Saving $250K* and Rebuilding Trust in Feedback

The action-fatigue problem

Sara Shillinglaw, Zoom’s Head of Engagement and Impact, is also the company’s product owner for Seer. She partnered with Workvivo’s People Science team to look past just collecting employee feedback.

The real problem, she realized, was what happened after the answers came in. “It really wasn’t about survey fatigue, which so many companies have and talk about. It was about action fatigue,” Sara says.

Zoomies were happy to share feedback, but they weren’t sure it led anywhere. As Sara mentions, “They said: we give our feedback, but then we do not always see clear, tangible action taken.”

Seer, Workvivo’s people intelligence platform, was built to solve this problem, and Zoom played a key role in shaping it.

As “customer zero,” Zoom’s team spent over eight months co-developing the product with Workvivo and brought strong opinions to the table.

“We know the pain points of a lot of our other competitors, having used them in the past,” Sara says. “And so we had a unique position to be in that we took really seriously.”

The partnership led to new engagement measurement scales, more flexible surveys, better internal benchmarking, and improved segmentation analysis.

The team ran two test surveys before launching the real one, involving early adopters to help shape the experience. Sara says this collaborative, step-by-step approach made the transition smooth.

For Zoomies and their managers, the difference showed up in four places:

• Native survey access: The Care to Tell survey opens right from the Workvivo homepage, a notification, or an email. There’s no need for a separate login or switching tools.
• Manager insights: Each manager has a dashboard with live participation data, engagement scores, key driver breakdowns, a radar heat map, and AI-powered theme analysis. HR sets the strategy, and managers act on it.
• Executive reports: Presentation-ready decks are now created automatically for executive leadership, eliminating the most time-consuming manual reporting work. 
• Action planning: AI-guided next steps recommend what to do based on the results, and every plan links directly to always-on goals, so managers start from a suggestion rather than a blank page.

Previously, getting results to executive leadership took three weeks with Qualtrics, and required team members to manually build the reporting deck. With Seer, managers had results in two days, natively, with no manual lift required. – 

Cavan Gray, Senior PX Analyst at Zoom

What nearly 18,000 comments tell you about a culture

The first Care to Tell survey on Seer reached 7,981 Zoomies, and 89% responded. They left 17,728 open-text comments across 33 questions.

For Todd Reeves, Zoom’s Chief People Officer, the number mattered less than the contents. He describes the results as “an incredible treasure trove” for his team, saying, “It gave us much deeper insight into how people were feeling.”

Two of those findings led to immediate commitments:

• Change without context. Employees said leaders explained what was changing, but not why. Now, Zoom includes a “why” statement in every change communication and announcement, so everyone gets the reasoning along with the decision.
• Feedback that stalled. The lowest scores went to a question about whether anything meaningful ever came of the survey. In response, Zoom created the “You Said, We Delivered” template, complete with owners and timelines, which is now available for every manager and leader to use.

And Zoomies noticed the follow-through. Overall engagement reached 84%, up 3 points on the October 2025 cycle and 8 points on the April 2025 cycle. Willingness to recommend Zoom as a great place to work rose 5 points, excitement about the company’’s future rose 4 points, and 89% now say they intend to stay.

We went from waiting for multiple weeks for a vendor to deliver a report that was actionable, to leaders having that immediately. We were really able to move from data to commitment faster than in any previous cycle.

Sara Shillinglaw, Head of Engagement and Impact at Zoom

$250K* saved, and a better product for everyone

The business benefits arrived alongside the cultural ones. Consolidating software onto one platform and retiring an expensive vendor took more than $250,000* out of Zoom’s stack.

“We saved over $250,000* as part of the implementation of this process. And we got better quality, a great product, and higher engagement in the process,” says Todd.

As Seer’s first customer, Zoom’s team helped shape a product that every organization using it now benefits from. This gives Todd a strong perspective on what matters when improving employee listening:

• Know what you want to learn. Zoom shifted to engagement-driving questions that best connect to action-taking opportunities at the company, ensuring each of the 33 questions serves a clear, actionable purpose.
• Keep it simple. Managers and employees already have a lot on their plates. Zoom asks each leader to pick one thing per six-month cycle rather than trying to solve everything at once.
• Consider where the survey lives. Care to Tell reached 89% participation because it was easy to access where Zoomies already worked.
• Spend time reading the comments. They reveal the reasons behind each score and show details that numbers alone can’t capture.

“If you can make an impact in one thing over a six-month period, and you continue to do that, you’re going to make a better and better environment over time.”

Todd Reeves, Chief People Officer at Zoom

* Reflects gross savings vs. previous survey vendor, prior to Workvivo licensing costs.