Based in Buffalo, New York, Wayforward is an organizational change management firm driven by a team of seasoned HR executives.
Our approach.
Wayforward associates have deep backgrounds in change management of challenging environments. Our firm excels in guiding many industries through significant periods of change and internal challenges, with a focus on Strategic Workforce Insight Mapping (SWIM™).
We apply a highly deliberate process – designed with intention down to the last detail – to maximize buy-in and trust with your workforce. We’re laying the groundwork for change management at every juncture.
Our practices and philosophies are real, tangible, applicable superchargers for companies. Because these strategies are rooted in lived experience, we’ve found they work consistently, swiftly, and to an extent that is wildly effective.
Wayforward was created as an outside resource for leaders who were ready and hungry for validation. They know that there must be another move – a way forward. We allow leaders to put internal organizational challenges in their rearview, and to do it quickly.
When we get involved.
Most executive teams are referred to us because they are grappling with an internal challenge that we have handled for those they trust in other organizations. The problems they may be experiencing generally fall into one of eight categories:
Challenges in Operational Performance
SWIM™ improves front-line performance through human systems engineering. By addressing barriers to successful performance identified through employee experience assessments, we facilitate real change in a way that many employers haven’t seen before.
Strategic Planning & Change Management
We facilitate the planning and implementation of mergers and acquisitions, product strategy shifts, long-term planning, creation of new divisions, and other major changes. These sessions are centered around a strong connection between the strategic and the tangible. Because it is our belief that most strategic plans fail on Monday morning, we prioritize immediate “rocks” and employee buy-in on the change efforts.
Becoming an Employer of Choice: Eliminating Turnover Problems
We impart best-in-class retention and recruitment strategies, improving the candidate and onboarding experiences, and eliminating the root causes of turnover.
Threats to Performance Culture: Low Morale & Employee Engagement
We try to avoid using words like “culture” and “engagement.” From where we stand, these buzzwords aren’t sufficiently tied to concrete results. However, this type of engagement is tied to building a positive employment environment that increases the connection between individual efforts and operational outcomes. These tend to deal with topics like camaraderie, training, and work environment.
Leadership Dynamics & Decision-Making
Our work focuses on executive performance development, their ability to leverage their everyday efforts toward strategic goals, and, above all, resolving the challenges that disrupt executive decision-making processes in their organization.
Customer-Centric Organizational Growth
Employee experience work and customer experience work go hand in hand. We routinely find that if a customer is experiencing an issue, it is because employees are experiencing a very similar one. But this work isn’t always rooted in problems. Often, we help our clients understand the customer (or prospective customer) experience and process decisions completely outside of our products or services. This allows our client organizations to target sales strategy growth through a deeper understanding of who their customer is and what they need to do more business with us.
Operational Excellence & Process Optimization
When barriers within the employee experience are intimately tied to an issue like equipment, inventory management, or another ‘hard science’ problem, we apply a problem-solving approach to operational challenges, heavily leveraging Six Sigma methodology and high-stakes investigations.
Effective Organizational Communication
Often discovered within the other challenges we’re working on,this client problem concentrates on enhancing decision-making and information flow through improved communication systems and feedback mechanisms. From a systems standpoint, if a client engagement begins with this challenge, it is usually because an engagement survey identified communication as an issue, and leadership was left with more questions than answers on what the root of the issue truly is.
How we engage.
All engagements begin with the SWIM™ process, always with clear timelines and specific deliverables.
Once we have delivered the SWIM™ diagnostic report or strategic plan, many of our clients wish to engage Wayforward for targeted interventions on leverage points in their human systems. This might include oversight of action plans, executive performance coaching, or more surgical problem-resolution with specific stakeholder groups.
The Values That Guide Us
Do what you say you will do
Our reputation is more precious to us than any accolade or financial incentive. When everything else is stripped away, the last thing a person has is their word. When we give you our word on something, we will follow through.
Whatever it takes
The right way to do things is often the most difficult. And our passion is helping organizations when things look bleakest. We are here to say that there is always another move. We will do what it takes to get our clients across the finish line. Tenacity of purpose is our identity.
Do the right thing
Most organizations list values like integrity, empathy, excellence, quality, fairness, or candor. It’s important for us to wrap all of those important sentiments into a single statement. In all things. At all times. With all others. No shortcuts, no easy way out. Just doing the right thing.
Leave it better than you found it
Is a long-term, productive mindset. Though we are likely a temporary part of your leadership, your organization grows best when we plant trees whose shade we know we may never sit under.
Fully Engaged
We are effective because we’re always on. To maintain a high level of daily focus, we’re disciplined in managing our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual energy.
Grow or die
We exist to be the catalyst for our clients’ future success and upward trajectory. It’s a responsibility we take very personally. If you don’t thrive, we both fail.
Trust people the way you want to be trusted
From the faith in our outcomes to the way clients pay us, trust is our currency. And we fiercely defend it.
The Founder Behind the Map
Somewhere inside most companies, talented people are quietly updating their resumes — and their leaders assume it is about pay, or competitors, or a restless generation. Dustin Snyder’s work shows it is usually none of those. People respond rationally to the conditions around them. One group exits. The other stays and underperforms. In both cases, the cause is the same set of environmental variables.
After fifteen years in labor relations and his service as President of a 600-employee, $300M manufacturing firm, Snyder founded Wayforward to surface and re-engineer those conditions — and has since diagnosed and rebuilt organizational performance in more than 50 companies across manufacturing, healthcare, and a range of other industries.
That work rests on a principle Snyder documents across nearly twenty scientific fields in his book Sink or SWIM: human behavior at scale is a predictable outcome of system design. Individuals vary; populations under a given structure do not. A company’s plan — its strategy, its targets, its execution — sits on top of that system, a layer most leaders have never deliberately examined: the topography of human behavior, the structures and unwritten rules that govern how people actually act. Every organization has one. Few have designed it, and fewer still can describe it.
Snyder’s position is direct: a business cannot execute a strategy built on workforce behavior it has never mapped, because that behavior is being shaped by terrain leadership cannot see. Wayforward exists to map it.
Challenge the Status Quo as a Wayforward Associate
Our promise to clients is built from the most cunning and confident minds in the human resources sphere. Experience is one thing. What someone has accomplished for the hours they’ve devoted is another. Knowledge without application isn’t of much interest to the organizations that need our help.
If you’re someone with executive experience who is interested in joining our team, please take a moment to complete our readiness quiz here. It will give you a strong sense for what it entails.
If you’ve completed the readiness quiz and would like to share your stories of change and impact on human systems with us, we’d love to sit down and get to know you better. Come by the office for an exceptionally good cup of coffee and an even better conversation. Or, if you’re not in the Buffalo, NY area – we can set a virtual coffee.
The story of our brand
The idler wheel plays an important role in the efficient and accurate functioning of a compound bow. Limbs bend and flex when the bowstring is pulled, and an idler wheel is built to withstand pressure and torque when the bow shoots an arrow.
Much like the stresses a business endures throughout its life, Wayforward plays the role of the idler wheel, helping keep the company shooting straight while allowing it to withstand the pressures of change.
Redefine your organization's future with Wayforward.
