Horizon House is a senior living community based in Seattle, Washington, home to around 250 employees who support residents across every part of daily life. Brenda Thompson oversees the full HR function there, from recruiting through offboarding and everything in between, along with a team responsible for day-to-day operations.
Much of Brenda’s focus is strategic. She has been building the infrastructure that lets the organization operate more efficiently, with an eye on a significant milestone ahead: Horizon House is preparing to grow by 40 percent with an expansion project opening in 2029. Getting the workforce ready for that scale of change is a central priority.
With a major expansion on the horizon, Horizon House recognized that success would depend on everyone pulling in the same direction. The organization wanted a clearer, more visible way to connect the work of individual teams to the goals of the business as a whole.
“We know our organization is in a place of evolution, especially as we look to expand. To do that effectively, we need alignment across the organization on what we’re actually working toward, so that we’re in sync with one another rather than focused only on our own areas.”
— Brenda Thompson, Head of HR, Horizon House
Alongside alignment, Brenda knew that adoption would make or break any new tool. Horizon House has a wonderfully varied workforce, including team members who speak English as a second language and others for whom technology is not part of their day-to-day work. A platform that was difficult to navigate simply would not deliver value, no matter how capable it was underneath.
“You can have the best product out there, but if your people aren’t using it, it doesn’t provide any benefit. Adoption has been really strong and easy for people to access, partly because it’s built right into the Microsoft Teams environment we already use.”
Teamflect first came to Horizon House through the organization’s IT director, who discovered the platform and introduced it to the team. Rather than committing everything at once, the leadership team took a measured approach. They started by using Teamflect’s meetings and OKRs among themselves for a full year, giving them time to get comfortable with the product before rolling it out more widely.
That year of hands-on experience gave them the confidence to move forward. From there, the rollout happened in deliberate phases, each one building on the last.
Across the organization, Teamflect now supports several connected areas of Horizon House’s people operations.
OKRs and goal visibility
OKRs were the first major focus, and Horizon House developed them more fully this year by assigning goals to leaders, managers, and supervisors across the organization. This gave everyone a shared, accessible view of what the business is working toward.
Performance management and more meaningful conversations
Horizon House rolled out performance management earlier this year and received a lot of positive feedback on the experience. Because the documentation is easy to navigate, reviews take less administrative effort, which frees managers and employees to focus on the actual conversation about what has gone well and where to grow.
“The system makes it easy to navigate the documentation, and that sets you up to have a meaningful conversation about performance. We were also able to customize the performance questions to our business, our needs, and what matters most to our employees.”
Surveys with real-time results for managers
Horizon House introduced surveys across the employee lifecycle, including a new-hire survey, a six-month check-in, a later follow-up, and exit interviews. The data has been genuinely insightful. Just as importantly, managers can access results in real time rather than waiting on HR to compile and send them.
“Surveys in Teamflect give us a clear line of sight to where we can do better. Managers can easily access the useful information without HR becoming a bottleneck. They can see the results in real time, understand them, and interpret them.”
Recognition
Recognition has grown organically. Even without a formal companywide push, Horizon House has talked about the feature with team members and is already seeing engagement, a sign that appreciation is starting to take root across the platform.
The clearest change Brenda points to is operational efficiency. Reviews no longer depend on someone manually chasing outstanding reports or sending reminders, because that infrastructure is built into the platform.
People can quickly see who has completed a review and who has not, which removes a great deal of administrative back-and-forth and creates space for more meaningful performance conversations.
Horizon House has also been standardizing more of its processes as it evolves, and Teamflect helps the team pair that consistency with a clear message to employees: the organization is investing in them.
“Teamflect is providing us with the building blocks and the foundation for succession planning, so that we can have more direct benefit and impact for our employees.”
Even with all kinds of performance management systems on the market, and having used several across her career, Brenda has found Teamflect to be the easiest to use while still offering deep configuration.
“Teamflect by far has been the easiest to use, but it still allows for a lot of configuration and flexibility. It’s really a blend of both worlds for us.”
Brenda has been equally happy with the support behind the product. When she has a question, the in-app chat assistant answers quickly and accurately, often taking her straight to the page she needs, which she notes is not always the case with other tools. She also values the video tutorials and a help center that stays succinct and caters to different learning styles.
When a conversation with a person is the better fit, her account manager makes it easy. Despite working from a very different time zone on the other side of the world, she flexes her hours to meet the Horizon House team when it suits them.
“Our account manager has been wonderful. She’s on the other side of the world from us, but she’s made adjustments to meet us in our time zone to support us, and she’s been great to work with.”
For Brenda, the answer is unequivocal. Having worked at organizations of every size, she sees Teamflect as a strong fit for complex teams with many different needs, and that view is shared across the Horizon House leadership team, not just within HR.
“A hundred percent, I definitely would. We’re a medium-sized organization, but we’re very complex with a lot of different needs, and Teamflect really caters to the flexibility we need. From an administrator to a manager to an end user, it’s integrated into the system we’re already using, with a clean interface where information is easy to find. If someone is looking for any of these modules, I’d tell them to check it out, because it really does help build a whole ecosystem where business and employee performance all connect.”
.svg)
