Blaze Performance Canada founder and CEO Rick Timlick said that in the time he’s spent working around the world, he’s seen the need for companies to merge operations and people better.

Knowing how to make that happen is at the core of the Calgary company’s employee engagement platform.

“I’ve spent a good many years working with large organizations around the globe about helping them at that intersection of culture and operations,” Timlick said.

“If I want to accomplish a big goal, I need to figure out how do I get the people brought on to that big goal.”

Jennifer Dearborn, a business partner with Blaze Performance Canada, and a neo-natal ICU nurse, said she teamed up with Timlick because she believed in the system that he’d created. She said she’s passionate about creating change within organizations.

“Healthcare is in a bit of a cultural crisis and I got very discouraged to see so many amazing, talented people walking out the door just because they didn’t feel supported and engaged,” Dearborn said.

“Our solution provides real-time sentiment data that helps organizations find where their pain points are, to help mitigate them and work towards that workplace culture that they’re looking for.  As well as having business outcomes that are in alignment with organizational goals.”

The company has 12 people, with Kent Vaughn, David Williams and Chandra Mannix also listed as co-founders.

Tracking engagement data

Timlick said their focus is on medium-sized companies looking for broader employee-engagement tools; ones that have enough degrees of complexity on their org charts, but lack a robust enterprise-wide HR system.

“We find those medium companies, there are complexities there, they face significant challenges in creating organizational alignment,” he said.

“They’ve got a disparate workforce or trying to maintain connection of contact with them.”

Blaze Performance provides various services, and one of its core products is the Blaze Digital Compass. That’s their diagnostic tool that employees interact with that help Blaze analyze the workforce structure, the culture and dynamics.

It’s a web-based portal that also looks like an app on a smartphone and it tracks regular sentiment among employees. That sentiment is analyzed through the system and aggregated into a dashboard so leaders can see where pain points are.

Timlick said the integrated AI system then tries to tease out the driver of the disengagement among employees.

“I think the big difference and where we are proud of is even those big companies that would have these big enterprise systems, there’s still a lot of crunching they have to do with the data and often outside of the system,” he said.

“Our platform has basically an all-in-one solution that it’s going to gather that sentiment, gather that data, and actually analyze it within the platform and give you good meaningful reports as a dashboard that you could then act on.”

They like to gather data at least weekly – more frequently if possible – as it helps the system get to know the organization.

So far, they’ve seen considerable success in helping companies overcome some cultural challenges.

“The other thing we’ve noticed is the actual richness of the data we’re able to provide has uncovered some root issues that companies wouldn’t have gathered themselves, and they definitely weren’t able to see the snapshot of that data in a one spot kind-of place,” Timlick said.

Continuous learning

Among their employees, Blaze has a wide range of experience. Still, Timlick said that participating in the Alberta Catalyzer – Velocity program helped them learn something new every day.

“I found the time highly valuable in just the way they structured the workshops,” he said.

“The way they’ve kind of led everybody to a point where you’re now ready to make a pitch to a wider audience has really forced us to think about our business and to keep tightening and refining.”

Sophia Truscott, who does the marketing and creative work for Blaze, said it allowed them to become more self-aware as an organization.

“Knowing when to take the next step, when to grow, when to hire, when to not do those things – when that can actually hurt you. So, that’s been really helpful to see,” she said.

Timlick said they’ve seen success in a couple of primary industries. He said the Blaze system needs to evolve a little bit more before they can access other sectors. They’re about 80 per cent of the way there, he said.

“That refinement will just allow us to tap into other markets,” he said.

As they gather more data across sectors, Timlick said they’ll be able to baseline industries and perhaps help companies by providing foresight into challenges they may face or to help them understand challenges with their workforce.

“The data itself is going to actually become quite valuable for research into those kinds of industry themes,” he said.