John Goulding talks about his work-life balance between the pandemic and altered workplace dynamic. He also sheds light on work culture and challenges at Workvivo.

1. Can you give us a brief of your career before Workvivo?
Before Workvivo, I worked in an HCM company called CoreHR, which has since been acquired to become part of the Access Group. I was COO there for several years, during a period of massive growth for the company. I then became CEO and led the company through acquisition. At CoreHR I met my co-founder Joe Lennon and we later connected and decided to leverage our experience in the HR tech space and build a company together.

2. How was the initial phase of setting up Workvivo? What does a regular day at work look like now?
In the early days of Workvivo, we spent a lot of time developing the concept and whiteboarding designs. When we started out it was just my co-founder and me. We wanted to build something meaningful and we began to focus on the problem of employee engagement. Great things happen when people are engaged and we wanted to help organizations achieve this. We built Workvivo from the ground up with a focus on the main concepts we knew would have an impact like a sense of community and belonging, a culture of recognition, and open and transparent communication. Our platform is designed to foster all of these things within an organization and be the central digital hub for the culture of the company.
My average week varies a lot, between speaking with our great customers about how they’re getting on with the platform, strategizing with the product team on new features and the direction of the platform, speaking with prospects, and speaking at events about the importance of the employee experience. I also spend quite a bit of time meeting potential recruits. Our workplace culture is hugely important to us and everything we do and we invest a lot of time and effort to make sure we hire people that share the same values as Workvivo.

3. As the Great Resignation accelerated, the company experienced over 150% growth. How did you manage to strike a balance between the pandemic and altered workplace dynamic?
I would genuinely say that we embraced the new dynamic pretty seamlessly. Most people like the flexibility that remote working provides and every week, we see 80 to 90% of our staff working remotely. We have always had a very strong culture of trust and when we supported this with a digital capability it meant that we could continue to be as effective if not more so working mainly remotely. We use our Workvivo platform as well and this has helped us ensure everybody knows what’s happening in the company and recruits understand the culture they are coming into.

4. You have excellent features for employee communication in your software. What upcoming updates can your users look forward to?
We’re always trying to add great new features for Workvivo – and our customers often give us great ideas! We have had some great new features in the last year, including podcasting and live-streaming, which allow users to engage with new types of content and bring the familiar social experience to the workplace. We are soon to launch Workvivo TV, our first release of the platform for digital signage. Colleagues can see what’s happening across the business with live updates broadcast to on-site screens directly from the Workvivo app. It will be great for non-desk-based employees who may not be able to check their devices regularly.

5. What role does employee feedback play in your modules?
Feedback is an important part of the Workvivo platform. We have a robust survey feature that allows our customers to ask their employees regular questions and check the temperature of the organization.
More broadly, the spirit of Workvivo is about opening up your communication and having a two-way conversation with your employees, empowering them to speak and contribute. This means that constant feedback and learnings are being shared on the platform. There tends to be a lot of positive posting and feedback shared on the platform, which is great for culture and motivation.

6. Enlighten us with three employee experience trends in 2022?
First of all, I would say that we need to look at employee experience. We look at it in terms of the desired output. The desired outcome of a great employee experience for us is a greater emotional commitment to the organization. This is the lens through which we look at the world and it influences how we think about what we build into our products. With the challenge of the Great Resignation, I think we will see more and more companies recognize the need to identify things that matter to help create that emotional commitment, and innovation in HR tech will have a huge part to play. There is a huge human element to this and the innovation in HR Tech will need to support things like bringing authenticity and real connection into the workplace.
I think we will also see a rise in asynchronous working where communication is less real-time and less interruption-driven. Meetings will be replaced with the ability to contribute to and progress a topic digitally at a time that works for each individual. I think we are all finding this more productive but it has yet to become the norm. I believe we will see huge growth in solutions that support async ways of working.

Flexibility will become a baseline requirement to compete for talent – not a perk and I think we are already seeing this. The talent competition will continue to intensify and companies will have to introduce flexible working policies based on trust.

Companies will increasingly invest in the employee experience in response to the Great Resignation and we’ll see a rise in the number of roles managing employee experience, internal communication, and employee engagement.

7. How is AI going to disrupt the HR industry further? Any tips for new HRTech startups out there.
There’s always a lot of talk about AI disrupting the HR industry. AI is a great tool for automating things that don’t need human input or that can accelerate processes that would previously involve a lot of heavy manual effort. I think it’s important that we don’t get too distracted by AI. There are very real and human problems facing HR professionals that AI won’t be able to solve – we recently surveyed HR professionals and found that 98% of them have felt burned out over the last 6 months. A lot of employees are feeling disconnected and isolated and AI can’t bridge that gap.

8. Do you believe poor employee well-being can impact employee performance? How does technology help in this scenario?
It’s so important for employers to focus on the employee experience in a very holistic way. The over-focus we have on performance management isn’t giving us the results we need. Just like the big focus on productivity tools doesn’t always improve productivity. The employee experience is the missing piece. If your staff isn’t feeling like they belong, if they don’t feel a sense of purpose in their jobs, if they can’t connect with the company goals all of this is evidence of a bad employee experience. In the best scenario, you create an environment where employees are happy, connected, and fulfilled. This does wonder for the employee and their lives as well as the company, its productivity, and performance. We are trying to facilitate this scenario with our platform. Tech is a great enablement tool and we have consciously built-in features designed to foster engagement and connection. But this employee experience can’t be achieved with tech alone – there has to be an understanding and commitment from leadership within an organization to make this a reality.

9. Internal podcasting for enhanced employee experience is a less-known concept to employers. What is your take on it?
We introduced this feature early last year with huge success. Our customers have used internal podcasts with varied themes and formats. Some will use podcasts for onboarding as an addition or an alternative to the many documents new employees receive when they join a company. Others run amazing employee spotlight series. One of my favorite uses of internal podcasts is using this medium to allow every employee to hear directly from leadership. If you’re the CEO of an organization with thousands of employees, even with the best will in the world, you won’t be able to speak to all of them. A podcast interview is a great way for staff to hear from the CEO directly about the goals of the organization. It’s great for employees to hear this transparently and candidly instead of in a tightly crafted company-wide email. Other customers of ours get external thought leaders for podcast interviews that help inspire employees.

10. What are the biggest challenges to Workvivo’s success right now?
We are scaling at a pace at the moment and so building our team to be able to grow with the demand we are experiencing is a challenge. We’ve worked very hard to protect our amazing culture and we’ve retained over 95% of our employees in the five years since we founded the company. To build the Workvivo platform and bring it to more users, (we are already at over a million end users of the platform!) we need to grow the team with the right people. That’s one of my biggest priorities.

11. What is your idea of good team culture?
Every culture is different and the values you share shape this. At Workvivo great team culture is when everyone feels they belong in the organization – where everybody feels inspired about what we are doing and trying to achieve. Where there is open communication and a culture of recognition, where everybody feels like it’s a safe place to be your true self, and your team cares about your life beyond work, whatever your interests are. For us, it is about not taking ourselves seriously at all, but taking what we do very seriously.

12. After six successful years in the industry, what have you learned about managing people?
I believe trust is the thing that goes furthest in terms of managing people. People naturally want to do a good job and our role as leaders in an organization is less about telling people what to do and more about clearing obstacles and supporting people to be successful. Trust is the basis for lots of great things in terms of what can be achieved.

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