Planning for Growth and Understanding Engagement in an Ever-Changing Org: Q&A with Dwayne Nalty, People Operations Manager at Scout Motors

When your organization is changing fast, it’s easy to lose track of where people stand. But it’s also the time that understanding your team becomes more important than ever. So how can you bring order to the chaos?

That was the question facing the People Operations team at Scout Motors. According to Dwayne Nalty, People Operations Manager, the team found their answer in ChartHop. Implementing ChartHop allowed the team to get out of spreadsheets to better visualize the organization – both how it stands now and in the future based on intended growth – and keep a pulse on employee engagement throughout a variety of changes.

We recently sat down with Dwayne to learn more about Scout Motors’ journey with ChartHop. Here’s what we learned.

ChartHop: What challenge were you looking to solve that led you to ChartHop? And why did you choose ChartHop in particular?

Dwayne Nalty: When I started at Scout in March 2023, we were 25 employees. Just over a year and a half later, we’re at 700 employees, and this type of hyper growth was always part of the plan. In the beginning, we used spreadsheets to do all our headcount planning. Our leadership team had this master spreadsheet with their projected headcount, including where people were being hired and the financial planning impact of that growth. But that wasn’t a robust or a long term solution, so we began looking for a way to get our team out of that spreadsheet.

We looked at a few solutions, but none of them were as robust as we needed. Then, one of our HR leaders who had used ChartHop previously suggested that we look into it. We immediately loved the interface and its ability to give leadership a visual representation of what they were doing to plan out the organization.

CH: What specific aspects of ChartHop have you found the most valuable?

DN: What I love about ChartHop the most is the interface. It is probably one of the most user friendly and intuitive interfaces. We have a lot of people who just get into it and start clicking around and can navigate it on their own. Especially for an HR tool doing analytics, headcount planning, and more, it does a lot in a pretty straightforward way. 

Another big point of value for our team is the fact that our leaders can go into ChartHop and run a basic report easily on their own. For example, if someone wants to see what their team looks like at any point in time or grab people’s email addresses, they can do that. We’re currently building out more analytics in ChartHop, and knowing that leaders can go in and get the information they need from that is a really powerful thing.

CH: How else are you using ChartHop today?

DN: Beyond headcount planning, being able to do surveys and track engagement has been really powerful. To start, we were able to jump in and do stuff in a scrappy way a little bit earlier than we expected. We did a really early engagement survey when there were about 100 people or so, just to kind of have one benchmark, and we used ChartHop to do that. That gave us some early data on what the organization looks like and how they feel about being at Scout. Being able to do early surveys and get early data from our team has been one of the best things. 

We did a larger engagement survey a month ago and that information rolled out to leadership with a lot more data and action planning. We were able to cut and analyze the raw data (which was de-identified). We also used ChartHop’s AI summaries of the content to give leaders a quick synopsis of what their teams said and to summarize the results and give some action items to the whole organization in our all hands. Leaders also got the individual comments, but the summary was a quick way to see the overall scope and they thought that was really helpful.

CH: How would you describe the overall experience of working with ChartHop?

DN: It’s been really positive. It’s a great partnership for Scout, as we’re in a really dynamic state where we’re asking to do things that aren’t long term, and ChartHop always has a solution for us. The customer success team is always responsive and they’re fantastic to work with.

From a platform perspective, ChartHop does the best job of creating an HR tool that is usable and beautiful. HR tools tend to be very convoluted and kind of lose the thread in their functionality. But ChartHop has figured out a way to do a lot of really powerful things in a way that actually makes sense and is really simple to use. Things like seeing compensation history, changing titles, and doing promotion cycles are a lot easier in ChartHop than I’ve ever seen with any other platform. 

I’ve also gotten positive feedback from our leaders, who love that they have a solution where they can jump in and do things for themselves.

CH: Scout has already grown tremendously and is continuing to grow quickly. How do you feel like ChartHop can continue to support you as your team grows?

DN: We’re going to continue doing headcount planning and engagement surveys in ChartHop as we grow. And we’re also talking about new ways to use ChartHop so that employees’ profiles become more identifiable and customized to what they bring to the team. For example, we’re talking about putting skills and certifications on people's profiles so we have a more communal way of seeing what people are working on. Overall, ChartHop is giving us a really easy, user-friendly way for all of Scout to interact with the org as a whole and have a more in-depth view of what the team looks like, which will carry us a long way forward.

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