When Jonathan Hyland joined Workhuman, it was as employee number 10. Back then. The company was known as GloboGifts, founded in 1999 by Eric Mosley, a childhood friend of Hyland’s, and Eddie Reynolds.
“[Eric and I] worked together on the software architecture before the company was even founded. Before there even was a Workhuman, we were sketching database schemas on the back of beer mats in the Bleeding Horse pub, coming up with what the system’s architecture was going to be,” said Hyland.
“Since then, it’s grown tremendously. It has gone through multiple evolutions as a company. It has grown thousands of per cent in terms of the size and the scale.”
It is, he jokes, “a 20-year overnight success”. It may be a force to be reckoned with now, but in its start-up days Workhuman had its work cut out persuading companies to take on the idea of employee recognition. Even a decade ago, companies struggled to understand what the premise was, and more importantly, what the benefit to the business could be from an innovative employee recognition system.
“Employee recognition, which was our core business premise, was really unheard of in mainland Europe. It was something that was seen as frivolous, almost, and it was really an American concept that was being spread around the world by American multinationals with their different offices around the globe,” he said. “But that concept has really spread around the globe from west to east over the last decade, to the point now where we see customers in not only in the UK and Ireland, but in central Europe as well and further afield in Asia where we’re doing business now with organisations in all of those territories.”
It has caught on, although it took a move to the US that Mosley previously described as pivotal for the company. Hyland is now chief technology officer of one of Ireland’s seven unicorns – Workhuman was the second Irish company known to have reached the coveted status in 2020, behind Intercom – and the company is valued at more than $1 billion, with headquarters in both Dublin and Massachusetts.
Workhuman now operates employee reward and incentive schemes on behalf of some of the world’s biggest companies, including Cisco, Moderna, Merck, LinkedIn and Intuit. More than six million employees are on the Workhuman platform across 180 countries.
“What we are looking to do is essentially pioneer a more human workplace. We’re doing that by disrupting a lot of the legacy, obsolete HR approaches and practices to improve the employee experience at work,” he explains. “And the way we’re doing that is by revolutionising the way that employees celebrate each other, connect with each other and appreciate each other at work.”
Engage more
Workhuman has developed its solution to do just that, adding to it over the years. Its Workhuman Cloud platform includes employee recognition, milestones, feedback, performance development and community celebrations. They each play a role for businesses that want to engage more with their workforce.
It’s not just about ticking boxes and paying lip service, though. According to Workhuman, there are business benefits to genuine employee recognition these days, and much of it has been accelerated by the pandemic.
Make your employees feel appreciated and valued, and it can help with some of today’s biggest human challenges – unprecedented turnover, employee engagement issues, hybrid work environments – and benefit the company in the long run. It can also help with promoting diversity and inclusion within an organisation as the Great Resignation or Reset sweeps through industries.
“Increasingly, culture is being seen as being everything for an organisation. Your culture is your destiny,” Hyland says. “People have lives that are happening. Outside of work, they’re getting married, they’re moving house, they’re having children, they have events that they’re taking part in, running marathons and so on. And people celebrate these things because it’s the natural human thing to do.
“Events is about bringing that into the fold, recognising that these things are happening, and using it as a mechanism for celebrating the employee inside and outside of the workplace, because it’s happening anyhow. So we look to provide a platform where everyone can get involved and it helps to foster closer cultures and bring employees together and help them to have more connectedness with each other.”
That, he says, has benefits for the workforce, the teams that those individuals work on, and for ultimately for the business as a whole. And the movement may largely have been driven by employees.
“Employees are starting to recognise the importance of the culture. It’s one of the things we see with new recruits: one of the reasons why they join us is because of the mission that we have to essentially spread the power of thanks to organisations around the globe,” he says. “Employees are looking for more of a connection with the organisations that they’re working for. They no longer simply want to work on technology at an insurance company or a faceless technology company which, while they may have good technology, they have poor cultural practices.”
That attitude has come even more to the fore during Covid, when organisations were grappling with employee engagement and with staff becoming increasingly isolated and feeling disconnected from their organisations.
‘We eat our own dog food’
Workhuman doesn’t just provide the software and tools to other companies, it also uses them for its own workforce. The company has gone through the same challenges as every other over the past two years as Covid forced many into remote working.
“What has helped us enormously is the very bedrock of culture that we had in the organisation before Covid hit. I think, however, the longer we spend apart the more challenging that gets because we’ve gone through a huge recruitment drive during that period. We’ve a large number of employees that have joined us during Covid. And they’ve never spent any time with our colleagues face to face,” he says. “We’ve leveraged our own technology very heavily. We eat our own dog food we roll out all of our software to our own internal recognition programme before it goes to any customers.”
As Workhuman has evolved, so has Hyland’s role. From an on-premise solution to cloud providers, from changing technology architecture to keeping up with the next tech trend, “the change has been immeasurable. It’s complete. It’s complete and absolute. And it’s happened many times over. I think it’s been a huge growth opportunity for me professionally,” he says.
“I think there’s an agility required, foresight is required. There’s a passion for technology required because it’s a fast-moving area. Just to keep on top of all the changes requires a deep curiosity for a world of technology to be able to maintain pace, where things are going. It’s important to know where things are going next.”
And what is next for Workhuman? There are plans for new product additions, with artificial intelligence playing a major role. The idea is to add more insights for managers, allowing them to spot trends at an early stage, pinpoint where culture is slipping within individual teams or across the departments relative to the company benchmark.
It will also include the ability to highlight micro-aggressions and unseen biases in language used in messages, providing some coaching to individuals about language choice.
Those solutions are only as good as the models they are trained on though, and Workhuman’s iQ department – the humans behind the data – have been hard at work to build the models and glean insights from the hundreds of millions of interactions in the company’s solutions.
There are also new markets to explore, with Workhuman looking at targeting its solutions to smaller organisations and even outside the workplace, to sports organisations such as local tennis clubs.
“Every company needs social recognition every company needs to foster their culture to enhance it, to enhance the connections between their employees. So I think there’s an inexhaustible marketplace there for us in terms of where to go.”
