Transcript
Mark:
Welcome to People Tech, the podcast of the HCM technology report. I’m Mark Feffer. Today, I’m joined by Tanya Barkalov, the CEO of Hello Team. They’re an all in one platform that offers performance management, employee engagement and social workplace tools. We’ll talk about the impact of COVID on the market, the evolution of engagement and share thoughts about remote work in the future. All on this edition of People Tech. Tanya, thanks for being here. So engagements, been a thing for a while from your perspective has COVID changed it?
Tanya:
Oh Mark. Thank you first for, for having me on your show, it has definitely changed it during the last year. It has been extremely apparent companies with the right culture, not only survived, but thrived. And even companies that initially suffered financial blow back were able to pick up and rebuild and they all point out to that resilient culture they had that they built upon the engagement of their employees. We can probably also agree that building culture is really hard and building engagement is very hard when it comes now to people working from home versus hybrid, versus remote, and some of the technology that we need to, to approach those people has changed quite a bit in the past 18 months.
Mark:
Now three years ago, say two years ago, engagement was almost all people to talked about and in HR tech. Engagement and experience were the really big things pushing everybody’s work. That’s obviously changed. Could you talk about that a little bit? I mean, first of all, do you agree and secondly, how has it changed and how has it impacted you?
Tanya:
Right. I mean, put yourself in the shoes of an HR leader. Back, let’s say before COVID they were grappling with a myriad of issues every day and trying to satisfy hundreds and thousands of constituents, their employees. But now on top of that for the last 18 months, they’ve also had to deal with a lot of other issues such as pandemic, making sure that their employees are safe, to a social and political divide, to social justice issues to DNI issues in the workforce.
Tanya:
So the employee engagement, the fundamentals are there. They haven’t changed as much, it’s just how we’re doing them. And how many people are we trying to satisfy on a day to day basis. And now it’s really, the focus has become on employee experience as being that broader issue. So what happens from the day that you start at a company before you can come to an office, you’ll meet with your manager with a bunch of your coworkers. You’ll get to know the people that you work with. Today most of us are recruiting remotely. And even the people that could be at the field, for example, the HR managers are often working from home. So it’s a different dynamic. And a lot of the times I also speak with other companies that for the first time they had to do a video interview and hire somebody remotely. That didn’t happen before. So now we’re thinking about that entire employee experience encompasses so much more and the pressure is that much higher on all of us
Mark:
So how has this changing situation impacted your approach? The approach of Hello Teams?
Tanya:
We’re seeing more and more. So we originally the product that we designed, Hello Team came a lot from my experience, running a startup that I co-founded back in the early two thousands. And the startup grew from two to 600 employees worldwide. And we were all spread out around the world and we had welcome employees remotely, as we were growing, et cetera. We had to manage how do we make sure that people know each other? How do we track their goals? How do we track their performance? How do we give them constant feedback so they can improve themselves? How do we make sure that people were recognized for the work that they did? And I thought when we were building Hello team a few years ago is those were the companies that we will appeal to these fast growing technology companies.
Tanya:
And fast forward a few years later, it took unfortunately the pandemic to do so, but we’re now seeing more and more companies that are all kinds of industries, not just the tech, but we’re talking about manufacturing floors and hospitality and grocery stores, if you will. People are trying to figure out how do I retain my employees? How do I become the choice of a work place? Because it’s so much harder to hire people today that they’re trying to do everything and stay competitive and make sure that their people are number one. Otherwise they will leave and find a different employer. So we’re seeing a lot more traction and demand from industries that are typically have been underserved, or they have not been such buyers for an HR technology before.
Mark:
Okay. Now I just want to go off to the side for a minute and ask you to describe Hello Team. What, what is it, what are you trying to do?
Tanya:
Yeah. So Hello Team is a unified employee engagement, performance management and workplace connectivity solution. So what we do is we provide employees wherever they work, an ability for them to connect to the culture and contribute to the culture of their organization. So I can find out my teammate’s birthdays and anniversaries. I can engage with them and give them a high five and recognize them for the work that we’re doing.
Tanya:
As managers, we can schedule one-on-ones with our employees, give them feedback, make sure that we don’t just do this annual performance review but provide constant feedback to our employees. And we also do a lot of that engagement through our mobile app. And that’s how we reach some of those field workers, for example, that are not necessarily in the office every day or in front of a computer. But just like the rest of us, they want to be connected. They want to know what’s happening with our company. What’s the mission of the company are, are they going to get a high five from a colleague or from their manager and know who they are as a person?
Tanya:
So that’s the capability that we, we give to employees. And at the same time, we do a lot of culture type surveys to understand what do they need? Is there something missing in their work environment or some something that we can make their lives better? So, again, as I was saying, it’s so much harder to recruit these days that the focus has been so much on retention for some of these companies.
Mark:
Do you target a certain type of worker or do you just find that you are pursuing a certain type of company as your customer?
Tanya:
So we focus on companies mainly that are, let’s say about 50 employees. Because a smaller organization would typically know each other, but once you kind of hit that magic mark of 50, it’s a little bit harder to, to get in touch with everyone and know who is, who to companies around 2000 employees in size. But they all share that common mission that now people are mission first, people have a choice and they want to feel like they belong in that company.
Mark:
Now we were talking before about sort of the landscape and how that’s been changing. What’s your roadmap look like? And have you changed that up at all in the last year, as COVID is kind of unwound?
Tanya:
So there’s a couple of things that we’re doing. One is, well, actually more than a couple. One is we brought in a rewards partner. So a lot of our high fives that we give out to employees or that our customers are able to give are converted to points. And those points could be redeemed for different experiences or products on the marketplace or gift cards. And that has gone really, really well, especially in our customers that are, that have more, what we call desk list workers that are not every day in the office. Another partner that we brought onto the platform was for learning management. Because again, a lot of our customers, one to make sure that they not just provide the right culture, they want to provide the right culture for professional development. So giving access to employees for training. And a lot of people took advantage of the little bit of the town downtime that they had during COVID to upscale their employees. So that was a great for platform.
Tanya:
And we have many roadmap items to do around culture benchmarking. Figuring out what are some of the common threads that we’re seeing in certain companies of what people are being challenged with, that we can bring to the rest of our customers and make sure that they’re proactive rather are than reactive when it comes to their culture and their employees.
Mark:
And my last question is, look ahead a little bit. And what do you think engagement is going to be like in 2022?
Tanya:
I think what engagement has become and will continue you to be is that we saw this was very much a nice to have before, right? Culture was very much our engagement, a nice to have item and people were focused on the bottom line and how are we going to satisfy our shareholders, for example.
Tanya:
Now engagement has become mission critical. It is the number one thing that every leader, not just HR, but every leader thinks about. And I actually just read an article that LinkedIn posted around what are some of the C-suite additions that they’re bringing to their team. And the two big C suites were growing to 60, 70% year over year, was a chief diversity officer and a chief people officer. So usually when executives add to the C-suite it’s to solve some sort of problem, right? You’re getting your first chief customer officer or you chief finance officer, because you may be going to an IPO, for example. The fact that almost every company is adding a chief people officer or a chief diversity officer is telling me that that’s the number one challenge or opportunity that people see that they need to get ahead of.
Mark:
Well, Tanya, thanks very much for taking the time and joining me today.
Tanya:
Thank you mark. For having me.
Mark:
My guest today has been Tanya Bakalov, the CEO of Hello, Team. And this has been People Tech, the podcast of the HCM technology report. We’re a publication of recruiting daily. We’re also a part of evergreen podcasts. To see all of their programs visit www.evergreenpodcasts.com. And to keep up with HR technology, visit the HCM technology report every day. We’re the most trusted source of news in the HR tech industry. Find us at www.hcmtechnologyreport.com. I’m Mark Feffer.
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