About Connexus Credit Union

Connexus Credit Union is a member-focused cooperative serving over 443,000 members across the United States.

Through high yields for checking accounts and deposit products, as well as competitive rates for personal, home, and auto loans, Connexus is proud to return profits to its member-owners.

Goals and Initial Considerations 

Connexus’ rapid growth created over 650 jobs across the organization in a short amount of time. With a large, continually growing team, Connexus was looking for an engagement platform that would not only offer incentives and rewards but would also support structural changes and an increasingly distributed workforce.

Jen Kochan, Senior Internal Communications & Culture Specialist, led Connexus’ effort to adopt its first-ever employee engagement platform. Working alongside Shannon Schoenberg, Director of Organizational Culture & Administration, plus a talented project team of subject matter experts, Jen strategized what the right platform would need to look like.

“After COVID, ‘we used to do this,’ just didn't cut it for us anymore. We needed something that would help us bring back the close connection our team had become so accustomed to prior to the pandemic. The feeling of sitting around a cubicle and chatting with teammates was lost and we needed to bring that back.”

Prior to the pandemic, the Connexus team prioritized team bonding and time spent outside of the office. Community-oriented activities like bowling, happy hours, and lunch-and-learns were baked into organizational structure.

However, with a quickly growing team and the permanent changes brought about by the pandemic, activities that required face-to-face interaction and physical presence weren’t possible anymore. That’s where the need for Cooleaf came in.

Connexus needed an engagement platform to meet their 3 key goals: 

1. Act as an engagement solution that offers employee recognition while remaining tied to core values

2. Create a sense of unity and connection for a distributed workforce

3. Serve as a comprehensive engagement solution that meshed with existing service awards and company strategy

“We were looking for a platform that could satisfy our team’s need for something fun and meaningful but that would help to break up the daily work and make things feel manageable from an HR standpoint.”

‍

The Onboarding Process

Around one month of careful, guided preparation went into onboarding to ensure that admins were fully trained and able to confidently share the platform with team members during Connexus’ mid-September launch date.

Shannon recognized early on that any platform would need to match Connexus’ quick-moving pace.

“Our team moves at an incredibly fast pace–we needed something that would match our style in order for this initiative to be a success. Cooleaf fit right into our work style; we found ourselves with almost too much time to get everything set up.”

Prior to platform adoption, Cooleaf and Connexus worked together to ensure a successful launch. The process followed 4 key steps to guarantee a smooth process:

1. Kick-off meeting to gather information and review goals
2. Strategy design to outline an employee engagement strategy
3. Platform training for Admins
4. User registration and launch training

A Partnership Approach

Bryan Wells, Cooleaf Customer Success Manager, led onboarding from start to finish, helping Connexus establish requirements, configure the platform, and assess readiness before launch day!

Jen and Shannon worked closely with Bryan to put Cooleaf in place. 

“Bryan was excellent — he was not only receptive to all of our ideas, allowing us to customize our experience and ask questions, but he also took the time to explain every piece of the process.”

For Connexus, the main question was how they could best manage the platform without being too prescriptive. Cooleaf’s ability to create a sense of connectedness while still giving their team autonomy was absolutely essential.

“The level of customer support and interaction has been huge. Bryan listened to all of our questions and carefully walked us through the answers. We’d never used a platform like Cooleaf. Having Bryan’s guidance put our minds at ease whenever we were worried.”

‍

Preparing to Go Live

To get employees excited for launch day, Jen and Shannon made sure there was no shortage of announcements around Cooleaf’s launch. Take a look at the phenomenal teaser video they created to get employees excited about the official announcement.

The team also worked with Cooleaf to create an FAQ resource for team leaders to help them understand best practices for recognition and using their allotted points budget. 

“We made sure to build excitement very early on! After the time invested by Cooleaf’s team and our own preparation, we knew there needed to be a lot of buzz around this shiny new tool. We prioritized a budget to get our rewards program started and made sure to share our own excitement with our team members.”

Since only managers have the ability to issue reward points in Connexus’ Cooleaf platform, it was critical that these leaders understood when and how to use employee incentives effectively. 

The FAQs also covered key topics like Years of Service Awards, Core Value Awards, and Leadership Awards that were essential to their employee recognition strategy.

‍

Onboarding Challenges & Training Events 

As part of platform adoption, Connexus implemented onboarding challenges and training “events” to unite the organization and get the team started using Cooleaf.

Training events were staggered throughout the first month to give employees a better feel for the platform. Three onboarding challenges were included in the launch process leading up to the first 30-day check-in to provide an element of joy.

Employees participated in a “Welcome Challenge,” “Cards Against Normality” Challenge, and a “Jack-O-Lantern” Challenge to kick-off their experience on the platform.

Challenge #1 - The “Welcome” Challenge

‍

Challenge #2 - “Cards Against Normality” 

‍

Challenge #3 - “Jack-O-Lantern” Challenge

‍

‍

Launch Results

Connexus’ launch was a success thanks to incredible prep work! Extremely high engagement around recognition and challenges led the team to hit all 5 onboarding benchmarks within the first 30 days. 

One month after the launch, 90% of their employees were active on the platform, 50% had participated in Cooleaf challenges and activities, and 98% of employees had earned enough points to redeem at least one reward. Connexus not only met their adoption goals — they exceeded them.

‍

With the holiday season on the way, plans are in the works for a Thanksgiving recipe-sharing activity, themed wellness challenges, and optimized engagement initiatives!

As the next few months on Cooleaf unfold, Connexus is looking ahead to 2023 with a renewed commitment to togetherness, community, and joy.

‍

‍