Strategic Management Decisions

As an analytics ace, Strategic Management Decisions (SMD) helps businesses drive outcomes in turnover, sales, profits, operations, and financial data. What separates SMD, an analytics-driven employee assessment and survey firm, from the competition is that they aren’t simply collecting data, like most employee survey firms. Instead, they are helping companies find value and make real-world decisions based on recommendations from their surveys and assessments.“Our solution is often used to reduce turnover, especially with such a tight labor market,” says Scott Mondore, Ph.D., co-founder and managing partner of Strategic Management Decisions.“We can help organizational leaders learn why people are leaving, diagnose the factors driving the turnover problem,and offer potential actions leadership can take.” The company takes a holistic view of the turnover problem and measures the entire employee life cycle in order to figure out which factors are behind it. This is done through a number of online surveys and assessments, including onboarding surveys and employee experience surveys.

The most important thing for SMD clients is homing in on what they are trying to drive. The team will sit down with the company leadership to determine precisely which business problem(s) the organization wants to solve. Then the SMD team will examine the current data and decide if it is relevant and applicable. If focusing on turnover, the organization will be set up with an automated onboarding survey process that sends assessments to employees on predefined dates, such as their 30th or 90th day on the job. By capturing this data, companies can start seeing tangible results right away, and begin implementing solutions shortly thereafter. For example, managers can determine when an employee might be considering leaving via their survey results, and the company can initiate the retention process to mitigate the high costs associated with finding and training new talent.

“We don’t dump data on our clients— we collect data and run analytics algorithms specific to what they are trying to drive, such as turnover or sales,” explains Mondore. The algorithms then serve up relevant information to organizational leaders whereby they can learn exactly where the opportunities are for improvement. All of the information is integrated together in a dashboard that tells the full story on the metrics being measured. “We can even connect to the LMS which nobody else does, which makes it predictive, prescriptive, scalable, and practical for every leader,” extols Mondore.

We are an organization that offers the most advanced analytics on the most practical assessment platform in the industry

SMD has had tremendous success with clients in the healthcare and hospitality industries. One large healthcare client with 75,000 employees had an issue with high turnover, with annual nurse turnover rates reaching 28 percent. This problem was costing the organization millions of dollars each year in retention costs. SMD’s automated employee surveys with built-in analytics technology helped in diagnosing the turnover problem for managers. After implementing the recommended best practices, the healthcare organization had reduced their turnover by five full percentage points in just 6-12 months. That change saved the organization over $8 million in turnover costs in 6-9 months of deploying the solution and allowed them to retain thousands of nurses.

For the road ahead, the SMD team is rolling out a new hiring product that will use their employee survey data and analytics to help companies make the right hiring decisions. This tool will measure job fit, manager fit, and organizational fit to provide hiring managers with new and valuable insights into candidates in real time—while also providing candidates insights into the hiring manager. Businesses from all industries can make great use of the company’s innovative platform to help improve operational efficiency, save money, and improve the experience for customers and employees alike. The underlying factor being, “We are an organization that offers the most advanced analytics on the most practical assessment platform in the industry,” concludes Mondore.