Driving Digital Innovation at Itesoft with Zest

Digital innovation is not only aimed at Itesoft’s clients —it is also embedded in the very core of the organization. As Itesoft’s CFO and HR Director, one of Benoit Dufresne’s main goals is to continuously strengthen the company’s feedback culture. As a result, he is constantly on the lookout for new digital solutions that might improve communication and collaboration within teams, from a bottom-up approach, and across various departments at Itesoft.

So, unsurprisingly, perhaps, when he stumbled upon a newspaper article in 2016 discussing the benefits of Zest—a solution that makes it easy for managers to identify ways to motivate employees and improve team collaboration —it didn’t take him long to be convinced.

Feedback made fun

In a world where companies and consumers are flooded with new digital solutions on a daily basis, few things are more important than user experience. That’s one of the areas where Zest stands out: by combining user-friendliness with various gamification elements, the often tedious process of fostering feedback is turned into something simple and fun.

In an effort to harness the full potential of Zest’s interactive design, managers at Itesoft have started handing out a ‘monthly contributor award’ to the most active Zest collaborator —an original way of motivating employees to engage with the tool and thereby contribute to an ever-richer feedback loop.

Zest’s Poll module

But Zest offers much more than just “feedback made fun” — in order to reach the right decisions, managers at companies like Itesoft depend on fast and easy access to reliable feedback from their teams. By facilitating this type of open communication, Zest has thus become an indispensable solution both for managers and the company as a whole.

While managers and employees at Itesoft use all of Zest’s modules, it is the Poll module that remains the most popular. It was even used to define the company’s branding guidelines —proof of the solution’s wide applicability. Indeed, whether it involves asking employees about their choice of graphic charter, or learning how they would feel if the office were to move to a different address, managers at Itesoft use Zest to measure the moods, motives and mindstates of their employees.

Zest’s poll module is designed to stimulate feedback in two mutually reinforcing ways; by communicating the results of the survey to everyone in the company, those who participated are rewarded with feeling their input is being taken seriously, while those who didn’t are encouraged to participate in future surveys.

According to Benoit Dufresne, the average overall participation in the surveys that were carried out using Zest was 65% —proof that not just managers, but also the majority of employees have adopted the tool as an indispensable part of their workday.

In its own unique way, the case of Itesoft is proof of the potential that is harboured by Zest; the possibility to create a workplace culture where employee engagement is enhanced, genuine feedback flourishes, and communication flows effortlessly.