0:00:05
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.
0:00:33
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. Hello. Thanks for joining me to listen in to this episode of the HR Tech Spotlight. Today's guest is Sri Chalapa, president and Co founder of Engagedly, a new age performance management software that redefines performance appraisals by simplifying and incorporating elements of employee engagement into the performance review process.
0:01:06
I love Engaged lead's positioning, real time performance management. Refreshingly, simple and engaging. Let's learn more about what that means. Welcome to the show, Sri.
0:01:18
Well, thank you. It's a pleasure to talk about the product and our solution for a change.
0:01:26
Yeah. So tell us about your background in the HR Tech space.
0:01:30
I will say that I'm not necessarily what you would consider HR by design or HR by education. I'm an entrepreneur, primarily came from the ranks of consulting in a process, and management consulting and technology consulting. My experience in HR is really being part of the process of managing people, growing teams, building strong cultures as I grew, the companies I've been in executive positions with or I've been a partner in, and here at Engagedly as well, obviously.
0:02:07
And over the years I've learned a lot about good practices, bad practices, practices that work for me purely from an observational basis and then just reading a lot. Over the years I have talked to probably at least 2000 HR professionals and I'm not making that up. It's probably maybe even higher than that on a one on one basis, by the way. So these are 2000 probably conversations I've had. And you learn a lot from that, right? You learn what works, what doesn't work, and obviously you talk to a lot of executives and that helps you being more knowledgeable in the space.
0:02:45
Awesome. So tell us about what Engagedly does.
0:02:49
So Engagely is a solution to build high performance culture where people are fulfilled at work. Highly engaged, right? And how do we do that? And we basically provide a suite of tools to our clients who are people focused. I want to clarify that because this tool is not for everyone. A solution is not for everyone. It's for organizations who are very people focused and have a more people experience approach to their HR tech.
0:03:16
Stack a lot of HR Tech stacks that are focused on administrative aspects of compliance reporting, running your payroll, keeping, make sure your benefits happen on time and your open enrollments happen on time. We are a stack that's focused more on how do I actively engage our employees and our people, make them feel like they belong and they are working towards a purpose and we are growing their careers at work so that we can get the best out of them and they get the best out of us.
0:03:46
So before we hit record, you were telling me that there are three pillars of your product. Let's talk about that and why it's important.
0:03:53
Yeah. So if you look at the people experience, part of the equation in HR tech, the things that make it very interesting and important is their entire experience on how do you manage performance. Right. So we have a suite of products or tools for that, including performance management, check ins, goal setting, goal alignment, OKRs, 360, things of nature. The second aspect of people experience is, if you look at some of the surveys, there was a Pew Research survey that came out after the great resignation that happened back in 2021, I think, and it said the number two reason over there in that list was people didn't feel like they were going anywhere in their organization. They were not getting career path and growth. So our second suite is focusing on that. It's focusing on building strong careers, developing people with learning, management, mentoring, coaching, providing them with career paths and development goals.
0:04:54
And the third suite of product is focusing really on building highly engaged teams. Right. And how do you do that? You really need to build a sense of camaraderie at workplace. So we have social tools for that, building a strong value based culture. So we have gamification and badges and recognition and rewards for that. And obviously you want to get a pulse of the organization at whole. And that's essentially where we have some listening tools. Engagement Survey, Pulse surveys, things of nature that help out. So when you connect the dots across the ecosystem, employee experience is not one thing you can do. Every touch point you have with an employee builds upon that experience.
0:05:30
And we want to focus on the things that really directly impacts what people at workplace care about, which is making sure that the performance matters and they know what they're supposed to do. They have a sense of purpose and they have a sense of belonging and that drives engagement at workplace.
0:05:49
So I know you're a co founder of Engagedly. Tell us the story behind that. How did the company come to be? Why did you decide to start it?
0:05:57
Yeah, so it's a really good question. I answer that a lot and I keep thinking about what clicked for me to do this. At heart, I think I'm a very people person, or at least I like to think so. And I could have gone down and I'm just going to digress for a minute, but I had a path to getting a PhD in engineering, in biomedical and other engineering type field. And the reason I didn't pursue that path, even though I actually had a fellowship to get that, is I didn't want to be in a research lab Headstown doing lab work or test or doing computer work or whatever that line of work would have been. At that point I wanted to be interactive with people and that led me to take a career in consulting where I worked with EY and Capgemini for nine years. And then I did a startup consulting services, which we grew from like 50 people when I started as a growth person to over 2000 people by the time I left.
0:07:08
And that was a great experience growing, building that culture within a short amount of time, that was phenomenally enriching for me. So to me those things led me to believe that we probably need to pay more attention to people than organizations do. Because in these experiences as a consultant, I worked with a lot of companies, right, because my consulting jobs one way or the other, we're working with my clients who are bigger portion 1000 companies as well as some mid size and smaller companies as well.
0:07:39
Over the course of working with hundreds of companies in one capacity or the other, I learned that not every place is a great place to work and it could be. It's not about money, it's not about resources, it's really about paying attention and being focused about it. So when I left my last startup that I did, Emits Technologies, which was a healthcare tech services startup, I had an opportunity to work with another entrepreneur who had an idea to start an employee engagement platform. And it sounded very interesting at that time because this is going back about eight years ago when employee engagement was just becoming a buzzword, but really people didn't know how to really drive that forward. And I found that fascinating and I found that something that I would be interested in doing. So that's basically how the journey started, hence the name Engagely as well.
0:08:33
And it looks like Engagedly has garnered some top recognition. I saw on your website that you've got a lot of g two awards, such as Most Implementable Best Results for Enterprise Momentum, Leader and Leader. Tell us a little bit about that.
0:08:49
So we over the years have expanded on the engagement thesis to more of an employee experience and talent management thesis, right, which is where I think the journey needs to be because you can look at engagement as an isolation. So by doing that we've obviously differentiated our product from a lot of the other products out there by taking this holistic view for experience along the way, we won multiple awards. I think we've won like 20 different awards or more at this point.
0:09:18
We won like eight or nine different Brandon Hall awards, which is really focused on HR tech services company and it's a global award. We won three, two or three goals on that and they only give one gold out, by the way. So it's not like everybody can be know they only give one gold out. We won three goals and that's against international competition. So that includes companies like SAP Workday, Oracle and other hundreds of companies in our space, obviously.
0:09:46
So that's obviously very affirming our place as somebody that is doing something right, right? Apart from that, we won the best employee experience for remote work, hybrid work, some of those areas, because we focus a lot around that as well. We also have a very strong mobile product, so it really helps people who are deskless workers to some extent as well. So I'm pretty happy about all of that. And we just found out two days ago that we made the Ink 5000 for a third year in a row, which has been a great recognition because that's across all industries in the US top 5000, fastest growing companies.
0:10:29
And we did that for three years in a row. So I'm pretty happy with where we are, but not completely satisfied, if you will.
0:10:36
I hear you. Well, you have a lot to be proud of. I think. When you think about the HR technology market, it's very crowded. It's hard to stand out in the sea of all the competitors and all the different takes from a marketing technology standpoint you could take. So to have that outside validation is pretty huge because it's not you guys saying, look at how good our product is, it's these other recognition factors coming into play and saying you're growing, you're making a difference in the industry. And so that's phenomenal and congratulations.
0:11:12
Thank you.
0:11:15
Let's talk about your company's unique point of view in the market and how it is different from the other competitors out there that do similar things to what you guys are focused on.
0:11:27
There are a lot of products, as you said, it's a pretty crowded market. There are a lot of people claiming to do what we do and more or less or things like that. I think it's how we do it. I think that's where the big differentiator is. The big thing that makes us different is we take a more holistic view to employee experience with our solutions. And we do it interestingly. Where we want to actively engage employees in their own career journey, where we give agency back to the employee, a lot of the organizations and it's getting better for sure.
0:12:00
Where the agency is not there in their own career growth in their engagement and being able to give feedback openly, for example, wanting to say, I want to be in this role, in this position in the future, or having clarity around their goals and say, why does it matter what I'm doing? But how does it matter? How does it move the needle forward for the organization? Give me that level of transparency so I can be more accountable, right, for that. So those things are important to us. For an organization, I believe our best clients are the ones who care about those things, who are giving this agency back to the employees. So from that perspective, our product is fundamentally different in way we approach those things. And that includes all of these different tools I mentioned. Because when you give agency, you can't just say, oh, we'll give you agency when it comes to learning and growth, but when it comes to performance and goal setting and all of that, we are going to drive that without any input from you or whatever that is, right? So that obviously makes us very different and the depth on which we go, where we can serve a lot of different organizations because no one, two organizations are the same in how they run their processes, HR processes, they might be similar in many ways. When you do benefits and payroll doesn't change a whole lot. But when it comes to talent management, there are so many nuances and our product is highly configurable and it is built for organizations that are mid size. So we don't necessarily go after smaller companies, but we don't necessarily go after large enterprises because their needs are slightly different as well. But the mid market needs products like ours, but they can get the service at the value and the price they're willing to pay and can afford.
0:13:39
I think that's where our strong market is. It's in that mid market 100 to 2000 employee organizations that we do really well because of the ability to serve them across multiple needs in HR tech space.
0:13:53
You mentioned there being a lot of other options out there. Tell me why Engagedly might be a great fit for a company versus some of those big brands like SAP and Oracle.
0:14:05
SAP and Oracle and Workday have their place. If you are a large company with 20 divisions in 30 countries or 30 divisions in 20 countries, however you want to look at it, that's great, because you can manage multiple units, they can roll up, get a lot of reporting and administrative aspects, it's great. But if you are, let's say it's 500 employee company and you want all the tools that Workday offers, SAP offers, there is actually no product out there that does all of those things.
0:14:33
You can get a payroll tool, they might be able to get a learning management tool, you might be able to get an employee engagement tool or a survey tool. But our value proposition is that we can service 80% of what you need in our one suite of products without having to get ten different tools to get the same level of capabilities as Walmart might have or Energizer might have, or any of these larger companies.
0:14:59
Why should your people and you suffer because you can't afford that price point and their resources? Can we service them better with better suite of tools. That still makes them a very high experience company for their people where they can provide these opportunities, but also provide some of these administrative aspects that I was talking about to the child leaders where they can run these best practices without having to use spreadsheets and emails or ten different tools which they may or may not be able to afford. So I think that what makes us different, right?
0:15:32
SAP Workday, Oracle, Seridian, all these different tools are great, but too expensive for most mid market organizations. Not in just in terms of the price point, but also in terms of the implementation costs, the timeline it takes. If you want to really change some workflows or your process, you'll have to hire an expensive consultant to do all of that. I mean, our average implementation time is six weeks.
0:15:58
That's unheard of in any of those tools for what you want to get. And I think that's our value proposition. We can align with the mid market's agility budget and their needs.
0:16:11
Speaking of implementation, what do you see as the biggest hesitations that companies have when they're implementing a solution like yours?
0:16:21
The biggest hesitation usually they have is whether this will be something of value. Because you can't put a number and say, hey, if I implement an OKR tool or a learning management system, my profits will be 10% higher next year. I can commit to that, they can commit to it. So then the CFO is like, why am I spending $50,000 on a tool or $15,000 on a tool, whatever the range is if you can't commit to an ROI. So that's a hard one.
0:16:50
But people experience matters, right? If I say, hey, you know what, I can cut the cost down in the company by in summers, we'll never go below 82 degrees in the office. Yes, you will cut cost, yes, and your people will be unhappy and yes, they don't want to come to work and yes, their productivity will go down. But I can't prove it. I can't prove a number and say by going to 82%, I will actually lose X dollars.
0:17:16
You can't do it's the same thing. So why do you want to put paintings or color the walls certain way, have certain things in your conference rooms that make it more welcoming for people at work? In similar ways, you're really driving better employee experience. When you are giving a learning and development promise to an employee, your retention is higher. There is a value to that, but it won't show that in the next three months.
0:17:45
It'll show up in six months and nine months and twelve months or later. And I think that's the hardest part for HR leaders to justify. And HR leaders by design are not mathematicians or financial analysts. They are more people people, which is why they went into that field. If they were more math people, they would have been in engineering or finance or accounting or something else. Right. And I think that's the problem.
0:18:10
They can't make a strong enough case sometimes to say that, hey, we need to focus not on how we are cutting costs, but also how is it affecting the people experience. And there's a number to that at the end of the day. And I think that's the biggest hesitation when people spend money for people tools.
0:18:28
Yeah, and that makes total sense because if you step back, common sense tells you if you have a great employee experience, it's going to benefit your organization. Because every time you have turnover, especially in client facing roles, for example, there is a cost to that. It's not always easy to measure that or see that. But the reality is, I think a lot of HR buyers will look at it and be like, well, I'd like to have that someday, but right now I've got to put out a fire over here, over here, over here. So right now, it's a nice to have. And the reality is, sometimes by the time you realize you need a tool like engagedly, it's because you're already dealing with the backlash of not having a culture where your employees are excited and happy to be there and you have major turnover.
0:19:17
As you think about the future vision for engagedly in your technology, what does.
0:19:23
That look like, the future vision? Oh, my God, I love this topic, to be honest. And I'm going to say something that you probably may not hear too much out there. You'll hear some of it, but not where I'm going with. So let me just try to phrase this the best way without taking up the whole hour. You've heard the saying people are our best assets and we need to get the best out of them. They are our best assets. At the end of the day, what differentiates an organization from other organizations? It's the people.
0:19:53
Everybody has access to the same information outside everything's on YouTube. Everybody accesses the same set of suppliers or whatever you want to call that. What differentiates is your managers, your layers below that, your individual performers and the whole team, how it works together. Right. My future vision is simply this, and I'll give you an analogy right now. If you are Walmart or Amazon or Home Depot or any manufacturing, retail, or any type of organization like that, you know where each box of your screw head or your coffee maker or whatever widget you're selling is, in which bin, in which store, in which location, zip code, all of that, right?
0:20:46
And you know, if you went to the Atlanta store in this certain zip code, you know what they have on inventory, because those are your assets as a Home Depot some extent, right. If you ask the same question to a people leader and say, what skills do you have in your Boston office? In the marketing department there, they might be able to give you an answer, they may not. And whatever they're telling you is probably a best guess based on what they've gleaned for some calls they've had with their managers and other people.
0:21:22
So what I'm saying is if you really break it down into granularity, we are not unidimensional human beings where let's say if you are a graphic designer in marketing department, your skill is graphic designer. Now your role is graphic designer. Your skills might be other things. You could be a writer, you could also be a photographer, you could also be good at social media, you could be good at music, you could be good at maybe Excel and PowerPoint that maybe you never get to express and host of other things.
0:21:55
15 other things you could have been good at, right? I don't know that. I only know that you're a graphic designer. So I'm assuming you're good at Adobe Photoshop and Figma and some Canva and some other tools like that. So I don't really know my asset. I don't really know the true variables of the asset and I think the future is really knowing that. So where you get the maximum and I call this talent optimization essentially is where do you get the maximum optimization of your talent pool is when you understand the true nature of the assets that you have in each of those locations, each of that individual humans that you have, which you call assets in your organization.
0:22:39
And you also know what their aspirations are, which is also something organizations don't really know because most people don't feel comfortable talking about it. They're like, I really hate my job, but I'm going to keep doing it. Or I am fine, but I've hit my limit. I want to go somewhere else. I want to do something new. You don't always know that. And even if you know that a lot of managers are really good at building their holding talent and not letting them go because they are the best talent, I'm not going to let them be shared across organization because what if they leave my team and then I'll be screwed, right?
0:23:10
So I think when you break that barrier and really provide a level of transparency both sides is when you get the maximum talent optimization, that's when you can truly grow your people, you can retain them longer. You actually get more out of your teams without always having to hire from outside because there's hidden talent out there that you could leverage and put in new positions that you're opening and you have a better idea of what their goals and aspirations are and how it aligns with your organization goals.
0:23:43
And I think with AI and the tools we are building and having psychological safety at workplace, which is cultural aspects which our tool cannot necessarily solve, that they have to solve it. If you get a nice marriage of all of that where tools and humans really work together. I think that's the future of talent management and I think that's the future we are shooting for is.
0:24:06
Mentioned. Oh, no, it's great. And you mentioned AI. I noticed on your website that you have an AI element to Engagedly. I think her name is Marissa, if I'm correct. Tell us a little bit about that.
0:24:20
Well, Marissa is very helpful. I am actually fascinated with her. She can solve a lot of problems. For example, we've created like over a dozen use cases with Melissa AI. I'll give you a couple of good examples here. One is, let's say you get multiple one of the tools we have is 360 where you get feedback on yourself from multiple people. And we anonymize it. Or you don't have to, but one of the options is you can anonymize it so you don't really know.
0:24:50
Sam said this and Susie said this, right? So you get all the data. Marissa can actually take all that data, summarize it and present it to you as a summary so that you don't actually know individual responses. You can actually get a summary of all the responses and then it can break it down into different sections. Now, where Marissa is going from that is that it can then say, based on this, here are some things you should develop upon based on the feedback. Maybe you should be a better listener, or maybe you should plan better. Maybe you should communicate more. Maybe you should be more responsive in your emails or whatever the feedback might be, right? Or Here are things you're doing well, it's good too, right? So those are the things Marissa can tell you without disclosing these Sam and Susie's of the world saying that that's a good example. Another great example we've solved for is really taking HR out of the transactional game. So Marissa can if you upload all your HR policies in our platform, Marissa can read that and answer questions for you. So if you ask, what is the paternity policy in my company? It'll tell you the answer for that.
0:25:50
You just ask, what is the paternity policy in our company? And it'll answer the question that paternity policy is ten days of leave where you get paid, or whatever the paternity policy is, or whatever policies you have, vacation policy, per diem, travel, all of that. So those are some of the big use cases we've solved. Make life easier for HR and then improves the employee experience. Right? Because you don't have to wait on an HR to respond because HR has other roles and other things they are busy with.
0:26:18
So yeah, that's a couple of examples. So Marissa, I'm very fond of Marissa at this point.
0:26:25
Deanna Shimota
Yeah, it's know, and it's really interesting to see how AI is really getting elevated lately in HR tech, because the technologies have been around for years now. But I think it's becoming more mainstream. Like, the average person now knows what AI is and starting to see it everywhere. And it's interesting to see how it is shaping the HR tech industry, especially in the last year, I would say.
0:26:52
Oh, yeah, in the six months at least, not even the last six months. There are obviously some HR tech that's been around for a long while in the recruitment space. It's been there for almost a decade or more in the space of talent analytics. There's been AI in the talents of talent intelligence, to some extent. What I was talking about in terms of the understanding your talent, really well, there's been some AI there for a while, but I think AI alone cannot solve that. You need psychological safety, as I mentioned, and culture that helps you.
0:27:23
But AI has really taken off. And we did a survey actually, we published a survey report the state of AI and HR. We did a survey of about 300 HR professionals just on our website on engaged.com under resources, where we found that almost and if I remember the numbers, almost 84%, if I remember the number, had a positive outlook on AI among HR professionals. And I was pretty surprised. I did not expect that at all.
0:27:51
So there is, generally speaking, a lot more acceptance over here. Now, we've also had clients who said, we don't want Merisa, please turn it off. And we did it for them because of secrecy or privacy or whatever fear they have. I will say that that's not necessarily true unless you are sharing some corporate secrets with Marissa. So please don't do that either.
0:28:16
Yeah, and I've heard from some different companies that are using AI that sometimes the feedback from the market, these HR leaders and their employees, when they push back on it, it's because they're like, well, I can do that. There's this little bit of fear factor like, you're going to take my job. And I think no matter what industry you're in, I'm in marketing, and I hear rumblings from that when it's like, hey, let's figure out how to use AI to help streamline some processes.
0:28:46
The graphic designer is like, no, you're just trying to take my job. And it's like, no, we're trying to help you be more efficient so that it doesn't take as long to do certain tasks. So we can manage some of these.
0:29:00
Things that I use AI personally for. Obviously, we do press releases for when we win awards or when we sign a big partnership or make a big product release. The big press release we did where we announced Marissa AI back in February or something was written by AI. Press release about AI needs to be written by.
0:29:29
It'S. It's fun to see everything that's kind of coming out of know we're living in the world of the.
0:29:37
Yeah, well, all right, almost there.
0:29:40
Yeah. Sri as we wrap this up, what final thoughts do. You want to leave our audience with?
0:29:49
Well, if it comes to HR Tech, I think we are finally seeing the promise of AI and promise of this confluence of different aspects. Technology being getting mature, AI and lot of vendors like us who are servicing mid market and lower end of the market that previously did not get respect and types of tools they wanted at a price point that they don't have to sell their babies at. And the second thing, which is confidence of that and the fact that people are becoming more aware that they need to start treating their employees and people as humans. And it's not a numbers on a spreadsheet. There's A Lot More Emphasis on People Experience, Retention, psychological Safety, deib all Those Aspects Which Are Important because they Realize There's Real Value to The Bottom Line, to The Organization when they Do Those Things. So it's a golden time to be in for people like for companies like us because we can provide those solutions and people recognize the value for that.
0:31:00
Excellent.
0:31:01
Where can listeners go to learn more about Engagedly? www.engagedly.com. Everything you want to learn about our product is there. I also host a podcast where we talk about exactly these people aspects called People Strategy Leaders Podcast and you can listen to those episodes where we have some insightful discussions around the new way of running people practice.
0:31:32
Excellent Sri. Thanks so much for being a guest on the HR Tech Spotlight to our listeners. Be sure to check out Engagedly's website as well as Sri's podcast, The People Strategy Leaders and tune in next time to learn more about innovative HR technology companies and the stories behind them. 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.
0:32:05
If you are an HR Tech company leader who would like to be considered for a guest spot on this program, please contact me via growthmodemarketing.com or 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. This is Deanna with GrowthMode Marketing signing off. Thanks for listening. We hope you'll tune in again next time our.