- LINKBANK went through a major merger in 2023 - 350+ employees across newly unified teams, with no structured way to measure engagement across the combined organization.
- CultureMonkey's People Science team partnered with LINKBANK to blend seven proprietary engagement drivers with a research-backed question library, creating a customized listening framework.
- Secure Paylocity integration and anonymous feedback systems improved data accuracy while giving employees a safe channel to share honest perspectives during transformation.
- 50+ managers were equipped with real-time dashboards and heatmaps for direct visibility into team-level sentiment across 15+ drivers.
- Participation reached 90%+ company-wide during the post-merger phase, and LINKBANK achieved an engagement score above 8, signalling strengthened trust and alignment.
LINKBANK, a leading Pennsylvania-based financial institution backed by NASDAQ-listed parent company LINKBANCORP, Inc., serves individuals, families, nonprofits, and businesses across Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia.
When LINKBANK entered a major phase of transformation, it brought both opportunity and complexity. To rebuild cultural alignment after the merger, LINKBANK needed more than traditional surveys.
The bank needed a way to uncover what truly influenced engagement across its teams, a mission brought to life with guidance and support from CultureMonkey.
Challenges : Maintaining engagement and clarity during a major organizational shift
Managing organizational change
The 2023 merger reshaped LINKBANK’s culture, raising the need to unify employees and sustain engagement across newly connected teams.
Need for structured measurement
The shift brought new complexity, making it essential to have a structured, scalable way to understand how employees were adapting.
Solutions: Empowering leaders to listen, understand, and act with confidence
Amid a period of transformation, CultureMonkey enabled LINKBANK to turn employee voices into insights that guided meaningful cultural action. As new teams came together, CultureMonkey’s People Science team helped design a consistent, data-informed listening strategy that kept every employee’s voice at the center.
Ensuring secure and seamless data transfer
CultureMonkey supported LINKBANK’s commitment to employee data integrity with a secure Paylocity integration that ensured accurate and efficient transfer.
Customizing LINKBANK’s unique engagement drivers
With CultureMonkey’s People Science team, the bank incorporated its unique engagement drivers into the platform’s customizable survey design, creating a structured way to listen and act.
What stood out about CultureMonkey was their willingness to truly partner with us. We had our own engagement model with seven key drivers, and they helped align it with their research-backed methodology.
Together, we created a customized, data-driven experience that reflected who we are as an organization.
Beverly Wise, Chief Impact Officer at LINKBANK
Empowering managers with real-time team insights
With CultureMonkey’s manager dashboards and heatmaps, leaders gained clear visibility into team sentiment and focus areas, enabling confident, data-driven action.
Build a culture that listens when it matters most
See how CultureMonkey helps global teams listen, act, and improve engagement at scale.
Book a demoResults: How science-backed listening strengthened LINKBANK’s culture
Through CultureMonkey’s science-backed listening and action tools, LINKBANK turned employee feedback into a clear direction for growth. The results reflected stronger trust, participation, and alignment across teams. Key outcomes include:
- Built greater employee trust: Anonymous feedback created safety for honest voices, deepening connection and cultural alignment post-merger.
- Increased employee participation: By continuously listening and acting on employee feedback, LINKBANK increased participation levels, reaching a 90% company-wide response rate in June 2025.
- Improved manager visibility: Over 50+ managers gained visibility into team-specific sentiment and engagement across 15+ drivers, enabling informed and targeted leadership actions.
- Enhanced data accuracy: Secure Paylocity integration, removed manual uploads, cutting administrative effort while improving data reliability.
- Strengthened engagement insights: Partnering with the People Science team, the bank gained clarity on the factors driving its culture forward, achieving an engagement score above 8.
After our merger, understanding our employees' perspectives was vital for us. CultureMonkey stood out by blending our engagement methodology with their research-backed questions, adding depth and relevance to our insights.
Their support team was exceptional, always responsive and proactive, making our engagement efforts truly impactful.
Beverly Wise, Chief Impact Officer at LINKBANK
Close the gap between what employees feel and what leaders know
Book a DemoCan you tell us about what was happening at LINKBANK when you started looking for an employee engagement solution?
We actually had just gone through a merger, and it was a merger of equals with a partner bank to our south. And so we literally in December of last year, now we had, we're a big believer in employee engagement and had done yearly employee engagement surveys up until this point. So it's a part of our baked in culture that we ask our employees how they feel about working at Link Bank.
So that was already a part of who we are. But really with merging another organisation into Link Bank, we really thought it was important to continue that practise, and especially since whenever you go through a merger, it's disruptive, and it's disruptive for the existing organisation as well as the organisation that's coming on board.
So critically important that we were careful in who we selected as a vendor to make sure we could ask the types of questions and get the types of feedback back that would be helpful to the overall organisation as it goes forward.
Once the survey results came in, how did LINKBANK approach sharing that feedback back with employees?
Absolutely. You know, it's always important to not only ask, but then to report back what you heard and what you're going to do about it. And we did that almost immediately.
We literally had an all bank meeting in the beginning of August, and our survey had cut off at the very end of July. Yeah, we only had about five days in between when the survey cut off and when we had that all bank meeting. But we took all that feedback and we took it out, and then we started the individual kind of leader meetings with their specific data.
How has the reporting portal worked for you in terms of understanding the engagement data?
Well, the ease of understanding the reporting portal, I mean, it was summarised so, I mean, there's so much there, and yet it's summarised in a way that you can grasp it really, really quickly.
Just even the way you colour code, you know, the higher level engagement scores down to the lower, you know, the more disengaged scores with your colour coding system, the way you organise things in a grid, the way you break it down, you know, demographically, reporting managers, team, location, sub team, you know, and then you can get into obviously like gender, type of employee, etc.
And the ease of just, you know, it's a point and a click. It re-organises the data right before your eyes, and you can really drill down and get a feel as you toggle back and forth between those different slices of data, what, you know, what your employees are telling you, and who's telling you what, where are some of the voices coming from.
And so, it just, it's, you know, it's, I mean, I'm not technologically unsavvy, but I'm not a superior technology user. And it's been really easy for me to navigate through and understand the data.
How have your managers responded to having access to their own portal?
So, as we are giving access to their manager portal, it's amazing the questions I'm getting back from those folks too, as they're navigating through. And it was easy to teach them how to go to specific types of screens to kind of get their data.
What differentiated CultureMonkey during your vendor selection process?
One other thing I would say too, that really lent itself toward us picking CultureMonkey was your willingness to work with us. You know, we have kind of an engagement methodology that we use. We have seven particular drivers that we think are critically important to engagement. And we worked together in partnership.
We used the questions that we have from those engagement drivers, blended with your drivers that you had in areas that also were important to glean information. Things like rewards and recognition, growth and development, like wellness and wellbeing, those types of, you know, and you had such a robust library of questions.
So, it made it nice for us to blend, like, you know, your data and research with our data and research and really provide a customisable experience for our organisation. And that was, that was a superior, like, qualification of CultureMonkey when we were doing our selecting.
How did you prepare employees for the survey and build confidence in the process?
We had, we wanted to prepare our employees. So, we sent out some emails ahead of time so that they knew when they got links from you that, A, the reason they were getting links from you was, was that creates the anonymity. Because you're, you know, you're, they're clicking on a link that doesn't come back to us. It goes through into CultureMonkey and creates that anonymity that's so important to do any kind of engagement survey work.
So, we did some of that ourselves, but when we were going to launch the actual survey, we had created, it's typical for us, we had created probably a longer email than what you all recommended. And you came back and said, hey, you know, very nicely, as you guys always do, came back and said, hey, we just recommend it's a little bit shorter so people know and here's the things that you want to make sure it says. And we just, you guys are the expert in it. So, we took that advice and that counsel and we changed our email as a result of that, that launched the survey.
What was the experience like once the survey was live and data started coming in?
Yeah, it's, you know, we started, of course, we were so curious. That was another thing that was really, really great about working with you guys was we could see live data as data was coming in. So, we could read comments, we could see scores, we could see all that, and obviously we could see participation rates.
And one thing you all recommended, I think we had decided to keep the survey open approximately two weeks. It kind of spanned over a three working week in case, because obviously it was in that July time frame when in our country, a lot of people take vacations. And so, but as we got closer to the end date, I think it was Sundaram had made the recommendation to maybe extend through, we were cutting it off, I think, on a Thursday night. And he made the recommendation, I believe, to extend through the weekend because you all like to see participation rates high.
And we were probably in the maybe high 70% or just pushing 80% at the time. And I thought, you know, do we really want to do that? But I thought, you guys have that expertise, you've been great to work with, need to trust that you know what you're talking about. And it boosted our participation rate by a couple percentage points by leaving it open that final weekend. So it was a great recommendation, suggestion, and it made a difference for us.
How has the overall experience been working with the CultureMonkey team?
Well, I just can't say enough for how the customer, I mean, the portal is so robust. I mean, your product in and of itself is exceptional. But when you add on to it, how you all have worked with us, your patience, your guidance, your responsiveness, again, there's a quite a time difference between where we're located and where you're located. And I never have to wait long when I send an email to receive a response, even though I don't necessarily always expect a response quickly, I always get one quickly.
And so it's really, you know, you've been so responsive, so patient, so kind, so helpful.
And what we do have when we had an issue that we were looking at after the survey came back, I think I was comparing a manager portal with our overall by administrative screen and saw a difference in the one manager scores. And we couldn't figure out what was going on. And we came to you all, you said, well, let us research it.
Well, we had done a test survey and of course you had amalgamated for one of our particular managers who like two of us in the test survey had that manager and we had responded in the test survey. And then in the general survey, of course, that manager, we responded to the questions too. And so that manager had multiple scores because of the test data. So all you did was pull the test data out. And then obviously the data was pure.
So again, even problem solving quick, efficient, helpful, and got to the root of what the issue was and resolved it. So I just can't say enough for how you've worked with our team.
