Questrade Financial Group (QFG): Maintaining a people-focused company culture of care

Traditional financial institutions are often viewed as monolithic. Bank vaults are synonymous with being untouchable and unbreakable, and sadly those associations can make the world of finance and financial management feel foreign and cold. 

Questrade Financial Group (QFG) is on a mission to change that. Its objective is quintessentially human: the organization cares deeply about helping Canadians become more financially successful and secure. It does this through securities and foreign currency investment, professionally managed investment portfolios, mortgages, insurance, financial services and, most recently, real estate services.

Business challenge

For many years, Questrade relied on a traditional, on-prem document management and collaboration solution. But as an agile organization that focuses on its people, QFG wanted flexible, scalable tools that reflect its mission. “We’re a fast-growing, intelligent organization, and the people we hire are incredibly talented,” says Max Schau, Managing Director of Enterprise Technology Services at Questrade Financial Group. “We needed a solid collaboration tool that would reflect those traits and enable them to do their best work.”

Questrade’s workforce expansion–through both organic growth and the acquisition of new financial services organizations–and commitment to a hybrid work environment, means Questrade needs a solution that can support all of the company’s employees, no matter where or how they work. With hundreds of new team members joining in the last few years, Questrade needs to accommodate onboarding users at scale, on any device they choose to use. 

“We have a bring-your-own-device policy, where employees can either get a corporate phone or use their own personal phone, so we have a mix of Android devices and iPhones. We needed a solution that didn’t lean one way.” 

Solution

Unifying collaboration to build global connections

To support its existing teams and provide a scalable communication and collaboration infrastructure for future growth, Questrade shifted from its legacy solution to Google Workspace. The organization was able to migrate to the cloud in just three months, 50% faster than it would have with other cloud-based solutions, to get its entire team working together sooner.

This transition included a full adoption of the Google Workspace suite, with a key focus on transforming how Questrade’s teams communicate. Gmail became a first step for getting new team members started. “A lot of folks already use Gmail for their personal email,” Schau says, “so giving them a similar experience at work that they have at home makes adoption very easy.”

The company also relies heavily on Chat for more instantaneous communication across certain teams or project groups.

“If we’re working on an initiative with a specific group, we’ll set up a space in Chat and share Drive files directly in there to keep the communication and documentation in one place.” 

Questrade also uses Chat to address more urgent communications, everything from broken printers and spotty Wi-Fi networks in the office to instant updates for senior leaders at the organization. “Email is no longer considered instantaneous. Our organization sends a lot of email, and there’s no guarantee someone will see something in a timely manner,” Schau explains. “Chat helps us ensure we see the information when and where we need it.” 

Being able to scale globally while maintaining a strong sense of purpose requires a willingness to listen to the workforce, so Questrade uses Google Forms to gather feedback and organize employee input. But not everything has to be about a specific business initiative. The company also collects information for team potlucks and informal check-ins to help nurture company culture.

Simplifying change management 

The Google Workspace platform makes it easy to bring new people on board. “When we bring in new talent, we need to make them part of the Questrade family,” Schau says. “Google Workspace makes the entire onboarding process much easier for everyone.” 

The company works closely with a Google Cloud Premier partner, SADA, An Insight company, to ensure each step of that migration and transition is easy for everyone involved.

When we’re looking for a specific answer or guidance, SADA helps us understand which Google Workspace solutions we can turn to for a specific use case. And if we need additional resources, they also have the expertise to steer us to unique vendors that will meet our needs.

Max Schau, Managing Director of Enterprise Technology Services at Questrade Financial Group

Helping customers buy houses and employees find home

In the company’s ongoing efforts to make its employees feel welcome, included and heard, Questrade uses Google Workspace to find more ways for more team members to communicate with one another. With Docs, not only can people see what others are working on in real time, they can also use Smart Chips for providing greater context when sharing with other Questrade teams. 

“It’s invaluable to have someone work remotely on the same document, rather than having to huddle around someone’s computer or send rounds of edits,” Schau says. “We’re also able to use Smart Chips to tag and include information about people directly in the document. Not everyone knows who I am, but anyone can click the Smart Chip and get a more detailed overview. That speed of information sharing helps a lot as we grow.”

Questrade leans heavily on live captioning in Google Meet and predictive text in Gmail to support employees whose first language is not English. “We work with a global team and have plenty of recent immigrants to Canada working on our teams,” Schau says. 

“Captions and predictive text help make sure our people understand and are able to participate in discussions in a way that’s hard to do in-person when you’re learning a new language.” 

A modernized tech stack to attract modern talent

Whether Questrade Financial Group is growing locally or globally, it now uses Google Workspace as a signpost for potential team members searching for a modern organization. 

Our work isn’t about just sitting at a desk in the office anymore. It’s not a 9 to 5 sifting through slide decks and sending them off. The environment is much more collaborative, and Google Workspace enables us to show everyone that we’re investing in a hybrid, people-focused work experience.

Max Schau, Managing Director of Enterprise Technology Services at Questrade Financial Group

Google Workspace Results

As a result of working with SADA on their Google Workspace migration, Questrade has been able to:

• Scale collaboration during a period of 4X team growth
• Shift teams from asynchronous collaboration to live editing
• Use instantaneous communication with Google Chat for urgent comms
• Empower employees whose first language is not English to more easily communicate with English-speaking team members
• Achieve 50% faster migration to Google Workspace compared to other cloud-based tools