Rising Team Pilot
Setup Guide

Before you get started, decide on the key outcomes you want to deliver. Companies use Rising Team to achieve outcomes around increasing employee engagement, enhancing leadership & talent development, building culture and connection, and more. Here are some examples of metrics people use to track success:

• % of people who agree or strongly agree to Rising Team in-session surveys (“I feel more connected, I learned something valuable, My team will work more effectively together”)
• % increase in average engagement scores (either Rising Team Engagement survey and/or your own pulse survey) or on specific parts of engagement
  
• % of managers who actively use Rising Team (e.g. >1 session per quarter)

Your account manager will work with you to define your key metrics and the thresholds for success you’d like to achieve in order to trigger expansion to more teams.

Decide which team leads you'd like to have participate in the pilot. We suggest choosing a minimum of five teams across a variety of functions and levels so the results can be broadly representative of your organization. Keep in mind that each team lead can then invite up to 14 team members to the sessions.

Once you know the size of your pilot, contact hello@risingteam.com for registration instructions.

You can invite your pilot team leads as part of the onboarding when you sign up, or log in to app.risingteam.com anytime and visit your Admin tab to add pilot participants to your account. Once you do so, your pilot participants will receive a welcome email from us with instructions on how to sign up and get started. If you plan to participate in the pilot with your own team, you'll need to invite yourself as a lead for one of these teams.

We offer an anonymous engagement survey with 14 standard employee engagement questions, including employee NPS, available via the Reports tab. To capture the impact Rising Team has for you, we suggest asking all pilot teams (leads and team members) to complete this before their first sessions in order to establish a baseline. On the initial page you’ll see draft email copy and a survey link to send to the teams. You can edit this as you wish, and either send it as the admin or have the team leads send it to their individual teams. Make sure to leave enough time to send reminders; both the account admin and team leads can send reminders as needed. The survey includes a field for “Team” so you and the team leads will be able to see baseline data for their team.

If you have other employee engagement tools you use at your company, you may still want to use our survey alongside your internal ones. Since our survey can be run any time, it will enable you to get a clear baseline and evaluate impact at the frequency that will be most compelling to your organization.

Click on the Kits tab and you'll see our full list of kit topics. The kits are in the order we recommend, though we can customize it for topics that resonate most with you, or the ones that need the most attention from your engagement baseline. Schedule time with your Rising Team account manager to discuss which to include in the pilot, and in what order.

At this point, it's a good idea to get your team leads together for a formal kick-off and training session, led by your Rising Team account manager, that walks through how to use the platform. It’s ideal if each of the leads has accepted their Rising Team lead invite and signed up for their account before this training session.

One tactic we’ve seen work well with other companies is when managers include running their Rising Team sessions as part of their quarterly goals or OKRs. This ensures that they are more likely to run the sessions, and that their leadership chain is supportive of the program. For instance, a team lead with the Objective to “Support and develop my team” could list a Key result as “Run two Rising Team sessions this quarter.”

Now you're ready to go! Ask your team leads to schedule their sessions. We strongly suggest people pre-book at least 3 sessions up front to avoid a last-minute scheduling scramble. An ideal cadence is to run sessions 6 weeks apart, though some teams do them more frequently. You may decide to run sessions every 4 weeks in your pilot to get data back more quickly. 

As team leads at your company start using Rising Team, you'll be able to track kit usage via the Kit Usage report in the dropdown on the Reports tab. You can see how many teams have scheduled, completed, and not scheduled each kit, and roll over the number to see which teams. This allows you to follow up with any pilot participants who are falling behind to find out why and see if they need support.

You can also view Session Summary reports by team and by kit, so you can see how individual teams are rating sessions and what types of reflections participants are sharing. Note that the results are anonymized in these reports to keep the data confidential to the just the people who completed the session together. 

At the end of the pilot, or after your first few sessions if your pilot teams are on annual subscription, you'll want to rerun our engagement survey in order to collect data and compare it to where you started. You may also want to invite pilot participants to share their experience with you, using whatever format you prefer: a group meeting, an anonymous survey, or a simple email. And if you haven't already, we suggest perusing the session summary reports because participants are asked to rate and give feedback on each kit.

With data and feedback in-hand, use the results of your Rising Team pilot to decide on next steps. Our team will be standing by to help you interpret the results of your pilot, compare them to your initial goals, and discuss a custom membership package with enterprise pricing if you are interested in expanding your pilot or doing a full rollout.