Helm Case Study — Boosting Small Teams

How our solution drives better team management in small, growing teams by building a solid foundation for team growth

Overview

Managing teams is complicated. We build tools to make it simpler.

Helm helps you get the right people in the right place as you grow by creating an ongoing conversation with your team about progress, culture, and growth.

Helm is simple SaaS team management that stays on top of how your people connect to company goals to drive transparency, reach objectives and stay continuously adaptable.

Brief:

A venture-backed 23-person team working in healthcare technology is at the tipping point of growth. Within the next year, they’re planning to expand their staff considerably but must maintain their financials, all while working in a distributed manner, where most of the staff are at an office and some work from home. Risk is high for bad hires, and losing existing talent to turnover would cripple growth and morale.

The company is young and agile, avoiding excessive management overhead while gradually building in structure — in HR, payroll, and accounting, to anticipate growth. Recently, the founders created and filled a role for their “HR Department of One,” which will be instrumental for workforce growth.

Understanding the need to proactively anticipate growth while maintaining engagement, the HR lead implements Helm during the summer. It’s used in three key team management areas:

1: Keeping track of progress and engagement

Using the Checkpoint feature, managers and employees open a secure, transparent pathway for candid communication. Through Slack or email, team members share a progress update in the simple, brief checkpoint survey. The Checkpoint collects information about progress, engagement, personal challenges, and teammate kudos or critiques. A summary of the insights is visualized and presented to both the manager and the individual team member.

Small Team Case Study:

In this case study, a couple members from the development team mentioned that while they had made progress, they recently had not felt bought into the direction of the company.

Helm helps detect low engagement, burnout, or team chemistry issues

2: A hands-on coaching tool for managers

With the Dashboard, managers see insights about their workforce in real time. Helm helps detect low engagement, burnout, or team chemistry issues, and suggests 1-on-1s or team standups when they’re needed. These meetings are made as effective as possible through the Checkpoint briefs, helping to inform what needs to be discussed.

Small Team Case study:

In this case, Helm prompted a 1-on-1 meeting between the manager and the members in question. The manager used the Dashboard to refer to past Checkpoints and saw a pattern, tracing the lower engagement to a recent product pivot that involved what these team members were working on. With this in mind, the manager quickly addressed concerns by using the Dashboard to show the unique importance of the workers’ roles, and how their work is instrumental to the company’s vision.

3: Workforce planning

Using the Dashboard to visualize roles, objectives, and progress, managers get continuous insight into how their reports are doing. It’s easy to see who’s excelling at certain tasks and where improvement is needed. With continuous updates, managers can adjust roles and move people within the organization as needed to prioritize success and avoid turnover.

Small Team Case study:

In this case, the management team used insights from Helm to proactively change the role of an individual who joined as a developer but started helping with user experience design only three months after onboarding. Instead of hiring someone new to fill their UX designer position, they offered the position to the new developer, who accepted.

Outcomes

Within months, the 23-person team started to grow from a solid foundation. Before new people were hired, the team made adjustments to optimize existing roles for success, helping resolve a period of low engagement due to a product pivot. Managers were able to track the ROI on changes through favorable progress improvements and higher reported engagement across the board leading to historic software improvement cycles and sales numbers.

Importantly, this happened at a crucial stage of growth. The management team had the foresight to prepare in advance instead of fixing team issues after the fact. Additionally, managers didn’t have to wait until an annual review to discover these critical insights. At that point, the moment to change would have passed, an unnecessary hire may have already been made, and disengaged workers may have found another opportunity elsewhere.