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Padre Dam achieves open and honest dialogue with staff

Padre Dam take their culture of honest communication to the next level with the use of the Jostle intranet .

Achieving employee engagement rates is a laudable feat, but what about digging even deeper to find out what's on the minds of the people in your company? This is something that Padre Dam Municipal Water District managed to do. Here's how.

In 2016, Padre Dam’s leadership team began to notice that the communication from employees on the Jostle^®platform and during their quarterly all-employee meetings (GM Dialogue Sessions) was consistently positive and upbeat.

While this may not seem like a problem, Padre Dam has a realistic view of workplace culture and strives for a healthy environment. They wanted staff to ask questions if they didn’t agree with (or understand) something, and they wanted every employee to feel empowered to make suggestions.

With this in mind, they launched a powerful campaign on their Jostle intranet to surface and pursue an honest, company-wide conversation. It allowed employees to speak directly with their CEO—Allen Carlisle—to garner quality feedback on unanswered questions from the last GM Dialogue Session, or ask new questions that had arisen since the session.

The campaign—"Ask Allen"—was a breakthrough moment for Padre Dam's internal communication. It opened up the floor to questions, and suddenly employees who had never commented before were weighing in with great suggestions and follow-up questions. They had cracked their problem and an honest two-way conversation was happening throughout the company.

You can read more about this initiative and its outcomes in Padre Dam's case study.

“The Jostle platform complements our collaborative culture and even helps strengthen it.”
Allen Carlisle
CEO/General Manager, Padre Dam