#HRTechChat: Nicole Davies, Vice President of Talent Optimization at Valet Living

For this episode of the #HRTechChat video podcast, my guest was Nicole Davies, vice president of talent optimization at Valet Living. Our discussion covered her department's highly successful deployment of Quantum Workplace, which 3Sixty Insights details in a recently published case study. If you've ever lived in a multifamily home, condominium complex or apartment building, it's possible that you've benefitted from Valet Living. United States-based and close to 28 years old, Valet Living operates in more than 40 states and employs approximately 10,000; about 8,500 are part-time staff. Together, these employees carry out amenity services such as package delivery, waste removal, and dog walking to the 1.8 million homes in residential communities with which the company partners. Driving Nicole's decision to propose deploying Quantum Workplace at Valet Living was her employer's lack of modern technology — or any technology at all, really — for tracking employees' performance. The process was annual and highly manual. As we have discussed at length lately, here at 3Sixty Insights, this is no way at all in this day and age to track employee performance, let alone promote better performance, boost employee engagement or inspire staff to stay. Annual and manual performance management has pretty much always been antithetical to all these goals, in fact. Luckily, modern technology for talent management makes it possible to leave these old ways behind and helps organizations align the employee experience to a high-tech customer experience. Valet Living already had advanced software, long in place, designed to track associates' progress day-to-day in completing client-facing work, and Nicole wanted to bring the company's employer brand into alignment with this aspect of the consumer brand. "We pride ourselves on being a tech-enabled service," she shared during the podcast. Valet Living's associates are "out there on site. They're using very fancy technology we've developed to let us know where they are on the property. But then, on the people side of things, we were very low tech. We really had no great way for them to be able to have engaging conversations with their leaders, or for them to even really know what was happening within the company." When Nicole joined Valet Living, she and the rest of leadership there made the decision to partner with Quantum Workplace. Doing so left them "one-stop shopping so to speak, where folks could go if they wanted to learn about how they're doing — going from a performance perspective all the way through to opportunities to continue to grow and develop from a succession planning perspective." Positive employee engagement increased considerably right away and continues to climb. Given that daily work life for associates does not naturally lead to much interaction between them and their managers, this boon to employee engagement at Valet Living is especially notable given the fundamentals of the employer's business model. Employee retention is much higher, too, and with the deployment of Quantum Workplace has come a significant boost in internal hiring for managerial roles and attendant drop in labor expenditure related to external recruiting. Our case study dives into these details. If you're looking for an example of how to boost employee engagement under challenging conditions, and if you need inspiration for HR transformation, then you owe it to yourself to watch this episode. The use of Quantum Workplace has helped Nicole elevate HR's strategic standing at Valet Living. Highly knowledgeable when it comes to talent management, she's a natural guest for a podcast and has an exceptionally compelling story to share.