To all the software development teams using Kiwi Dials: We're not exactly sure how you found us, but we're glad you did. Who knew?
Recently, Kiwi Dials hit one of those unpleasant milestones that every tech company has to hit sometime in their growth. We had an extended service outage. For a period of about 5 hours, nobody was able to use Kiwi Dials to vote. Here's what happened.
With Kiwi Dials, you can share your perspective on Professional Growth, Independence, or any one of 25 other dimensions of engagement by rating it on a scale of 1 to 5. Lately, we've heard some discussion of what each number means.
The simplest answer is to say that 1 is the worst and 5 is the best score. All the others fall somewhere in between. Our earliest prototypes included words to help define the scale.
So, let's say you are ready to start measuring the employee engagement on your team. We've found that most managers approach the prospect with some trepidation. What if the numbers are bad? Will engagement get worse because I'm asking people to focus on it? Maybe things will get better if we just focus on other things. I can't afford to pay people more, so why ask them if they are engaged?
Comments are like crack. Reading comments feels like unwrapping a stream of little gifts. Managers like them because they add color and meaning to the snapshot of quantitative numbers they get from surveys. Traditional engagement surveys depend on them. Where numbers can be mysterious and opaque, comments promise nuance and context. Each one holds the promise of insight, but more often than not, underneath the gift wrap is another pair of itchy socks.
Today is the day. Kiwi Dials is available to anyone with an Android, iPhone, or Windows Phone, for free.
Imagine that employee engagement at your company stinks. Maybe a recent layoff, difficult re-org, or budget cut has left your team demoralized and shopping for their next career move. Since these events are beyond the control of most managers, it's easy to feel like employee engagement is a lost cause. And since you already know engagement is low, why bother measuring it?
Evaluation sounds like a great idea, if you are an evaluator. But if you're the one that suddenly has someone knocking on your door asking "how's it going," it can be a little uncomfortable, especially if the answer isn't "great!"
Tada! Here we are, bursting into the world, fully formed. Well, okay, not really, but after months of sketching, exploring, testing, iterating, and refining in the studio, then engineering and testing real live mobile products, we're delighted to be able to share our work with you.