The Customer
Meet Travis Feddema
Financial Advisor and Wealth Management Analyst at PWL Capital
Industry
Investment
Wealth
Management
Location
Montreal,
Quebec
Use Case
Build a feedback culture within your company
Without Fellow, it can be easy for things to be disjointed. It’s super important for everyone to be on the same page, especially when working remotely. Now, everything gets tracked and linked to a specific person in Fellow, and nothing slips through the cracks.”
PWL offers a personalized approach to wealth management that lets clients define their financial and family goals based on their lifestyles, providing each client with a unique experience.
Travis Feddema works in the Private Services department at PWL Captial as a Financial Advisor and Wealth Management Analyst responsible for various analyses, meeting preparation, and financial planning.
When Travis joined the company in 2020, PWL had just started rolling out Fellow across the entire organization.
Goal
The goal: Encouraging feedback between managers and their direct reports
PWL was looking for a tool to give teams an easy way to share feedback between managers and direct reports. At the time, teams across the organization used Word documents for everything.
Our previous process for tracking action items was spread across multiple platforms. More effort was required to gather notes and action items from previous meetings, and we could not view manager feedback holistically. Fellow has helped us streamline all of this into one spot, and the way it automatically pulls incomplete talking points and action items from the previous meetings is a game-changer!”
When the team at PWL came across Fellow, they realized the platform would help manage both feedback and meetings at the company, which was a huge win! 🤩
challenge
The challenge: Training managers to adopt a feedback mindset
It’s no secret that most companies have a large techstack, so it’s challenging when another tool gets rolled out across the organization.
Sure, teams might see Fellow’s value, but learning everything about how the platform works may seem daunting, and adoption can suffer.
The good news is, when you purchase Fellow for everyone at the company, our team makes sure to provide ongoing support to every team to ensure they are getting the correct value out of the tool!
Within our department, we started using Fellow right away, but at a certain point, we felt that we weren’t using it to the fullest potential. We knew that there were advanced features and capabilities that we weren’t taking advantage of.”
solution
The solution: Fellow’s Masterclasses to boost engagement and productivity
I remember there was a specific meeting where we were thinking, isn’t there a way to do this in Fellow? And that’s when we got a reminder that we have access to training sessions with the team at Fellow. I thought that would be great and help get everyone up to speed quickly.”
That’s when the team at PWL contacted Julia, Implementation Specialist at Fellow, to participate in some masterclasses to refresh the team on how to use Fellow.
She did a great job, and we went ahead and booked more team sessions. There was lots of positive feedback, which moved us forward in our implementation!”
With Fellow’s masterclasses, we provide custom training to fit your unique workflows to ensure Fellow is helping you build a culture of efficient meetings and ongoing feedback.
Results
The results: alignment, productivity and better meetings!
We asked Travis, “Did you notice a difference after the team training?.” Here’s what he told us:
More adoption for sure, which just makes the whole experience better. It’s not great if you’re the only person on your team using Fellow. It makes it exponentially more useful if everyone is working together on the same platform. Tracking action items from our daily sync call has improved a lot.”
Additionally, Travis explained how Fellow had improved his team meetings:
I really do find that Fellow has added tons of value to our daily sync calls because it makes sure that they’re productive and that we accomplish what we want to accomplish. Otherwise, it can quickly become a “How’s everybody doing?” type of meeting. Fellow gives you that structure to follow with templates, making it easy to run through each section of the agenda.”
Travis is right – Fellow integrates with tons of your favourite tools so you don’t have to switch between apps throughout the day. His favourite Fellow integration is with Outlook and Teams because Fellow connects directly to his Microsoft calendar, Teams chat and calls.
The thing that I loved at first was just the integration with Outlook. The fact that all your meetings from your calendar just are automatically there in Fellow is great. It’s also really helpful that I can open up Fellow in a Teams meeting, and all the agenda items are there.”
Travis also mentioned that he loves Fellow’s feedback feature – the reason why the tool was introduced at PWL. According to Travis, the simplicity of giving feedback in Fellow, whether it’s about a meeting or a colleague, makes giving and receiving feedback a part of the organization’s culture.
The feedback feature is really cool. We like to use it for meetings to check the pulse and see how everyone feels about the structure. With feedback in Fellow, you can also give anyone feedback at any time, whether it’s your colleague, direct report or manager. Feedback has become really organic and part of our routines.”
Apart from asking for feedback about meetings and projects, PWL also uses Fellow for their quarterly feedback cycles:
We have quarterly performance reviews about things that are going well and areas for improvement, so the fact that you have a record of everything that was discussed each meeting allows you to understand what you said you wanted to accomplish or improve on, and you can check in on that.”
PWL has leveraged Fellow to build their culture of feedback and efficient meetings. The best part, according to Travis, is that Fellow has reduced the number of tools used by managers – while creating a centralized place for decisions and one-on-one exchanges.
Fellow is interactive. Notes from previous meetings carry forward; action items keep you accountable. I really like being in a meeting with a colleague and jotting down action items in real-time, so I don’t forget what I need to do.”