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. Hello listeners. Welcome back to another episode of the HR Tech Spotlight. Today we're talking with Ethena, an all-in-one compliance training platform that helps companies create more inclusive work cultures through content and employee relations tools. Their library of 150 plus training courses spans topics like harassment prevention, anti-money laundering, and code of conduct, with a 93% approval rating from over 2 million learners. Joining me to dig into Ethena is co-founder and CEO of the company, Roxanne Petraeus.
Deanna Shimota:Welcome to the show, Roxanne. Thanks for having me. So let's start out. Tell us about your background in the HR tech space.
Roxanne Petraeus:Definitely. So I myself am not an HR practitioner. Instead, I actually come from a background in the Army, which is, I think, quite nontraditional for founders, especially in the HR tech space, but has really helped give me a perspective on leadership, on organizational culture. I think the Army does a phenomenal job with, for example, training on topics like leadership, on aligning a team around a common goal. And my background was there. I was briefly a consultant as well, and then found my way into Ethena, primarily through experiences I had had in the Army, taking what felt like really check-the-box training that just really wasn't helping anybody navigate tricky situations, in particular in the context of sexual harassment. Because as a woman in the Army, I was kind of acutely aware of the problem, and the solution just felt really, really check the box, just didn't meet the mark.
Deanna Shimota:So tell us a bit about what Ethena does.
Roxanne Petraeus:Yeah. so what we do is perfectly right in terms of an all in one solution. So we really want to give our, customers, whether that's HR or legal, kind of depends on the company. a suite that makes it really easy for them to automate all of the details so they can focus on the really high impact work. And we do that through a couple different suites. So one is mandatory training. So whether your company has training courses that you've created or you need some off the shelf ones or you need to customize training, use our system to do that and deliver it. And then we also have a kind of a suite of employee relations type tools. So that's everything from a anonymous hotline where employees can submit feedback or concerns to an HR case management tool where the HR team, the employment counsel team, can track any sort of employee relations issues, make sure that everyone who needs visibility has those be really tight on permissioning, and just have a repository of all of these sorts of issues should the need arise to, for example, go through an investigation or something like that.
Deanna Shimota:And I know you are one of the co-founders of the company. Tell us a little bit about the story behind founding Ethena.
Roxanne Petraeus:Yes, it, as I mentioned, was in the Army and the kind of founding story was very related to that experience. Just feeling like the training that I saw in the Army on mandatory topics was so much worse than the training that was really about leadership development and all those deploying to war, like all those sorts of things. And then I got together with my co-founder and who is our CTO, and she saw a real opportunity to leverage tech to take something that was about training and checking a box and turn it into learning. So that's everything from delivering training in the moment that matters, to automating all the requirements to making sure that you can cut down on overall training time so the employees aren't bored out of their minds, and instead they can focus on the the information that's most important to them.
Deanna Shimota:And what would you say is a big challenge, a problem that you see facing HR departments today that Ethena can help solve for?
Roxanne Petraeus:Yeah, I think a big one is over the past couple of years, in particular in tech, but really seeing throughout the economy, HR teams have been asked to do more with less.
Roxanne Petraeus:And even managing multiple vendors like that has a headache in and of itself, let alone trying to, for example, run all make sure that you're compliant with the latest California regulation. And so we think a lot about how we can kind of streamline and automate for the HR team. That might be like one person, you know, two people. And so they don't have like all the tech tools should talk to each other, for example. So we always integrate within his system, just trying to like give superpowers to an HR team that that might be especially lean right now.
Deanna Shimota:So I know out in the market there's a lot of compliance solutions that companies can choose from. Tell us a little bit about what differentiates Ethena from other options out there.
Roxanne Petraeus:Yeah, I think it's twofold. One is we designed the whole training experience to be really about learning, not just checking a box. So yes, there are approximately a million different ways to like really just check a box, right. Make sure that everybody sat through a video or something.
Roxanne Petraeus:But we work with everyone from expert compliance and legal practitioners all the way down to artists to make sure that the content really is driving learning objectives. For example, at here things which I think is so cool. We had an HR person right in saying for the first time an employee had seen an issue as I think this was related to a gendered feedback or something, and instead of just calling in HR and saying you deal with it, they the employee was able to navigate and call out the problem and suggest an alternative and not have this escalate into this huge thing. And I think that's really special. The other way we're quite differentiated is we have so many tools to support our buyer that they don't have to have a bunch of different point solutions. So again, whether that's a employee hotline, a case management tool, a fishing simulator, off the shelf training, custom training, you can kind of go to us, we really want to be a one stop shop. And so instead of having a bunch of point solutions you can just manage one.
Deanna Shimota:And what type of companies are the perfect fit to work with your company?
Roxanne Petraeus:Yeah, so we find it. We definitely do particularly well with companies that are headquartered in the US that have employees with states or certain functions that have compliance requirements. So examples if your company is FedRAMP certified or trying to get FedRAMP certified, if you're Soc2, if you have employees in New York and California or Chicago where there are training requirements, I think we're particularly helpful there. I think we're more helpful. The larger company is if you're seven people, you could probably manage a compliance program without much help. But if you're a large, growing public international, any of those types of things or regulated in the healthcare space and the health tech space, etc., I see that we just provide exceptional value there.
Deanna Shimota:And what impact have you seen organizations that work with Ethena experience?
Roxanne Petraeus:Yes, I noticed that we're having impact when I see repeat customers. So many of our customers have been with us for years and years, which I think is just like incredibly cool.
Roxanne Petraeus:And I hear the impact articulated in two ways. Like one is directly to the HR team. So I hear a lot of things like this used to take me hours every week. I used to sweat whether I was getting everybody the right training. I didn't have someone who was telling me when a new requirement came out. All of those like time saving type things and maybe cognitive overload. And then the other big impact that customers tell us about is the impact on their teams. So everything from everybody rolled their eyes when they got their training requirement. But for the first time they were like, oh, this is actually good. And this is actually useful. And So we hear things like, I used to get so many complaints and now actually occasionally I get a compliment. I think things like that are really, really quite neat.
Deanna Shimota:Yeah, those are neat. I have worked in large organizations where they've had the compliance training that comes along. And you're right, a lot of employees, they roll, their eyes are like, oh, here we go again.
Deanna Shimota:Gotta learn about sexual harassment and how to stop it. Flip it about it. It's done for a reason and it's meant to help organizations have a better culture. And if you can make that actually entertaining and help people truly absorb that information, then it's doing what it needs to do.
Roxanne Petraeus:That's what I think.
Deanna Shimota:So what is the biggest hesitation that you see companies have with implementing a solution like yours? What makes them say, I don't know if we're ready for this.
Roxanne Petraeus:Yeah. Let's see. I think that for us, we serve. We're in the mandatory space. So I think most organizations of any particular size or. Yeah, I know that I'm going to do this, but I would say like maybe small teams sometimes something I hear from HR leaders there is look, I know this is important, but my leadership team or the employees or whatever feel that this is too like big company for us. That's definitely a concern that we've heard from HR leaders that it the company doesn't want to feel like suddenly they're becoming some big, stuffy, huge company when they want to kind of still feel like they're very innovative and agile.
Roxanne Petraeus:And we talked to them a lot about like, how modular and configurable the experiences. So what a public company is using Ethena for doesn't need to be what a HR leader at a 75-person company is using Ethena for. You could have a very streamlined hey, if you want to fish your employees like once a year, just trained those who fail on cybersecurity and then roll out mandatory sexual harassment training just for employees who are in the states where it's required. Like you can start there and we can scale with you on your compliance journey versus having to take something that's like designed for some huge, like IBM style company and put it into 75 person team where it just feels like you know too much.
Deanna Shimota:Haha, sure. So what would you recommend for an organization that's looking at their options for compliance training that they take into consideration as they evaluate the options that are out there?
Roxanne Petraeus:Totally. I think there's some things that are like table stakes. So I would consider table stakes. Does it integrate with your eyes and going a step deeper and being like and is that integration good.
Roxanne Petraeus:Like we've definitely heard people who were very hesitant at first because they say some other vendor promised me that I got an ADP integration, but turns out it was like really not very good. It broke all the time, whatever. So I would definitely kick the tires on that. We have a couple of case studies on air, people saying that they forgot about Ethena at times because the integration just like runs in the background. So I'd like really want to hear something like that from a vendor. So I think that's one. And then maybe another one is which law firms do you work with? Like how do you vendor keep your training up to date? There are so many requirements, but in particular, if you're in a state like California, there was just another like a wage in law requirement that came out before that. It was a workplace prevention, excuse me, workplace violence prevention training. Another California requirement that went into effect in July. And so if the vendor isn't deeply tied into various law firms that are alerting, for example, us, we work with a bunch of subject matter expert law firms about data privacy changes, cyber changes, harassment changes and the new regulations.
Roxanne Petraeus:Because without that kind of continuous revisiting of the regulatory landscape, things can go stale very quickly.
Deanna Shimota:Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So what is your future vision for Ethena?
Roxanne Petraeus:Yeah, we say that like the mission, the thing that orients us is to really help companies build ethical and inclusive teams. And I've been really excited, for example, with this relatively new product for us, the employee hotline. So a place that an employee can go to share, for example, a concern, feedback whatever, and then HR case management tool and and that allows the HR leader to track all the employee relations issues going on at a company. I think that the connection of the training space and the hotline space are really exciting, because training is like you, HR leader, talking to a company, talking to your whole employee base and saying, hey, here's what we expect, here's what professionalism looks like here. But the hotline is really an opportunity, especially as we continue to build it out to hear from your employee base either things that they're not comfortable saying directly or occasionally to have a channel for the stuff that, like we all hope doesn't happen, open the news and we realize like it does.
Roxanne Petraeus:Whether it's a code of conduct issue, whether it's an interpersonal conduct type problem. Yeah. And so I continue to get really excited about how those two products that that we have, especially when I see customers using them together, they're getting this really neat like holistic picture of what's going on at their company.
Deanna Shimota:Awesome. So as we wrap up this conversation, what final thoughts do you want to leave our audience with?
Roxanne Petraeus:I would love to let folks know that we run a really good, obviously unbiased but webinar series primarily for HR leaders. So for example, our next one coming out is about when reasonable accommodations and performance issues intersect. It's like one of the thorniest issues, especially if you have a lot of new managers, like reasonable accommodations alone can be really scary, let alone when it intersects with the performance issue. And so I'd encourage folks to check out our webinar series. We have all the past ones we've had. We're always partnering with really innovative lawyers to bring you that expertise without you having to spend thousands of dollars getting it for, you know, yourself, and they're conducted in a really engaging way by our wonderful head of people, Melanie, who had also recommended folks to follow her on LinkedIn.
Roxanne Petraeus:It's Melanie Naranjo.
Deanna Shimota:All right. In that vein, where can our listeners go to learn more about those webinars and Ethena?
Roxanne Petraeus:Totally. So our website is goethena. That’s “Go” And then E-T-H-E-N-A. You can find me on LinkedIn. Thankfully, there are not too many Petraeus, so I'm relatively easy to find as well as Ethena very active on LinkedIn, and we're always posting, whether it's a in-person event we have or a webinar or some sort of like a plan guide template. Whenever there's a new requirement, we always try to come out with a useful set of assets so that HR leaders don't have to start from scratch, and those are all really great places to find us.
Deanna Shimota:Great. Thanks so much for sharing this info, Roxanne, and for coming on the HR Tech Spotlight.
Roxanne Petraeus:Thank you.
Deanna Shimota:That does it for today's show. We hope you'll tune in to us again next time as we dive into another HR tech platform making waves in the industry. 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.
Deanna Shimota: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.