CASE STUDY
Zillow & tribute:
Unlocking institutional knowledge
The Opportunity
When the pandemic hit in 2020, it gave tech real-estate marketplace, Zillow, an opportunity to rethink many of their learning and development offerings. For Zillow, innovation doesn’t always come in the form of technology, but when it came to looking at their mentorship offering, it became a core part of their hybrid workplace strategy.
Without consistent in-person opportunities to learn, Zillow’s HR team found themselves focusing on things they could easily execute virtually – building rich content and career pathways. Though the department was able to translate some in-person experiences online, it was challenging for employees to take that final, most important step, of applying their learnings.
Zillow needed a scalable way to help employees connect with their peers for real-time knowledge sharing. Mentorship came up in conversation countless times. The Learning and Development (L&D) team knew their employees craved it, but they didn’t quite know how to execute, which resulted in several initiatives being started and stopped. Some worked for a period, and some did not, but none matched the philosophy they were looking for in a mentorship program.
Corina Kolbe, VP Talent Success at Zillow
“Teaching others through mentorship has a 90% retention rate of learning. That is why mentorship is critical to our growth. With remote work and hybrid work, we need to have digital tools, like Tribute, to help our people make connections, real-time.”
The Solution
Zillow’s L&D department wanted a solution that could mentor the whole person, not just developing one-off skills. Choosing Tribute’s Slack app also allowed their learning and development team to enable their employees to learn-in-the flow of work. It was the perfect solution for an organization of this breadth and depth because all it required was an initial set up. Employees were able to self-start and find micro-mentorship on their own, empowering everyone from new hires to senior staff to become both a mentor and mentee at different points in their career at Zillow.
One of Zillow’s key learnings was that obtaining manager buy-in was critical to success and increased usage. Leveraging managers as catalysts to enter the Tribute flow helped promote the importance of self-directed learning through micro-mentorships to performance. It allowed managers to focus on other areas of the business, while supporting their reports, without much extra effort or time. Ultimately, Zillow saw the most success in being able to help employees learn from each other, real time, at scale.
Though mentorship relationships began through the app, it provided a solid jumping off point to help relationships flourish offline and out of app.
Enabled peer-to-peer learning across their organization
Helped ease their transition to a hybrid workplace
Over 700 employees have used Tribute today with hundreds of mentorships completed.