The Client

Valere is a technology firm that builds high-impact digital products. With a distributed workforce including remote teams and international offices (such as in United States, Peru, India, Croatia, Argentina and Uruguay), Valere’s success is directly tied to the engagement and productivity of its talent.

The Challenge: The “Black Box” of Distributed Work

While Valere maintained a strong reputation for delivery, leadership lacked a formalized mechanism to measure real-time employee sentiment. As the company grew, relying on informal checks was no longer sufficient to understand the nuances of the employee experience.

The leadership team faced three specific friction points:

• Operational Fragmentation: With teams spread across different locations, there was a risk of “silos” forming. Leadership needed to understand if communication protocols were working effectively across borders or if remote teams felt isolated.
• The Burnout Risk: In a fast-paced agency environment, high workloads are common. Valere needed to identify if “hard work” was crossing the line into “unmanageable stress” due to unclear timelines or resource constraints.
• Silent Stagnation: Are employees growing? The company needed to uncover if talent was being underutilized or if clear career paths were missing, which is a leading cause of turnover in tech.

The Goal: Establish a data-driven baseline of organizational health to proactively improve retention and culture.

The Solution: An AI-Powered Cultural Audit

Valere deployed Dactic to run a confidential, asynchronous interview campaign with employees across all roles. The goal was to create a safe space for honest feedback that might not be shared with direct managers.

The Process:

1. Deep-Dive into Processes: The AI interviewer probed specifically into workflow efficiency, asking employees to describe friction points in project transitions (e.g., from Sales to Delivery).
2. Psychological Safety: By using an AI intermediary, employees felt comfortable sharing sensitive feedback regarding salary delays, benefits, and mental health struggles without fear of retribution.
3. Talent Discovery: Dactic asked employees about their unused skills, revealing a hidden reserve of talent in areas like AI development and video editing that the company wasn’t leveraging.

The Results: From Instinct to Action

The insights provided a clear roadmap for operational and cultural improvements.

Key Outcomes:

• Unifying Operations: The data highlighted that inconsistent communication was the root cause of stress. Valere moved to standardize project management workflows to align expectations across all offices.
• Prioritizing Well-being: Identifying that “unclear timelines” were driving burnout, leadership focused on better resource allocation and introduced mental health support initiatives.
• Unlocking Potential: The findings drove a new focus on career development, creating pathways for employees to step into leadership roles and use their specialized skills, transforming “workers” into “partners” in growth.

The Voice of the Customer

“Dactic gave us the ability to look under the hood of our own organization. We moved from guessing how our teams felt to knowing exactly where the friction was. It helped us identify burnout risks early and uncovered incredible untapped talent within our own walls.”

— Guy Pistone, CEO, Valere

Conclusion: Proactive People Operations

For service-based companies like Valere, culture is the bottom line. Dactic proved that measuring employee engagement doesn’t have to be a shallow annual exercise.

By using AI to listen at scale, Valere transformed employee feedback into a strategic asset, ensuring that as the company scales, its culture remains its strongest competitive advantage.