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Global video game publisher Activision had a massive need for learning and development.
The organization had all of the legally obligated and cursory training in place, like anti-discrimination and compliance. Still, it needed a more robust investment in L&D.
Then, the company invested in Together to revamp its mentoring program. Heather Gift, Global Employee Networks Manager at Activision, led the charge to adoption and shared the tremendous impact mentoring has had on the organization.
In this case study, you’ll learn about the roadblocks Activision faced when building a mentoring program and exactly how Together has transformed its workplace culture.
The Challenge: Manage a mentorship program at scale
Activision needed a technological solution to reduce the workload on HR and create a meaningful program that supported employees worldwide.
Before adopting the Together platform, Heather and her HR colleagues had built a mentoring program at Activision, but it was a manual program that was tough to maintain.
One lone administrator ran the program globally in addition to their remaining day-to-day responsibilities. It was overwhelming for this one individual to facilitate conversations among colleagues worldwide.
The process to kick off the manual program involved the HR administrator matching folks one-to-one. Those participants would then need to find their own time to set the meeting time, schedule a call, and remember to participate when the time came.
It was very common for mentoring relationships to fail. One reason was simply that employees would forget about their call — and with no automatic scheduler or reminder, it fell onto the individual participants to hold themselves accountable.
Heather shared that the most significant reason the manual program failed was the inability to react to changes in real time.
“We manually operated our mentoring program as employees hit major company milestones, like promotions, retirements, and onboarding. Sometimes, we’d have situations where a mentee would be paired with a mentor who recently left the company or moved to a new department. That relationship would fail if we didn’t get that data in real-time. Our mentors and mentees didn’t feel well supported.” — Heather Gift, Global Employee Networks Manager at Activision.
There was also no meaningful way to track the success of the manual mentoring program. Employees would meet and have a productive conversation, but there was no formal process to follow up with HR. This meant improving the program over time or even proving the value of the program to Activision executives became nearly impossible.
The Solution: Invest in Together as a partner in mentorship
It was clear that Activision needed to step up its mentoring program to support the needs of its global staff better.
When it came to features, Heather knew Activision needed something both user-friendly and intuitive. Since Activision’s HR team already had a helpful tech stack at their disposal, it was clear the right tool would need to integrate seamlessly with platforms they’ve already invested in, like WorkDay, Outlook, and Slack.
Heather and her team relied heavily on word-of-mouth from colleagues to find a tool that could handle their needs.
Through a recommendation from a colleague, Heather learned about the Together platform. The feedback her team received about Together was overwhelmingly positive, so it was clear they needed to consider an investment in the platform.
Before rolling out Together to the broader workforce at Activision, Heather’s team ran a pilot program with just 130 employees.
Right off the bat, the team found Together integrated with tools like Outlook and Slack, making managing communication between participants easy.
When it came to building a mentoring program, Heather’s team relied heavily on Together’s user-friendly dashboard to customize a relationship with unique starter questions to get a conversation moving.
Similarly, Together’s pairing algorithm helps Activision’s HR team find strong matches among mentor and mentee participants.
Get the lowdown from Heather herself in this video
The Results: Transforming Activision’s workplace culture
Since implementing Together, mentoring at Activision has become both a networking tool and a crucial component of L&D.
“Together has been revolutionary at our organization, and it’s helped to drive the culture changes we’ve been looking to embed,” says Heather. “It has changed our culture from a survivalist mentality of, ‘Figure it out,’ to the more productive, ‘Let’s find someone who can teach you.’”
Employee engagement in mentoring has seen a significant liftoff since implementing Together. During Activision's initial manual mentoring program, engagement levels were very low, hovering between 1% and 1.5%.
With Together, Activision has seen engagement soar with a whopping 46% adoption rate.
Even more, Activision was able to scale its program successfully. At the start, Activision pulled in 130 employees to test the new mentoring process. Now, the pool of participants has grown to 4,700 employees.
Together’s reporting capabilities make it easy for Activision to prove and improve the value of mentoring at the organization.
Heather and her team can now track and monitor the effectiveness of the mentoring program and share their progress with the executive team to show the program’s ability to connect colleagues, provide employees with important training opportunities, and encourage a healthy workplace culture based on continuous learning.
Activision’s top 3 benefits since implementing Together
On top of solving Activision’s most significant need to automate mentoring, Heather shared three major benefits the organization has felt since implementing the Together platform.
1. Improve support to diverse employees
Prior to implementing Together, Activision knew its mentoring program needed to provide support specifically for its underrepresented employees worldwide.
“We had the perception that we were not as supportive of our underrepresented and protected-class employees,” said Heather.
The manual process didn’t help to change that perception, putting the burden of managing a mentoring relationship fully onto participants. If an employee already felt unsupported, they were less likely to want to participate in a program that put more work on their plates.
Rolling out Together’s automated program directly to diverse employees was immediately seen as a unique and well-thought-through way to provide support.
2. Scalability
Overwhelmingly, HR received positive feedback from participating employees. So much so that HR began to scale its mentorship offerings to more and more groups of workers.
Once Together was up and running, Heather was amazed at the sheer volume of employees across the organization who were eager to join.
“Employees knocked on my door, asking, ‘I heard you have this platform. How can I also get on it?’ We knew we made the right choice when we realized we had bottom-up support from employees worldwide.”
The team scaled by incrementally inviting different subsets of employees by group and location. At one point, the organization even launched a manager-specific mentorship program because of internal demand from mid-level employees.
In terms of ease of scalability, Heather says it's a simple rollout. “It’s truly just the press of a button and comes down to the matter of inviting just some or all of your employees.”
2. Ease of use
“One of the wonderful things about the Together Platform is not just as an administrator but as a user. Having an automated experience, coupled with integrations, made the platform feel foolproof — it really doesn’t allow for the users to fail,” says Heather.
Not only did Together’s mentoring solution directly impact company culture, it also became a training source for Activision. “It’s now our learning & development language,” says Heather.
Now, if an employee has a question, they know they can simply hop onto the Together platform and match with someone with the expertise they seek. Best of all, the Together platform is so intuitive that any employee can easily navigate it to match with a helpful mentor.
Automate mentoring at scale with Together
Heather is aware that a happy employee stays at an organization.
Since rolling out the Together platform, Acitivision’s mentoring program has gone a long way to improve long-term retention and change how employees think about skill development.
Plus, by allowing anyone to participate in mentoring at any time through their evergreen program, Activision has vastly improved its company culture.
Ready to learn how Together can transform your mentoring process? Book a demo to speak with a live expert.
