee participation in all hands meetings, the team is utilizing Awards and Achievements in Motivosity. “We start our all hands meeting with a question of the month,” said Colton. “We do a brain-teaser and get everyone to participate by submitting an answer. The first right answer gets $10 Motivosity Bucks.” They’re implementing the same strategy in their quarterly doctor all hands meetings as well—this time, with a Name that Tune award. All together, they’re noticing higher engagement not just at the beginning of the meeting, but throughout the entire presentation. “We have fun at the beginning and then people are engaged for the rest of the content that we’re going to share,” said Colton.

• Surveys

Before they had Motivosity, Blueberry Pediatrics didn’t measure engagement or their eNPS benchline. Now that they have an easy-to-use survey tool, they not only set a baseline for their eNPS, but they have more insights into problems employees want to see fixed. “When we launched our first engagement survey, we found that we had a recognition problem to be solved—something I hadn’t realized before,” said Colton. “Now that we have the engagement survey, we can take a more data-driven approach to the problems we’re looking to solve.”

Results & ROI

In a record 2 months, Blueberry Pediatrics used Motivosity to see fast, noticeable results:

→ Increased remote employee engagement and connection

“Spaces is what I got most excited about with Motivosity—an opportunity to finally have a tool that could help me build remote culture and connect people to one another,” said Colton. And that’s just what Spaces is doing. The programs they tried in G-chat are thriving in Spaces—high participation in the book club, vacation ideas, favorite tv shows, and more. “I love that it has a social media feel to it,” said Colton. “People add their post and everyone else can give it a thumbs up or an emoji fire or whatever they want. It makes it feel different than a wall of text like you’d get with Slack or G-chat.”

→ 89% increase in program participation from employees

Employees love Motivosity Spaces and Blueberry Pediatrics is seeing an 89% increase in program participation in their first few months on the platform. One good example—the Halloween contest Space. In G-chat this program had low participation—only 18% of employees. Compare that to a similar program run with Spaces—Blueberry’s Summer Questival—and the team has seen an 89% increase in employees engaged so far because of the increased visibility and opportunity for social connection. Employees engage by completing a list of tasks and posting about it on the Questival Space’s social feed where coworkers can react and comment.

→ 40% participation from frontline physicians in programs

While overall employee participation in programs wasn’t incredible before Motivosity, doctor engagement was even lower. But now, with Spaces, the physician group is connecting with each other and the rest of the organization. “I’ve been pleasantly surprised to see how much our doctor team has engaged with the Spaces piece of Motivosity,” said Colton. “Out of our 70 doctors we have a good 40% interacting in Spaces which is a huge success.”

→ 30x increase in employee recognition

“One employee told me that Motivosity has made it possible for him to see how much good is done across the company. Before we had Motivosity, they couldn’t tell what was happening in marketing or sales, they were just focused on their own role,” said Colton. Now, everyone has more visibility into the accomplishments of their peers and coworkers. Plus, since the tool enables peer-to-peer giving, more people are using it. What once was 4 - 5 people recognized per month is now 4 - 5 people recognized each day, a 30x increase in employee recognition.

→ eNPS baseline of +50 with the ability to correlate engagement to performance

Blueberry Pediatrics launched their first eNPS survey to get a baseline of +50. Meanwhile they conducted their first formal performance review process. “We’re excited to measure everything over time and see engagement levels by team” said Colton. “With Motivosity we’ll be able to look at the correlation between engagement and performance and compare the results.”

→ 1 channel for all company communications

While Colton still sometimes emails out notices to employees about company news, all communications now point to Motivosity. “I might email everyone and tell them we have a new personnel change notice, but employees have to go to Motivosity to read about it,” said Colton. “Now we have one place for all communication and everyone is in the habit of checking Motivosity for all of that news and information.”

→ 50% reduction in repetitive questions sent to HR

A single source of truth for all company communications has done more than make it easy for everyone to be engaged, it’s cutting the time Colton spends answering follow-up questions from employees by 50%. “People are asking me fewer questions now that we have Motivosity,” said Colton. “Every email used to spur at least 20% of employees to ask me questions they would have known the answer to if they’d seen my communications, and now we’re down to 10%—and it’s getting better every time.”

“With Motivosity Spaces,” said Colton, “We’ve seen a significant increase in cultural participation. Before Motivosity it was all work. Post Motivosity, you're finally starting to see people as they are—humans. And I think that it is creating a lot more empathy behind every single one of our team members because you are learning a lot more about these people that you spend every day working with, and especially cross-functional partners as everybody was filling out their histories and their personality assessments…And that just creates a better experience and it deepens relationships. It helps you work better with one another, which I expect to have more impact on our ability to be successful as a business.”