(00:00:05) - - Welcome to The HR Tech Spotlight podcast. I'm Deanna Shimota, CEO of GrowthMode Marketing. The HR technology market is crowded, and we know it can be hard to find the best software solutions for your business in the sea of sameness. On this podcast, we shine a spotlight on some of the best up and coming technology options out there. Check it out if you are interested in learning about new, innovative solutions available in the market. And if you are with an HR tech company and interested in being considered for a guest spot. Stay tuned for details at the end of the show.
(00:00:46) - - Hello and welcome to another episode of the HR Tech Spotlight. Today I am thrilled to Spotlight WorkTango, the only employee experience platform that includes employee recognition and rewards, surveys and insights and goals and feedback capabilities all in one holistic platform. My guest today is Rob Catalano, co-founder and chief engagement officer at WorkTango. Hello and welcome to the show, Rob.
(00:01:12) - - Hello. Thank you so much. Excited to be here.
(00:01:16) - - Yeah. So I've seen you are considered a top influencer in the industry. Tell us about your background in the HR tech space.
(00:01:25) - - Sure happy to. I actually like to take a step back. I actually started my world as a marketer. That's what I went to school for. I went to university for. And then, uh, even during that time, I was working at marketing agencies, graduated, and, uh, you know, a couple of years into the workplace and I would spend one day a week at my client offices helping with their marketing strategies. And I'll be completely honest, Deanna, I would sit there and look around these offices and think, man, these people are miserable at work like they like they do not want to be here. Is this what the rest of my career is going to look like? Like 40, 50 years of not liking what I do most in my waking time. And I completely change my trajectory to be focused on how do you build better workplaces and think about it as a marketer, back in the day, you talk about consumer behavior and why people, you know, buy certain things or tie themselves to brands.
(00:02:14) - - And my concept was, why do people give more discretionary effort? Why are they more engaged at a company? And even from a data perspective, we have so much data from a marketing lens. And this is over 20 years ago, right? Why don't we have data on our employees like we do with our customers? So that kind of changed things for me. And and, uh, yeah, about 20 years ago, I decided to focus on building HR technology companies to help build better workplaces at the end of the day. So that's kind of the the trajectory and, and how I kind of got here. But, um, uh, it's something I find passion to do day in and day out, uh, even, you know, even a couple of decades later.
(00:02:48) - - Tell me a little bit about what WorkTango does. Obviously I touched on it in the intro, but there's so much more to the capabilities that you guys offer.
(00:02:59) - - Yeah. So, you know, you mentioned it the most holistic employee experience platform.
(00:03:03) - - So I like to talk about the holistic platform in three major buckets. Um, and some of our customers find value in using all three that I'll mention. And some of them might pick or choose 1 or 2. But the three major components of what we do, the first is what we call surveys and insights. Uh, what that means is how do you understand employee sentiment through surveys across the whole employee lifecycle? How do you have that data delivered to not only HR, but leaders in real time, whether that's tens, hundreds or thousands of leaders to help open engagement for their own teams. And also, you know, support nudges to actual have actions take place and build accountability on that, um, based on getting employee feedback. So that's the first part of it. Um, the second major pillar is what we call recognition and rewards. So that's great. You might have all these wonderful plans and items you want from your surveys tool. Uh, but when you want to drive other values and behaviors in a company, um, the idea is how does a platform allow you to recognize those behaviors? Top down, bottoms up here.
(00:04:00) - - You know, peer to peer. How does it manage all your reward and milestone programs like years of service or or other milestone awards you might provide or nominations, but it's really about building a culture of recognition. And, uh, because what gets recognized gets repeated. And there's a lot of value from that. Um, and the third pillar is what we call goals and feedback and think of it as more modern performance management. So it's not just about setting goals, it's about how do those goals align to other goals in the company. Uh, how do you enable leaders to have better conversations with employees on expectations and, and focus on their development versus more of managing their performance? So those are the three layers of what the work offering is and the pleasure of working with, you know, almost 1000 customers across the world on on helping what we call our, um, our passion statement to improve work lives.
(00:04:50) - - When I get a co-founder on the show. I love to pick your brain to understand the story behind the company.
(00:04:57) - - What led you to found the organization and how did it get to where it is today?
(00:05:04) - - Yeah, so a bit of an interesting journey I'll walk you through. So, um, uh, back in oh five, I was actually on the founding team at another HR technology company called achievers and spent 11 years helping companies build their recognition and reward strategies, building technology on building better, you know, cultures of recognition which drive higher engagement, higher retention and ended that journey in 2015 when when the company was sold, I actually I was in the UK at that time. I moved back to to home to Toronto to start up WorkTango, which was the employee listening side of the coin. You know, at that time I couldn't start up another rewards and recognition company would have got sued pretty hard, uh, but was passionate about the data on understanding, you know, employee sentiment more than just measuring engagement, thinking about the whole employee lifecycle. And started WorkTango about eight years ago on the employee surveys and insight side of things.
(00:05:54) - - Fast forward, you know, six, seven years, um, just about, you know, less than two years ago, we actually sold the surveys and insights part of the business to a company called Cazoo that some people might recognize, which actually did recognition and rewards and the performance management side. So for for us, it was a way to accelerate a more, um, holistic platform, accelerate our vision of improving work lives and, you know, get back into the recognition and reward world where I spent a lot of time and loving, uh, and, uh, I can do so. So that's how it really came about is kind of a collection of not just features coming together, but deep and wide platforms coming together to provide, again, a more holistic platform and a better employee and customer experience.
(00:06:39) - - What is the big challenge or problem that you see facing HR departments today, and why should companies be leaning in right now?
(00:06:49) - - Yeah. So, I mean, how much time do you got for all the things he's got going on? Um, there's a couple of things that come to mind, right? One is, I mean, think about how I think of all the priorities that people are focusing.
(00:07:01) - - Yes, there's skill shortages. They are trying to focus on enabling their leaders more than ever. There's new technology shifts that are happening. Huge business and change transformation. By the way, let's try and do this through a remote world or hybrid workplace. Um, and again, that's just the top 3 or 4 that come on some recent research, for example, from Gartner on what are people focused on? There's so many other things they're focused on, on building more diverse, equitable and inclusive cultures. You name it, the list goes on. But but they're doing it. Uh, and I think the biggest challenge is they're doing it in that Vuca environment. Right. Again, how do you do you do you do this remotely. How do you do it when employee engagement in many organizations are are challenged? How do you do it when there's wellness initiatives and people are focused on, you know, the personal human self versus the employee and work self all the time. So I think those priorities are not only challenging, but it's hard to be able to execute them with the uncertain environment around.
(00:07:57) - - And I think now to your question, more than ever, companies need to really take stock and defining, well, how do we ensure we understand the sentiment of employees through all this change? How do we build experiences and environments where employees are engaged and they want to stay with your organization? How do we build a concept that you don't work for the company, but with the company? How do you build alignment with employees on what their focuses are? And so as you can see, there's not just one silver bullet I think that's there. But a lot of companies now more than ever have to figure out how do we build that right experience for the best, you know, best outcomes that result from those experiences? I always say, you know, company profitability and growth is an output. The inputs are what employees do every day. So how do you build an environment where they can thrive?
(00:08:42) - - Yeah, that absolutely makes sense. Without the employees, you don't have a business, right? So you've got to take care of them.
(00:08:48) - - Exactly.
(00:08:50) - - So what would you say is WorkTango's unique point of view in the marketplace? When you think about all of the competition and the different platforms out there that HR tech buyers are looking at and evaluating and have the option to choose from.
(00:09:05) - - Yeah. So I think a couple of things. One is with a more holistic platform. Uh, you can consolidate a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of integration of platforms. Um, and, you know, even just the employee experience of going to one place versus going to multiple places, obviously, it's more heavy lift to manage and own multiple vendors versus, you know, 1 or 2. So I think just from a differentiation perspective and having, you know, those three components of recognition, reward, service and insights and the goals and feedback component, um, really differentiates us, especially in mid-market, right? I think where we focus our efforts is that, I mean, mid-market is different to everyone. I say the sweet spot is like 500 to 5000 employees for us, but everyone could probably define that differently.
(00:09:50) - - Um, that being said, you know, some of our customers are in the 100,000, uh, range or 100 employees, but especially in that mid-market. It's definitely a differentiator from a platform perspective. Um, I mean, there's so many other components that go to individual parts of, you know, recognition rewards and why we may differentiate, differentiate to others which happen to dive into or why are we different than other surveys and insights vendors, as an example. But at a broad stroke, that's definitely one. Um, and the second is technology is an enabler, right? We're not in the business of throwing our tech over the fence and saying, hey, figure it out. Um, we like to offer what we call software and a service, right? How do we not only give you the technology, but give you the best practices? Um, the the focus areas, the compliance, everything you need to be able to implement and successfully, you know, support what your vision is. So those are two broad stroke ones.
(00:10:43) - - But having to dig deeper if you if you'd like.
(00:10:46) - - One thing I would love to dig deeper on. Rob, you mentioned 500 to 5000 at Mid Market. When you think about companies that can work with your organization, obviously the spread is very wide. It often is in HR tech. But who would you say or what? What are the characteristics of that ideal customer to come in and work with? Work. Tango.
(00:11:11) - - Yeah. Um, you might not like this answer, but I always say companies that care. Uh, and I truly say that, like, working with organizations that sometimes have online workers very hard to build an experience versus offline workers. But we've figured out ways to, you know, include those folks into the narrative, whether it's listening to them through surveys or, you know, recognizing and rewarding them with screens in their manufacturing plants. Like, that's just one element of usually how companies will determine, same as industry, right? We work with oh my gosh, name an industry and we work with them.
(00:11:42) - - Um, and sometimes I unfortunately think some industries use their industry as a crux, as a crutch. Sorry to identify why. Well, we can't have high engagement here because, you know, that's just health care or we can't have high engagement because not just government, but I've seen organizations, whether we work with them or otherwise, that are doing fantastic things. So, you know, there's not really a sweet spot per se. It's really across the board where if they care about building great employee experiences, our platform can provide that offering. Now, are there some industries, for example, that bubble to the top? I mean, obviously a lot of people in tech that are, you know, investing dollars in that talent and retention, we do see a lot of impact on things like retail, given a unique ability to focus on offline workers. But, um, man, you couldn't name one industry that we haven't worked with. Uh, that's for sure.
(00:12:33) - - Yeah, I've seen it on your website that you have worked with over a thousand companies.
(00:12:37) - - So that's not exactly a small book of business by any means. Um, digging a little more in, you mentioned impact. What type of impact? Have you seen organizations that work with WorkTango experience?
(00:12:52) - - Yeah. So that's a great question. So I would buck it into three areas. Um, one is there's definitely ROI when it comes to an impact when it comes to the HR team. Right. So think about the team. Think about something like creating an engagement survey or recognition program. There's so much manual work, manual effort in identifying reporting or, you know, managing those nominations from employees or delivering rewards to people's houses for their years of service program, all those types of items. And immediately when we start implementing technology, uh, they're seeing huge ROI in terms of the activity cost, of how much time they're spending, in some cases, months of teams of work of conducting these manual type approaches. So there's a lot of benefits from an HR perspective. That's the first bucket. And think about it.
(00:13:39) - - When they're not doing those that work they're doing other strategic and very focused parts of work there. Um, the second is what I call people impact or people ROI. And we've seen, you know, dramatic increases in engagement or NPS. We've seen huge impact on things like retention, uh, things on, you know, performance, uh, when you align and organize different recognition programs, for example, to different parts of the business. So there's a lot of impact where when you're actually, you know, implementing those types of programs, you're seeing the people metrics move up. But the other and I think really important is what I call the third bucket is the company impact and company ROI. Um, so we've been able to correlate, you know, recognition programs to things like customer satisfaction, right. When we're in, you know, improving these programs. And people are feeling recognized, they take customer satisfaction or service to the next level. We see things like saving money, like a lot of organizations, if you ask them what they spend and for example, recognition and rewards, they have all these disparate programs, right? One department's doing one things to give incentives to their team.
(00:14:40) - - We're doing a years of service program in another bucket. We're giving people dollars for referring talent or, you know, customers to the organization. And all these things are happening across the company. And even harder to measure and manage. A lot of our companies are just consolidating that into one equitable reward and recognition experience, and actually saving money at the end of the day and have a number of case studies. And that's an important company metric, especially today. And how do we try to drive costs out of the system? Um, and just other things that matter to organizations. Right. Um, whether that is the not only customer support or saving money, but even profitability, right? Seeing recognition increase upsells or sell, you know, sales in different locations in a retail outlet. So, um, when I think about HR, ROI, people ROI and business ROI, I've just seen it across the board in terms of how our platforms help support some of that value.
(00:15:35) - - What is the future vision for work? Tango.
(00:15:39) - - Huge revision. Take over the world now. Um, I think continuing to do what we do. Right. Um, I mentioned earlier this concept of improving work lives and work is in parentheses because that's our, uh, we spend a lot of our waking time at work. Uh, so if we can do that, we're improving people's lives in general, but it's continuing to build technology that supports a lot of the things we just talked about, like, why should people implement these programs? What's the ROI they're seeing? So the future is really continuing to do what we do to follow the passion that we have. Now, that being said, there's a lot of things that go into that, uh, that bucket, right? We're being a lot more innovative from a platform perspective, leveraging new AI technologies as an example. Um, we're focusing on new ways to be able to support and service our customers. We're integrating the platform in unique ways so that, you know, not only can you can see how many people are participating in the recognition program, but, hey, you can actually identify the ROI on driving engagement if you're using multiple parts of the work.
(00:16:39) - - Tango. Uh, you know, ecosystem and universe. So there's a number of things I think we're that are in our future, um, when it comes to how the technology and how our support systems are getting better. Um, I think what's really exciting to me is a kind of a call out there is just the data. Like we have a unique ability to collect data for employee listening and people interacting through recognition, rewards and people's performance plans, like, how do we use that data to develop more interesting insights or interesting ways to enable leaders to bring engagement and retention down to their team level? So those are some of the the future components or things that excite us, or at least me, uh, going into the, the near future. Uh, but, um, you know, I think as the the economy gets better as the, the HR tech landscape gets better, it's just really excited to see the impact we can continue to make and again, improving work lives.
(00:17:34) - - As you look at organizations that are out in the market evaluating their options, what do you see as the biggest hesitation companies have when they're considering a solution like WorkTango?
(00:17:49) - - I think you just nailed it right.
(00:17:50) - - Sometimes with the ROI question, right? A lot of companies tend to not see the forest from the trees when they think of this as a cost rather than an investment in their employee base, which, again, is an investment in what we talked about building better business outcomes. Um, and a lot of HR leaders I work with sometimes struggle with that gap of, of having that data, communicating that out. And that's what we're trying to play our role in, is making it clear to folks of, you know, why you should invest. Um, but I get it right. There's budgets being cut, there's less employees, there's less resources to manage programs. But that's when I think technology really should be a something that companies lean on to be able to remove the cycles of manual effort and manual work. Um, but again, it's it becomes a huge barrier for folks to convince the rest of the executive team of why they should implement a recognition or rewards platform or, or other platforms like WorkTango.
(00:18:44) - - Um, uh, especially at this moment in time. Now that all being said, I get the pleasure of working with companies that have made that decision, right. I've seen the impact of what our technology or companies that use, uh, use our types of solutions, uh, have in, in driving results and, uh, and supporting businesses, a lot of research and data and case studies out there that exist. So, um, I have a lot of confidence that people will eventually get there. But, you know, there's always going to be some laggards in any industry or model at the end of the day.
(00:19:16) - - So what things should someone purchasing this type of technology take into consideration? If they have gotten to the point where they're like, okay, I see the value in this, I think this is the right direction for us. I mean. As they evaluate those options, what should they be thinking about and considering?
(00:19:37) - - Yeah. So a couple of things that come to mind is one is how does your technology sit in the flow of work of your other technology? Right.
(00:19:44) - - And what I mean by that is, is it going to be a difficult place for your, you know, your technology to be leveraged or used in the company? So let's use rectangle as an example. That's great. You can recognize and reward employees. Well, what if people don't, you know, aren't sitting in a computer every day? Well, how do you make it easy through mobile to be able to provide those those those moments? Or like I mentioned earlier, we have screens in our, you know, offices of our customers or in the manufacturing plants to be able to show recognition throughout the organization or for employee listening, scan the QR code and go to kiosks. If people aren't sitting in front of the workplace every day. Or maybe you just want to recognize in places you're working every day, like slack or teams. So I think if if a technology sits in its own island and doesn't tie in to your ecosystem of other technologies or in the flow of your employees work, that's one thing I think companies should definitely look into.
(00:20:34) - - Um, you know, second thing people should look into is you know what I mentioned earlier? Are you getting a technology that you have to figure out, or are there support on implementation and best practices and other ways to drive better employee comms and kind of, um, and that implementation process. So, you know, understanding, are you buying software or are you buying a software with direction and a service component to it? Um, another one is is really around, uh, kind of who your team is, right? What is the team that you're working with in that implementation process? What is their history? Have they had, um, experience diving through that process? I always find, you know, especially in HR, we work with people. We make decisions based on people who are the people you're going to work with in that environment. And have they lived, you know, your lived experience before? Um, and I think another big one is can you define the ROI as we talked about with a, with a robust reporting element.
(00:21:29) - - So something like WorkTango, right. How easy it is for me to take that data on employee listening or data and recognition and rewards and share that not just with HR but with any of your leaders across the organization. Right. How do you make sure that data turns into insights at the end of the day, versus just data that sits in HR, that people are going to have to come request from you? Um, I can probably go on, but those are just some key things that, you know, recommend when you think of things in holistically in general with the HR tech platforms. Happy to dive into, you know, uh, more specifically recognition and rewards or surveys and insights if you'd like. But, um, those are some of the key ones that come to mind.
(00:22:06) - - Yeah, I think that's a great overview. And, you know, as we wrap up this discussion, I would just ask like, what final thoughts do you want to leave our audience with?
(00:22:17) - - Yeah. Um, you know, we're all sitting, uh, uh, thinking about ways that we can improve our employee experience.
(00:22:23) - - I'm sitting in that from a people leader lens, from a, you know, an executive lens. Um, and I think the the biggest takeaway is what are you doing to build trust and build that experience every day. And if you're not doing anything, you're really eroding it at the end of the day, right? So being intentional, identifying that, you know, we have to do something to invest. Folks are leaving companies in droves. We can't just keep doing things the way we were always doing it. Um, it's not providing the right experience as we want. And, you know, unfortunately, we reflect back on those retention numbers and say, ah, well, look at the huge impact retention had on our bottom line or on our institutional knowledge or on our relationships and companies. Um, but if we can do things today to invest in our talent, to retain them and obviously engage in which we know have huge impact on other things our teams and companies want to drive, it's worth sitting around and saying, all right, what does that strategy look like? What are we doing differently? And just being intentional on the time, effort and budget required to do that.
(00:23:19) - - And I know it's tough in a Vuca world, and it's tough when there's not a ton of budget available at people's disposal, um, disposal right now. But the companies I've seen invest, uh, are the ones that get out of these types of tough times.
(00:23:34) - - Where can our listeners go to learn more about WorkTango?
(00:23:38) - - Yeah. So you can head to worktango.com. You could check, uh, you know, check out all the all the socials, let's call it, um, there's places there to interact with folks. Uh, feel free to reach out to me on. You know, I was gonna say Twitter. That's faux pas now on X and LinkedIn and all this other channels, but, uh, uh, yeah, we're staying at com will probably get you, uh, get you where you want to go.
(00:23:59) - - Excellent. Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of the HR Tech Spotlight. Rob.
(00:24:05) - - Thanks. Thanks for having me. Everyone. Take care.
(00:24:08) - - Yeah.
(00:24:08) - - For those listening who are interested in exploring WorkTango's technology solutions, I'll drop the links in the show notes below. Until next time, have a great day!
(00:24:25) - - Thanks for listening to this episode of the HR Tech Spotlight podcast, where we showcase some of the best up and coming HR technology options in the market. If you are an HR tech company leader who would like to be. For a guest spot on this program. Please contact me via GrowthMode Marketing. Reach out to me, Deanna Shimota on LinkedIn. And if you found this show informative, subscribe. Connect with us on social media and leave a review.
(00:24:54) - - This is Deanna with GrowthMode Marketing signing off. Thanks for listening. We hope you'll tune in again next time.