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Success Story

Support, Trust, and Transparency: The Basis for Improved HR, Recruiting, and Compensation

Crisis Connections is one of the oldest crisis hot-lines in the nation and home to five programs focused on serving the emotional and physical needs of individuals across Washington state. After identifying a need for interim HR support, Crisis Connections began work with Reverb in 2020 and continues to maintain a strong partnership today.

PeopleOps Service

Company Name:

Crisis Connections

Location:

Seattle

Company Size:

150-200 employees, 400 volunteers

Industry:

Marketing + Branding Consulting

Challenge

Crisis Connections was a $6M organization in 2013, and since then has more than doubled in size. Due to their rapid growth and increased complexity, leadership wanted to improve their foundational HR tools and processes. Crisis Connections reached out to Reverb to provide interim HR support.

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Solution

Reverb’s Interim HR support started in 2020 and developed into a “mission-driven partnership” characterized by trust and transparency.

Crisis Connection’s existing HR team needed a leader who could help put solid HR fundamentals in place. There was a lot of pent-up HR demand. The to-do list included a comprehensive and compliant employee handbook, improved medical benefits, and better new hire onboarding. There were also tactical needs like auditing payroll data and automating recruiting and hiring systems. And, the team wanted to improve their end to end recruiting process. The interim HR leader successfully brought the team together to take on this critical work.

A year later, two more Reverb consultants joined the team. The People Operations consultant worked with leaders to identify critical behaviors and competencies. They used that information to develop a new performance success framework followed by implementation of a new, more comprehensive performance management process.

Reverb’s Compensation consultant pared down a list of over fifty values and competencies to a core few, creating a compensation approach that resonated with the staff and employees. The new structure represented a collective approach to compensation that the whole team could buy in to.

Result

After stepping into the role of CEO in mid-May, Michelle McDaniel worked with the leadership team to turn what had been a difficult environment into one of transparency where feedback is welcome and encouraged. Reverb’s consultants have partnered with leadership, introducing HR initiatives and projects that make employees feel valued and engaged. Compensation, benefits, and recruiting have all been improved. Most important, there’s now a culture of trust, feedback, and kindness.

"I've worked with consultants in the past and it hasn't always been as rosy as working with Reverb consultants. As we continue growing, we continue to find things to implement and modernize. Reverb consultants know what they're talking about and I appreciate how specific they are in their suggestions. I really trust their ideas and judgment."

– Michelle McDaniel | CEO, Crisis Connections