Seneca Holdings, LLC, is wholly owned by the Seneca Nation, a federally recognized American Indian Tribe with over 8,500 enrolled members. Guided by the Seventh Generation principle, Seneca Holdings ensures that its efforts will have a positive impact on the next seven generations of the Nation.

To achieve this, Seneca Holdings has developed a portfolio of businesses which serve the federal and commercial marketplace. The company has over 900 team members who work nationwide and internationally, delivering services and products to its customers.

For this session, we sat down with Zain Hussain, Sr. Business Operations Manager, to learn how CoffeePals has helped improve Seneca Holdings workplace connectivity, ensuring team members understand and are invested in the company’s goals and objectives.

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Challenges

With a diverse team spread across customer, office, and remote sites in metropolitan Washington, D.C., Western New York, and other locations, Seneca Holdings has faced challenges in fostering a connected and cohesive work environment. The large percentage of team members working remotely has amplified the difficulty of maintaining a strong organizational culture and effective communication. Specific challenges include:

1. Maintaining Team Connectivity: The dispersed nature of the team posed challenges in fostering connections and building relationships. During a team offsite, employees experienced the benefits of face-to-face interactions, which sparked discussions on how to recreate a sense of camaraderie in a virtual environment.
2. Enhancing Team Collaboration: Ensuring effective communication and collaboration among employees who were geographically dispersed was a persistent challenge. The absence of spontaneous, casual interactions hindered the organic development of teamwork.
3. Onboarding New Employees: Integrating new hires into the company culture and helping them build connections with existing team members proved to be difficult. The remote onboarding process often left new employees feeling disconnected.

Core Objectives

To address these challenges, Seneca Holdings established the following objectives:

1. Improve Cross-Departmental Collaboration: Create opportunities for connections across departments.
2. Increase New Hire Support: Facilitate smoother onboarding by providing new employees the opportunity to meet and connect with colleagues. This enhances their understanding of the company culture and supports seamless integration.
3. Enhance Corporate Culture: Strengthen company culture by encouraging personal connections and a family-like atmosphere. A strong culture contributes to greater employee satisfaction and retention.

Implementing CoffeePals

To achieve these objectives, Seneca Holdings implemented CoffeePals, a platform that organizes weekly coffee chats and connection programs. The platform’s user-friendly interface and seamless integration with Microsoft Teams made it an ideal choice for the company. Key features that have contributed to its success include:

1. Spontaneous Connections: CoffeePals’ random matching feature allows employees to meet colleagues they might not interact with otherwise. This helps build a sense of community and fosters inclusive relationships across departments.
2. Monthly Cadence of Meetings: Organizing small-group meetings, on a monthly cadence, enables team members to build relationships beyond their immediate circles. These meetings create a structured yet casual environment for employees to connect.
3. Coffee Maker Questions: A series of engaging prompts are posted twice a week to spark conversations and interactions within the team. These questions generate lively discussions, laughter, and insights into each other’s personalities and interests. Zain said, “The coffee maker questions that are posted twice a week really get a lot of dialogue going. [People post] GIF replies, which get a lot of laughs, and we learn things about team members that we would not have otherwise.”

A New Era of Connectivity

With the implementation of CoffeePals, Seneca Holdings is tackling employee engagement challenges head-on, ushering in a new era of connectivity. The platform’s features provide multiple avenues for employees to interact and build meaningful relationships:

1. Connections Across the Organization: Random matching facilitates spontaneous interactions that mirror water cooler conversations of a physical office. Employees find themselves forming connections with colleagues from different departments, enhancing cross-functional collaboration. Zain stated, “Increasing the personal connection has paid dividends in a professional capacity, helping us to operate a little bit better. Problems and issues and things like that arise all the time but you can mitigate that when you have a respectful relationship, and it's all built upon genuine relationships.”
2. User-Friendly Experience: The simplicity of the platform encourages widespread participation. Employees appreciate the ease of use and the seamless integration with existing tools like Microsoft Teams. Zain shared, “To me, the implementation of CoffeePals was easy. I remember from the initial conversation that I had with you, to get the trial and finish implementation, took less than two or three weeks and then it was off to the races.”
3. Support for New Hires: New employees particularly benefit from CoffeePals. The platform provides them immediate opportunities to meet colleagues, understand the company culture, and feel more at home in their new roles. Zain explained, “[When we are in the office], you could see a new face and chat with that person. [Now, even for remote team members, interaction is improved] because we are randomly paired, and we now can quickly get to know someone who's just started in a meaningful way.”

Measuring Success

Seneca Holdings has seen overall improvements in the organization because of CoffeePals:

1. Engagement and Satisfaction: Casual conversations through ice breakers and CoffeePals connections have increased overall employee engagement. Zain noted, “[Casual conversations] go a long way toward creating a work environment that someone new can feel comfortable stepping into.”
2. Productivity and Collaboration: Improved personal connections have made employees feel more comfortable about collaborating and reaching out to colleagues, thereby boosting productivity.
3. Positive Cultural Impact: By helping employees connect on a personal level, CoffeePals has made the company feel more welcoming. The platform has played a crucial role in maintaining and enhancing the company’s culture, even in a remote setting. When asked about the impact CoffeePals has had on Seneca Holdings, Zain said, “Now, when we got to our retreat for the second time this past year, there was a different feeling because people had built relationships through CoffeePals.”

Implementing CoffeePals Successfully

In our conversation with Zain, he shared the following tips for a successful CoffeePals implementation:

1. Encourage New Hires: Introduce new hires into the CoffeePals program. This offers them an immediate opportunity to meet colleagues outside their team and gain a broader understanding of the company’s culture.
2. Share Testimonials: Encourage participants to share their experiences from CoffeePals matches during town halls or in newsletters. These stories can be surprising and inspirational, motivating others to join the program.
3. Adjust Match Frequency: If weekly connections feel too frequent, switch to bi-weekly or monthly matches. This flexibility can make the program more manageable and increase participation.

Conclusion

For Seneca Holdings, integrating CoffeePals has been a game-changer for navigating remote work challenges. The platform’s ability to create spontaneous, meaningful connections has supported new hires, improved productivity and strengthened the company’s culture. As a remote-first organization, Seneca Holdings highly recommends incorporating CoffeePals to enhance employee connection. By doing so, they’re creating a more enjoyable and connected workplace, ensuring the continued success of their mission.Zain emphasized the importance of employee engagement in a virtual world: “In looking at our organization holistically, how do we get employee engagement right in a virtual world? How do we foster some of these feelings that we want people to have as part of our core values? I think that's something that's not talked about enough. Everyone's really good at solving business problems and creating connections with our partners and vendors and everything else. But I don't know if people really think about how we are connecting to each other in a meaningful way and creating those meaningful relationships. And I think that's something that is going to be important now and it's going to be magnified in the future. For us at Seneca holdings, we think about connection so much that we’ve incorporated it as a core value and appreciate how CoffeePals has helped us reinforce this value.”

Research has shown that teams who share strong connections are more likely to benefit from improved productivity and loyalty, and a decrease in absenteeism and turnover rates. To see how much your company can save using CoffeePals, use our ROI Calculator or add CoffeePals to a team to experience firsthand its awesome benefits!