Case Study: Symmetra

In today's blog entry, we're proud to share a new case study created in partnership with our customer, Symmetra, who uses the EchoSpan 360-degree feedback system to provide employee survey services to its consulting clients.

"Inclusive leadership has evolved from a 'nice-to-have', to a definitive capability that separates high performing teams and organizations from the average." - Josh Price, Director of Growth at Symmetra.

About Symmetra

Symmetra is an end to end service provider in the diversity and inclusion space helping their clients to drive better performance and innovation in their businesses by building more inclusive leaders and teams.

Since 2003, Symmetra has been working with companies around the globe to make their cultures more diverse and inclusive, ultimately giving them a competitive advantage.

For Symmetra, the value proposition is to make inclusion an observable, manageable thing you can actually measure, which is something that people have typically struggled with. According to Josh Price, the development of Symmetra's competency model plus a good platform that allows them to measure and benchmark inclusive behaviours, is the difference between "tick the box" DEI activities and driving meaningful long term change.

The Symmetra Difference

Josh goes on to say that Symmetra has always been a very scientific and empirically driven organization. Their competency model is a result of synthesizing decades of research about what inclusion is, as well as what influences inclusion and belonging, coupled with their own experience in working with clients over the course of many years. "We've been in this field for a long time. Symmetra has been around since 2003, but our CEO, Heather Price , has been working in diversity and inclusion since 1992."

Part of the reason why Symmetra clients like working with them is their ability to engage with mathematicians, engineers, and scientists on the topic of diversity and inclusion.

"As Symmetra has evolved alongside the field of DEI, we have much bigger clients and with much larger scale global rollouts, so it was essential for us to build a practical and tangible model for measuring and tracking inclusive behaviour. We have spent a lot of time developing our framework with a lot of statistical review using hundreds of people to complete test surveys to ensure it's valid. The work that has gone into developing our competency model - along with the substantial global benchmarks we have now accumulated - is a big differentiator for us," said Josh.

Why EchoSpan

A key part of what Symmetra does for clients is a diagnostic assessment, and they have a number of services that include assessments. However, Josh says the Inclusive Leadership Index , which is their 360-degree assessment on the EchoSpan platform, is the most popular.

Why? Because it really helps Symmetra get to the granular detail for individual leaders on how they are, or are not, behaving in an inclusive manner.

As a rule, Josh says, inclusion has always been hard to measure. EchoSpan changed that.

"EchoSpan gives our metrics-driven clients something very concrete to work from."

So, why then did Symmetra come to EchoSpan?

According to Josh, the Symmetra team struggled with how cumbersome and counterintuitive their previous tool was to administer and were quite frustrated on a daily basis. However, they could immediately see the ease of use with EchoSpan.

Benefits of EchoSpan from Symmetra's Perspective

There are additional benefits, he says, in working with EchoSpan which include:

Flexibility and Customization - We've really been able to easily integrate our competency framework neatly into the EchoSpan platform. It's very quick to make any changes in the competencies, whether it's the order they are being presented, adding or deleting questions, what type of questions are being asked, associating benchmarks all of that was ready to go in the platform and didn't require any special development from us.

The way that we can build sub accounts for each of our clients is extremely useful too. We have different single sign on accounts set up for our clients, as well as our distributors, which is very valuable and not something we could do in our previous tool.

Top-Notch Customer Support - EchoSpan has a user-friendly interface, which not only makes it very easy for Symmetra's team to administer, but for our clients, as well. If there is ever a question though, EchoSpan gives amazing support and is extremely responsive. The team is thorough with explanations and very quick to answer questions.

A Secure Platform - the EchoSpan platform gives Symmetra peace of mind because of its security. We have some complex customer requirements, particularly in the financial sector and EchoSpan was able to meet them all from a security standpoint.

Showcasing Key Elements

Josh shared a short video that highlights The Seven Key Elements of an Effective Inclusion Strategy . In this video, Josh identifies four of these elements as clarity of vision, leadership commitment, inclusion capability, and meaningful measurement - and a 360 assessment helps with all of these.

Symmetra's favorite clients to work with are the ones who understand that inclusion has a meaningful impact on an organization's success.

"Our best clients (meaning the ones who are engaging with us and getting the most value out of it) are the ones who understand that inclusion isn't just this thing we have to worry about as part of our HR strategy, it's actually what good leadership looks like today," said Josh.

"EchoSpan shares the same passion for creating diverse and inclusive cultures as Symmetra. We are delighted our platform is being used as part of a strategic process to bring value to organizations on a global scale," said EchoSpan President, Erin McCall.