The Vision

WorkReady is a social services agency based in Allen, Texas that provides employment services to people facing tremendous barriers to employment. Clients are referred to WorkReady for a wide range of reasons, from autism to physical limitations to cognitive deficits.

WorkReady’s remote team of 30 employees is spread across the state of Texas. The work is flexible and employees have autonomy to operate on their own schedule. One of the drawbacks of this structure is that employees created their own independent systems to track relationships with employers and clients. Even more challenging--their entire workflow depended on Excel spreadsheets, emails, and attachments. The CEO, Daniel Thompson, felt that he didn’t have a pulse on the company. He wanted to create a centralized place to store information and streamline workflows without negatively impacting the company’s thriving culture of flexibility.

The Results

Through in-depth discussions with the WorkReady team, Moonbase Labs built a customized portal that solved three problems:

Centralized the workflow and created a single source of truth
Because progress was dependent on emails and attachments, managing the paperwork and files for hundreds of clients was daunting. Creating a centralized repository of all of their client details, files, and benchmark deadlines. This critical upgrade meant that everyone was, for the first time, looking at the same data. Increasing transparency immediately improved collaboration and communication at all levels of the organization.

Fostered deeper engagement with employers
In this work, developing relationships with employers is essential to creating placements for clients, but WorkReady was unable to organize and document these partnerships. By creating a few basic CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools, the WorkReady team was able to track their calls and emails with potential employers. This shared, company-wide employer database allowed team members to explore past activity with potential employers and discover trends like which industries were most actively hiring.

Brought the data to life
With everyone working off of their own spreadsheets, management struggled to stay informed on what was actually happening across the company. Using Tableau, Moonbase Labs was able to harness this spreadsheet data to create clear, insightful visualizations. The executive team used interactive tools to understand their company at a deeper level. For the first time, they could see a map of the employers they’d been collaborating with and interpret who was driving critical placements.

After 12 months of using the portal, WorkReady has gone from having no data on their employers to a detailed database of 688 employers – all relationships developed by their team. In the same span, the team logged over 10,000 activities working with clients and developing relationships with employers. By correlating which activities drive placements, WorkReady can incorporate this information into their management and training.

The Takeaway

By organizing all of their information into a single, shared repository, WorkReady was able to improve their collaboration, streamline communication and feel confident that everyone was looking at the same information. This increased visibility of their data, saved everyone time, and made them better at what they do.