Tag: employee engagement

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inFeedo gets $12M to help employers find out how their workforce really feels

Employee sentiment can be hard to gauge, even at smaller businesses. This can lead to burnout and attrition, when managers least expect it. inFeedo wants to solve that problem by acting as a bridge between workers and their managers, with surveys performed through a chatbot called Amber, which inFeedo refers to as a “Chief Listening Officer.” The company announced today it has raised $12 million in Series A funding led by Jungle Ventures, with participation from Tiger Global and returning investors like Bling Capital.

This brings inFeedo’s total raised since the U.S.-headquartered company was founded in 2016 to $16 million. Part of the funding will be used for the company’s second ESOP buyback for all employees. Other investors in the round included Zeta founder Bhavin Turakhia; Gainsight co-founder Sreedhar Peddineni; Freshworks chief human resources officer Suman Gopalan; and Ankur Warikoo.

A screenshot of Amber, inFeedo's chatbot

Amber, inFeedo’s chatbot

inFeedo’s chatbot Amber is available in more than 100 languages and customers include a wide range of companies in terms of sizes and sector: Samsung, Xiaomi, Lenovo, TATA, Godrej, Bhardi, Unacademy, Paytm, OYO, Lenovo, JD.ID., Tiket.com, Mediacom, Sunlife, BukuWarung and Aboitiz. In total, Amber is used by 30,000 employees in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines. inFeedo has 175 enterprise clients in 60 countries, especially Southeast Asia, India and the U.S., and it plans to speed up its go-to-market plans in North America with its new funding.

Tanmaya Jain, who founded inFeedo with Varun Puri, told TechCrunch the idea for the platform was planted when the two were still at school. “Both Varun and I came from liberal schools and the general concept of a university was a big culture shock. People were encouraged to follow a template rather than think, and new ideas were often ignored, shot down or lost.” They found that this continued at workplaces, and that employees often felt “neglected, under-appreciated and were afraid to open up and share honest feedback with managers, which led to disengagement and attrition.”

Quan raises $1.15M from YC to tackle post-pandemic employee burnout

After doing research, the two realized that companies do care about employee sentiment, but struggle to stay on top of it. “When you have an HR:employee ratio of 1:300, 40% of their time is spent manually tracking, collecting and analyzing feedback and it becomes humanly impossible to give employees the voice they need,” Jain said. While many organizations use annual or pulse surveys, inFeedo was created to standardize surveys across domains and cultures, he added.

Amber also builds connections with employees by remembering context from previous chats. Employees can engage with the chatbot as often as they like, but Jain said they typically have three to four chats with Amber in year, and each conversation is about 8 questions long and takes no more than two and a half minutes to answer.

The new funding will be used to ship new products over the next two years, with the “vision of an all-in-one employee experience platform with predictive people analytics that involve 0 effort HR/IT,” said Jain. inFeedo also plans to quadruple its revenue and double its team, and is currently hiring for 140 remote roles, especially marketing, product, engineering and sales in Southeast Asia, India and the United States.

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Quan raises $1.15M from YC to tackle post-pandemic employee burnout

With post-pandemic burnout on the rise, the shift to remote working, and the ‘Great Resignation’ now passing into the lexicon, companies are struggling to hold onto talent.

Culture platforms like Culture Amp and Glint were built for a different era, offering insights and reports to HR, but many are less tailored to 2022. And employee well-being is still going up the agenda.

New startup Quan has raised $1.15M in pre-seed funding from Y Combinator, along with a Netherlands-based impact fund and several unnamed angels to address the gap between engagement surveys and well-being perks.

The first female-led Dutch startup to be accepted into YC, founders Arosha Brouwer and Lucy Howie say they researched the issue with doctors, psychologists, and therapists to identify over 20 sub-dimensions of well-being underpinned by more than 200 predictors.

Quan launched its beta product in March 2021, and says it is now working with 12 organizations, over 1,000 paid users and a platform engagement rate of 88%.

Brouwer told me: “For far too long, players in the ‘people and culture platforms have been measuring ‘employee engagement’ and ‘employee experience’ without providing ways to effectively manage well-being and linking it directly to business metrics. Hence the reason why issues such as burn-out and toxic corporate cultures have been trending in the wrong way. Quan knows that to effectively fix a social problem we have to make it a financial problem (or incentive) too. The cold hard truth is we get companies to care about their employees when they can directly measure how it impacts their bottom line.”

Quan is now offering a free access trial for company leaders.

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How engaged are your employees?

Nick Psyhogeos Contributor
Nick Psyhogeos is the co-founder of Fork, a startup with an AI solution that discovers career pathways to optimize the placement and growth of talent in the jobs of tomorrow.

Managers are occasionally evaluated by their team’s occupational wellness — the sometimes-hazy calculation that rates employees’ professional and personal contentment. What may not be as commonly tested is the connected concept of employee engagement, which measures how committed employees are to helping their company succeed. While 71% of executives cite employee engagement as essential to their success, a mere 15% of U.S. employees consider themselves engaged.

Unfortunately for employers, when we look through either the contentment or engagement lens, we see a workforce in crisis — upward of 70% of U.S. workers are so unhappy in their roles that they are thinking about and/or actively looking for a new job.

What’s behind all this? Developmental stagnation at work and the opportunity for a better role elsewhere, often defined not merely as one with more pay, but as one presenting a pathway toward personal and professional growth and upward mobility.

Rather than list out the litany of errors, let’s gauge your company’s employee development and engagement efforts.

The pandemic has only exacerbated the dissatisfaction of many employees — at varied levels — who feel stuck in unfulfilling jobs, with little guidance on how to advance or pivot in their careers and achieve the dignity of meaningful, impactful work.

This piece aims to deliver a simple action plan for assessing your employees’ engagement level and taking targeted steps to build the kind of committed and reliable workforce necessary to survive and thrive in today’s marketplace.

Common failures in corporate career development efforts

While researching employee retention when building our startup, we identified a number of common and recurring shortcomings in career-development practices — ones that are likely to be familiar to most Fortune 500 companies, as well as scaling, high-growth startups.

We focused on the activities and strategies companies use to align their skills needs with workers’ capabilities and aspirations — specifically, their approach to advancing staff toward jobs deemed both desirable to employees and essential to employers.

We found significant behavioral-design failure points across three main areas: Their strategic framework for employee engagement and advancement; implementation process and templates; and goal setting and rewards.

To understand the companies’ strategic framework, we examined upskilling and tuition reimbursement policies and spend; individualized employee future-fit assessments; tools for employee career pathway modeling and advancement; and early-in-career and diverse-hire career-progression programs.

For implementation processes and templates, we examined onboarding; employee performance and development cycle; manager feedback; and succession planning.

For goal setting and rewards, we examined manager and VP-level goals and rewards connected directly to their activities and performance in developing and advancing employee careers.

Take this employee development survey

Let’s gauge your company’s employee development and engagement efforts. How many of the following can you answer with a “yes”?

  1. Has your company run a process to define skills or talent-gaps across organizations in the past two years?
  2. As part of such a process, did your company define a role taxonomy for essential roles?
  3. Do you have a process and the tools for mapping existing personnel to that taxonomy, whether from within or outside the relevant organization?
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Employee engagement platform Culture Amp raises $100M at a $1.5B valuation

Culture Amp was founded in 2009 to let companies conduct anonymous employee surveys, but since then, its focus has expanded to helping employers turn the data they collect into action. The company announced today it has raised $100 million in Series F funding, led by returning investors Sequoia Capital India and TDM Growth Partners. The round bumps Culture Amp’s valuation to $1.5 billion, more than double what it was after the company’s Series D in 2019.

New investor Salesforce Ventures, along with existing backers Felicis Ventures, Blackbird Ventures, Index Ventures, Sapphire Ventures, Skip Capital, Grok Ventures and Global Founders Capital also participated in the round.

Culture Amp is now used by more than 4,000 organizations with a total of 25 million employees. Its clients range in size from about 20 to 30 people to more than 150,000 employees, and include Salesforce, Unilever, PwC, KIND, SoulCycle and BigCommerce.

Employee survey startup Culture Amp closes $82M round led by Sequoia China

From its start as a survey platform, Culture Amp has grown to encompass analytics for managers, like turnover prediction and team goal tracking. It also has a sizable online community where users can connect and book workshops, including ones run by diversity, equity and inclusion experts. Culture Amp recently held a virtual version of Culture First, its annual event, with over 20,000 participants.

Founder and chief executive officer Didier Elzinga told TechCrunch that he sees Culture Amp’s Series F as a “validation of the HR space in general.”

“I think for a long time, the HR space and HR tech space have been viewed as not that interesting or important, but what we see now is that people are the most important thing that most companies have, so what can we do to craft their experiences,” he added. “I think it’s a really interesting step for the space as a whole, for an organization like Culture Amp to have made it to this level of revenue, fundraising and valuation.”

The company still has most of its funds from its Series E, but the new round will allow it to “work at a whole other level of scale,” Elzinga said. Culture Amp launched in Australia, and about two-thirds of its revenue comes from the United States. It is also growing in Europe, so some of its new funding will be used on its dual data centers. Elzinga added that the raise also gives Culture Amp a warchest to spend on acquisitions.

Over the past year and a half, employers have dealt with two major issues: a remote workforce coping with the COVID-19 pandemic and growing calls for diversity, equity and inclusion.

Culture Amp saw more employers addressing DEI in surveys; for example, the number of companies who asked employees questions like do they “build teams that are diverse” increased about 30% in 2020. Clients have access to surveys created with behavioral psychologists, including ones designed to see if women, people of color or people who use English as a second language are feeling disengaged and, if so, how to help them.

To understand the pandemic’s impact, the platform introduced well-being templates, asking if employees are feeling overwhelmed, how they feel about messaging from company leaders and gauging their willingness to return to the office.

eqtble, a platform that uses data analytics to create healthier workplaces, raises $2.7M seed

Surveys are answered anonymously and data is aggregated to protect the privacy of individual employees. To help companies act on the results they get, Culture Amp provides what it calls an “Inspiration Engine,” or practices that have worked for other companies.

Since Culture Amp works with a large group of employers, it is able to create benchmarks by industry, size and region. This allows companies to see how their employee engagement compares to others in the same space.

Another feature, Skills Coach, is based on behavioral science research and helps managers develop “soft skills” through two-minute interactive exercises that are delivered by Slack or email.

“The experience that employees have is the thing we want to up level, but the way we want to do it and what we’re focused on is lifting managers’ capability to delivery that employee experience,” Elzinga said. Skills Coach was designed to fit into busy workdays and its usage has tripled over the past year, he added.

“We think that for all the progress we have made, we’re still at the beginning of actually delivering on that employee experience,” he added. “I think the last two years have shown us how important mental well-being is, how important diversity and inclusion is, and how important it is for leaders to truly listen to their people and then to act on that and follow up.”

Other employee feedback platforms include Lattice, Glint and Qualtrics. Elzinga said the main way Culture Amp differentiates is its team of “People Scientists,” or organizational and behavioral psychologists who design surveys, work in its product team as analysts and serve as consultants for clients.

The long road to the Qualtrics IPO

“We see ourselves at the point now where we have enough data that we can start to do primary research on a lot of these issues and we’re looking at how can the data we are developing help inform the space in general, not just ‘here’s what our customers are doing,’ but research that shows how this correlates to that in a situation,” said Elzinga. “The people science component is a hugely important to us.”

In a statement about its investment in Culture Amp, TDM Growth Partners co-founder Hamish Corlett said, “Organizations are living in a world of unprecedented change, and the last 12 months have only accelerated this. We have seen first hand the power that Culture Amp’s unrivaled data set and unique insights have inside boardrooms globally, and we expect this only to amplify in the coming years.”

Optimize employee onboarding to better retain top talent

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Why I make everyone in my company be the CEO for a day

Ville Houttu Contributor
Ville Houttu is the founder and CEO of Vincit USA.

Leaders become great not because of their power, but because of their ability to empower others.

It’s no secret that most tech companies tout their culture as “unique” or “open,” but when you take a closer look, it’s often merely surface level. Yes, you may be dog-friendly or offer unlimited beer on tap, but how are you helping your employees become the best versions of themselves? We’re at our best when our employees are at their best, so we do everything in our power to make that a reality.

We’re at our best when our employees are at their best, so we do everything in our power to make that a reality.

After successfully running Vincit in Finland and Switzerland, in 2016 we made the jump to the United States, setting up an office in California. Although we had moved over 5,000 miles to a new country, it was important that our two main KPIs remain the same: Employee happiness and customer satisfaction. We believe that happy employees make clients happy, and happy clients refer you to others. Therefore, it was essential that this positive and prosperous workplace environment followed us to the United States.

So beyond traditional benefits, like full medical coverage, 401k matching and standard office amenities, we tapped into our Finnish roots to build and provide our employees with an uninhibited, supportive workplace. We keep our company culture as transparent as possible and fully believe in the power of empowering our employees. We have no managers and no real role hierarchy. Employees do not have to go through an approval process on anything they are working on.

We encourage our employees to make a trip to Finland to visit our headquarters. Instead of “Lunch & Learn” meetings, we host “Fail & Learn” meetings where employees get to share something that didn’t work and what they learned from it. And once a month, we let an employee become the CEO for a day.

Unsurprisingly, the “CEO of the Day” program is one of our most popular initiatives. The program gives our employee the reins for 24 hours with an unlimited budget. The only requirement? The CEO must make one lasting decision that will help improve the working experience of Vincit employees. Whatever the CEO of the Day decides, the company sticks with. They can purchase something for the company, change a policy, update a tool we use … Really, anything that they come up with can be done.

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The roles tools play in employee engagement

Christina Janzer Contributor
Christina Janzer is Slack’s Director of Research & Analytics, responsible for leading all global research and product analytics efforts that provide insights about people and work.

Employee engagement isn’t just about the morale of individual workers—it also enables broader workforce productivity and leads to better business outcomes. In fact, research conducted by The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) argues that an understanding of the role employee engagement plays in driving morale and productivity is critical to business success.

At Slack, my team of researchers and analysts spends time studying how people work and what they need to do their best work. We consistently find that an important signal of employee engagement lies in how people feel about the tools they use at work.

Good tools can enable both productivity as well as increase morale. We’ve done research to learn more about successful and thriving Slack teams, and what it is about Slack that enables them to do better work.

These teams don’t just talk about how Slack improves efficiency, but also how it builds community and in some ways modernizes the company. We also found that the top three emotions people associate with Slack are happy, fun and easy, which you might not expect from a productivity tool.

Technology overall has impacted how, for how long, and from where we work, as well as our efficiency in getting things done. Engaging employees with technology isn’t just about supplying more robust software, but giving people tools that they look forward to using everyday as much as their preferred personal apps.

When products and technology reflect the nuances of human communication, while at the same time making information more accessible, employees feel more connected — both with the workplace and with their co-workers – resulting in a stronger, more trusting relationships and better performance.

So, how can we challenge ourselves to set higher expectations for the work products we build and use every day, and what would it look like to bring more humanity, fun and delight into the tools we use for work? Here are some principles to keep in mind.

Add emotional context to improve communication

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How much HR does a scale-up need?

Nora Jenkins Townson Contributor
Nora is an unconventional HR expert based in Toronto. After helping successful startups like FreshBooks and Wealthsimple grow, she founded Bright + Early, an HR consultancy focused on helping scaling companies build impactful people programs.

There is a special chaos that happens when a startup reaches 30 employees. People have a harder time tracking what’s going on, and it’s easy for some to feel left out or ignored.

Right when you want employees focusing on taking the company to the next level, they’re suddenly focused on their own futures. Insecurities and politics can abound, and the work can suffer.

How to stop the madness? In my experience, it all comes down to structure. It might seem early, or scary to a company used to succeeding on grit, but 30 is a key time to begin putting processes into place.

You’re no longer 10 people sitting around a table together, and communication can start to break down. Looking to large companies is no help either. It’s easy to get lost in a sea of frameworks, and you don’t want to overwhelm your team.

What steps can you take to keep things on track and scale effectively? How much is too much?

My company, Bright + Early, works with companies at exactly this stage, helping them grow up without losing the culture that makes them special. For a company just on the verge of scaling, here’s what I recommend.

Values

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Nexthink raises $85M to monitor and improve ’employee experience’ of apps

As companies compete for talent, a startup that has built a platform to help ensure that the talent — once it’s working for you — doesn’t get bogged down by IT frustration, has raised a significant round of funding.

Lausanne, Switzerland-based Nexthink has nailed down $85 million in funding led by Index Ventures (which has a base in nearby Geneva), with participation also from Highland Europe, Forestay Capital, Galéo Capital and TOP Funds and Olivier Pomel (co-founder and CEO of Datadog).

Nexthink’s CEO Pedro Bados said in an interview that the company will be using this round to expand its business globally and specifically in the US.

It will be doing this from a healthy base. The company already has 900 enterprise customers, covering no less than 7 million endpoints, using its platform to improve employees’ interaction and satisfaction with the IT tools that they are required to use for work. Customers include Adobe, Advocate Healthcare, BlackRock, Commerzbank, Safran, Sega HARDlight, Tiffany & Co., Vitality, Wipro and Western Union.

Network monitoring is a big and established area in the world of IT, where tech companies provide a wide array of solutions to identify and potentially fix network glitches across on-premise, cloud and hybrid environments.

What is only becoming more apparent now to organizations is that problems with the dozens of apps and other software that employees need to use can be just as much, if not more, of an issue, when it comes to getting work done — for example, because something is not working in the app, the worker is unsure how to do something, or there is a configuration issue.

That is the issue that Nexthink is tackling. The company installs a widget — it calls it a Collector — on a worker’s phone, tablet, laptop, desktop computer, or whatever device is being used. That Collector in turn monitors hundreds of metrics around how you are using your device, ranging from performance issues and policy breaches through to examining what software is being used, and what is not.

Nexthink’s algorithms both identify and even can anticipate when a problem is happening, and either provide a quick suggestion to fix it, or provide the right data to the IT team to help solve the problem.

In the “marketplace” created in an IT network, you might think of Nexthink as solving problems at two ends: for the IT team, reduces the number of calls it gets by helping solve problems and providing useful information in cases where they will really be needed. For the employees, it gives them a quick and hopefully helpful response so that they can get on with their work.

“Not only are employees happy and more productive, but costs go down on support,” Bados says.

Nexthink has actually been around for 14 years — Bados co-founded Patrick Hertzog and Vincent Bieri not long after he finished his graduate research work in artificial intelligence at the polytechnic in Lausanne — and this latest round is larger than all the funding that the company had raised up to now, which had been $69 million.

That in itself is a sign of how VCs and the industry are waking up to the opportunity to address the challenge of software usability and experience and how that might affect employee satisfaction and productivity.

“We’ve known the company for a while and have a lot of respect for Pedro as a CEO,” said Neil Rimer of Index Ventures in an interview. “We’ve been watching what they have been building focusing on user experience and management, and it’s an area that we find compelling.” Plus the customer caliber and loyalty helped, he said. “The retention and lack of churn are all very impressive.”

Unsurprisingly, there are a number of others also moving into the same space as Nexthink, including Microsoft, VMware and Riverbed, as well as others like New Relic around the same neighborhood of services. For now, Bados says he sees these more as potential partners than rivals.