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Business News & Notes: March 23rd – 29th

FOUNT Global Inc. a D.C. business that conducts workplace analysis, has built an app to help companies fix internal bureaucracies which impact employees in their jobs. FOUNT offers targeted surveys that give upper management insight on company culture and work environment issues that cause the most frustration and attrition.  The technology won the attention of Series A investors in a round led by Lavrock Ventures, based in McLean, enabling it to invest in engineering and product teams to expand the scope of its surveys. FOUNT’s customers include adidas, Siemens and TEKsystems with offices in Falls Church, Bethesda and Glen Allen.

Read more from FCNP on their website.

Christophe Martel met with George LaRocque at WorkTech to discusses FOUNT’s recent funding and how its friction management solution can help companies make their work environments easier for employees to work in.

George LaRocque is founder and principal analyst of WorkTech, an advisory firm focused on HR, HR technology, and the trends shaping them. In this interview, FOUNT Cofounder and CEO, Christophe Martel, discusses the pervasiveness of work friction and how FOUNT’s recent funding will be directed toward efforts to help organizations reduce the invisible headwinds their employees face in their day-to-day jobs. Listen or read the full transcript below.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/mnNRM6snv0c?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=https://getfount.com

Christophe Martel, Co-founder and CEO of FOUNT Global, Inc. and George LaRocque, founder of WorkTech

TRANSCRIPT:

GL: Welcome back to work Tech it’s George LaRocque and we’ve got some industry funding news to discuss today. FOUNT announced a round of growth funding of eight million dollars. FOUNT is an employee experience solution and Christoph Martel the CEO and founder of FOUNT is here to talk about the deal and tell us more about FOUNT. Welcome Christophe.

CM: Thank you, thanks for having me. Good morning.

GL: It’s great to meet you. I spend a lot of time in the employee experience space so I’m as excited as the audience to learn more about FOUNT and about your deal. But let’s start out with a quick introduction – if you could just tell us a little bit about yourself and the quick “what is FOUNT” story.

CM: Let’s see, my background is mostly a business leadership background. I worked for about 15 years at a company called CEB – Corporate Executive Board – acquired by Gartner in 2017. I spent most of those years as a business leader heading the EMEA region … London and then transferred to HR to become CHRO in the last few years before the acquisition.

I’m not really qualified as a proper HR person… spent in enough years in it to be a little bit dangerous but that’s it. One thing that it did highlight for me was that employee experience – which everyone knows is incredibly important for the health of a business – is as much an HR problem as it is a business problem given that these two functions essentially share the load of experiences that are provided to employees. And in my time as a business leader I expected HR to sort it out… in my time as an HR leader I expected the business to sort it out. And the truth is really in the middle. That’s kind of what what prompted the creation of this business which is to help large companies understand the friction that their workers… employees experience on a day-to-day basis whether it’s with their work – so whatever their work might be – their day-to-day activity or what I would call “life at work things” like career planning and using benefits and so on and so forth.

So the question is how do you break down the big massive experiences that people have every day to understand which ones are working and which ones are not working so that we can go fix it? I found myself just unable to do that in my time at CEB and that’s why this company was created.

GL: Great. So, I noticed in looking at your site and your messaging the word friction is used a lot. It talks about identifying those points and improving them and where you ended is sort of where I’d like – it’s a great segue. How do you identify those points of friction and how far do you go in solving them – or how do you help solve them?

CM: One thing that I observed just transitioning from the business to HR is how little success metrics you have in HR. It’s very difficult to know if you’re solving the right problems and whether or not you’re solving them because you know the only metrics that are typically used are employee engagement metrics that are more about how people feel which is not hard enough to see if you’re really making a difference.

At FOUNT, we’ve focused most of our fire on creating data that is going to pinpoint where the friction occurs in a way that aligns everyone within an organization. So, between the business and HR and IT and everyone involved in all these experiences to say here’s what is causing friction, here’s how it breaks down and here’s how we can solve it cross-functionally. Data is at the center of our business because it allows not only to understand what’s happening but also to measure the progress that’s being made. We do this with a data model that’s pretty unique – that is centered on the goals that people have and the activities that they undertake when pursuing these goals.

For example, pursuing a new role… that’s an example of something that individuals try to do. Well, what happens when they try to pursue a new role? What gets in their way of solving a customer problem if they’re a customer facing a team member? The heart of our product is actually about collecting data that represents the friction that these people experience across these multiple activities and the multiple things they interact with and things and people and processes and so on so forth. And that helps the organization actually improve its own environment to make it easier for people to work there. That’s something that is easy to do in a smaller company but much harder to do the bigger you get. The less visibility you have into what parts of the company’s ecosystem are working for people and not working…

GL: Yeah, is that done passively? Is the system – you know – observing the tasks or listening or is it a survey?

CM: On our forward roadmap there is a bunch of passive data intake to provide context however there’s kind of a central assumption in our work is that employees don’t like surveys when surveys are not acted upon, right? So, just like the same thing as the customers – if I don’t think you’re going to do anything with my feedback I would rather just not give you any. And the same thing is a little bit at play right now in organizations. But we actually believe that employees want agency. So, in other words, if you ask them for feedback in order to improve their work environment and to make it easier for them to do their job and to perform, you’re going to find that all of them will lean in actually and not only in providing data but also in helping create solutions for the problems that they encounter every day.

So instead of trying to “sneak on” employees and then rain down solutions on them, we believe that it’s better to actually involve them in both the sourcing of the problems that they encounter and the resolution of them. We use a survey approach and actually we can run on a variety of server platforms but it’s what I would call a very economic survey solution in that you essentially don’t need to survey a lot of people to get great insights about what’s happening for employees at work. So it’s a very high-efficiency survey solution. We’re actually not shameful about asking employees for input but we do it in the most economical way possible and our customers are usually focused on following up on this feedback by taking action and then closing the loop afterwards to make sure that improvements are real and can even be reported internally.

GL: As far as differentiation it sounds like your data model is one of the unique things about FOUNT? How does that data model present itself as differentiation for the employees or the customer?

CM: Typical feedback platforms actually try to understand how people feel about the company and I’ve used these platforms. At CEB, we even had our own brew of it and it’s very effective to understand who in a team is getting disengaged or having feelings that are categorized in certain drivers of their overall engagement and that’s actually really useful for business managers – people that have teams in the front lines and want to know how their teams are doing that’s great however when you’re in the business of trying trying to make the environment work for employees so if you’re in the HR team or the IT team or if you’re a very senior business leader where essentially workflows are created for the workers in the front line. There’s a dearth of data that tells you what gets in the way of people what causes friction for them when they try to do stuff and you know our data model actually portrays this friction in the context of the activities that these people are trying to perform and that makes it uniquely effective at designating the things or processes or policies or whatever in the environment that are really getting in the way. And it’s usually relatively easy to fix – not everything needs to be a transformational design approach. So that companies kind can essentially start having impact on this environment even if it’s through quick wins but then over time just go after more ambitious things.

GL: Okay, interesting. That all tracks to my experiences as well so I really appreciate that approach especially earlier I’m not a big fan of the listening approach. I’ve got an eight-year-old and she’s been learning the difference between listening and eavesdropping and I think a lot of the tech solutions could could use some of her experiences lately but that being said I’d like to move on to the deal and and keep the conversation going.

So, eight million dollars of growth capital – congratulations – this is not an environment where it’s as easy as it once was. I don’t think it was ever easy but it’s definitely not as easy as it was to raise capital so that’s a that’s a feat in and of itself. Great validation. I’m curious what was happening in the market or at FOUNT or both that led you to this time for that Capital raise.

CM: So what’s happening in the market is that there’s a little bit of a – you know – post-COVID hangover happening in the world of HR right where COVID was really a license for HR teams to ask for anything from the leadership team to say, “hey all workers are remote, we need to show some love right now.” And that did happen across the two years of COVID. Towards the end of last year what we did see is that companies started tightening the belt a little bit on employee investments and it’s still continuing today. That drove the the trend that you described also for HR technology companies as a result.

What made us special actually is that friction is not just an employee problem. Friction is actually a productivity problem when you really think about an employee doing their work the the time that they spend doing – what I would call useless stuff for lack of a better word – is essentially wasted work. So if you’re the CFO of a company and someone tells you that there’s up to 15 or 20 percent of the activities that workers do that is actually wasted… that feels like a good thing to go after.

This notion of friction is unique in that it is both an enemy of the CFO and CEOs of these companies but also an enemy of the workers so when you do work and you feel the company is putting obstacles in your way when you’re just trying to do your work. There’s nothing more frustrating than that and more disengaging than that. If you think about things like burnout and under-performance and quiet quitting and all these phenomena – many of them are actually caused by just an overload of controls and things and rules that people that probably makes sense from the center’s perspective right from the head of corporate finance and whoever manages operations. But when you’re a worker and looking at this gigantic machinery that you have to carry, it becomes a lot more frustrating. So the business case for our solution is usually a dual business case 1) increasing people’s performance and productivity and 2) make sure that their work is less frustrating than it currently is. And that’s what I think – that was a story that resonates with both companies today and also investors.

GL: Ok, so now you’ve got this eight million – or however it is being delivered, how do you plan to use it? What’s the plan for the funds?

CM: Well, Plan A was to make sure it was not in one of those banks that got in trouble so that was a little bit scary. So Plan A was to not lose it…

GL: … that’s a good starting point…

CM: Plan B was to actually build a product. So, our our product is very powerful right now and you know one of the things that created the investment opportunity for investors was we have a lot of big companies that are struggling to resolve this friction problem and this is just a unique way of doing it. Our growth last year was such that we’re on the beginning of a pretty exciting run. What’s going to take us to the next level is to actually build up our product – both the types of data we can ingest and convert to our data model, but also the support that the solution can provide beyond providing insights but also helping these organizations solve these problems by co-creating with employees which is a really important aspect of our methodology. So there’s a lot of product to create, there’s a lot of software to build and that’s expensive as you know. So that is where most of our focus is at the moment.

GL: Okay, so what kind of impact will this all have? I always think of the three constituencies – the customers, the employees and then the market at large, what can customers expect now that you’re off and running on this?

CM: I think we’re only at the beginning of our story, right? We’ve uncovered this big giant headwind that this kind of resisting both employees and companies trying to do things better and our product is miles ahead of anything else out there to again to problem solve that thing. There is so much we can build and some of the areas that we’re building our product into are actually specific Talent segments. So think about call center agents, right? These are rules with really high attrition particularly in the United States and when you actually look at how much friction call center agents have to deal with on a day-to-day basis not surprising that there is a lot of attrition.

Same thing for nurses, right? So these are especially after COVID very highly pressured talent segments where there’s enormous attrition. Many many open jobs right now in the United States are nurse jobs and again friction is one of the biggest causes of turnover there. Think about engineers. Software engineers or retail workers so these specific talent segments where we actually have mapped their day-to-day work activities to understand what gets in the way of them doing you know ambition being their best basically right so that’s a big area of investment from a product perspective and then the second one is essentially a more comprehensive solution to enable people to not only understand where the problems are, co-create solutions for them, but also close the loop all that in an environment that recognizes people that do the work, that shows best practices and so on so forth. So there’s a lot of great things that we have in mind in the future

GL: That’s great and I’m curious on the employee front, are you growing or is there a lot of movement internally right now?

CM: No, we’re just building up our product and engineering team mostly. You know we’re we’re pretty disciplined about where we invest these funds. We will invest more heavily in sales and all these things once we feel we’re uh you know we’ve got a team where we need to be in terms of product and engineering and we’re almost there to be honest but there’s still some work to do so we’re recruiting pretty heavily right now.

GL: Okay, well this is a good place to get that word out so that’s good if you want.

CM: If you want to build friction-fighting code, please reach out.

GL: All right, I think we’ve talked a lot about the market and how you’re different and what the market can expect. And you’ve touched on the roadmap. Where should folks go in order to learn more about the product and the company?

CM: Yeah, our website is fount-ex.com. That’s the best of the best place to go. Just as a note, we’re rebuilding our entire marketing engine so our website is pending revision, but what’s there is already helpful and… or, contact me directly if need be.

GL: Well I have to say this sounds really interesting. I have talked a lot about and explored employee experience a lot over the years. This is the first friction conversation around productivity that I’ve had so I find it very interesting. Congrats again on the deal and thank you so much for telling your story here at Work Tech.

CM: Thank you, George. I appreciate the opportunity and as you said, employee experience is so large a topic that is often easy to get lost in it, and I think that we’ve provided a unique shortcut to essentially having an impact on it which is you know dearly needed in this environment. Thanks for the opportunity to speak.

GL: My pleasure and thanks to everyone who’s watching or listening. Until next time…

This interview with Christophe Martel originally appeared in Authority magazine.

There have been major disruptions in recent years that promise to change the very nature of work. From the ongoing shifts caused by the COVID19 pandemic, the impacts caused by automation, and other possible disruptions to the status quo, many wonder what the future holds in terms of employment. For example, a report by the McKinsey Global Institute estimated that automation will eliminate 73 million jobs by 2030.

To address this open question, we reached out to successful leaders in business, government, and labor, as well as thought leaders about the future of work to glean their insights and predictions on the future of work and the workplace.

As a part of this interview series called “Preparing For The Future Of Work”, we had the pleasure to interview Christophe Martel. Christophe is co-founder and CEO of FOUNT Global, Inc., a SaaS company that helps global organizations reduce work friction and improve employee experiences. FOUNT helps companies identify what’s at the root cause of employee dissatisfaction and prioritize what to fix in their environment. Previously, Christophe was CHRO of CEB, a global research and advisory company acquired by Gartner in 2017.

What do you expect to be the major disruptions for employers in the next 10–15 years? How should employers pivot to adapt to these disruptions?

Employers can expect the labor market to become even more fluid over the next 10–15 years, as any individual’s choices of where to work continue to increase in variety and volume, across industries. Employees will gain even more visibility into what work is really like inside different companies, which will lead to more informed decisions, mirroring how they become ever better informed about the real-life performance of the products or services they buy as consumers. Individuals gaining this new level of transparency and agency will challenge employers to adopt new ways of attracting, motivating and retaining employees as they compete for talent with other organizations. This is how an experienced economy arises in the new world of work.

Companies will need to look beyond building an attractive employee value proposition (EVP) as that is no longer enough. Organizations must follow through and deliver on the promises they make through their EVP. Data shows they are not doing this today, which accounts for a doubling of voluntary attrition rates over the past decade.

The other disruption that shows no sign of slowing is the fact that work itself will continue to rise in complexity as processes, policies, regulations, organizational structures and tools become more complex. Advances in AI and machine learning will undoubtedly streamline many ‘expert’ processes. They present an amazing opportunity to reduce friction and complexity in frontline workflows to free-up workers’ energy and capacity for ever more valuable customer or patient interactions where experience is paramount. As such, customer-facing workers will be more valued than ever for the quality of human interactions they are able to create, in stark contrast with automated alternatives.

Conversely, organizations that are unable to tame complexity and work friction for their people, leaving them unable to perform at their best, will be subjected to a double penalty:

1. On productivity: Gartner estimates that employees waste as much as 2 hours per day “hacking work” to avoid friction they face while completing routine tasks. To put this into perspective, that equates to 3.1 million wasted hours per year at a typical 10k+ organization.
2. On talent retention and attraction: Individual tolerance for work friction and ‘wasting my time’ is declining with every generation and companies will be unable to stop employees from seeking and finding opportunities elsewhere when their expectations are unmet. The ‘great resignation’ has shown us the economic impact of such a challenge.

There is however an untapped opportunity for companies to address the challenge of rising complexity and ever-increasing work friction: New analytic tools and friction reduction methodologies can show what it looks like when employers reduce complexity for employees, follow through on their promises and create frictionless work environments. This new work friction data lives at the intersection of employees’ perspectives about what gets in their way, uncovers where the most critical hot spots are occurring, and offers a clear path to resolution. In the coming decade, the most successful companies will be those that make friction management a strategic part of their business.

The choice as to whether or not a young person should pursue a college degree was once a “no-brainer”. But with the existence of many high-profile millionaires (and billionaires) who did not earn degrees, as well as the fact that many graduates are saddled with crushing student loan debt and unable to find jobs it has become a much more complex question. What advice would you give to young adults considering whether or not to go to college?

Maya Angelou had many powerful quotes, and one of my favorites is “Making a living is not the same thing as making a life.” Careers are moving from a traditional linear, upward path toward a “lattice” or “spiral” progression model based on a constantly enriched set of skills and the discovery of one’s unique abilities, preferences and personal goals through experimentation, which ultimately lead to more personal fulfillment than a conventional path.

College remains a powerful path toward a fulfilling career in many places such as academics and expert fields, but it is no longer a sine qua non. Skills are the currency of the future for individuals and the question is: ‘Is College the best way to build the skills I want and need for my next step?’. The business case for this path weakens every year with rising investments in alternative options. For young adults looking to level up their career, there now exists an abundance of skill-building resources at a fraction of the cost of traditional university programs.

Consider many technology, coding and evolving ‘prompt engineer’ roles where skills matter more than credentials and pedigrees. Or, the rise of service jobs where customer-facing acumen is at a premium while also providing opportunities for those who relate well to people and have high emotional intelligence.

Perhaps the best advice for young adults thinking about their future is to first understand their natural strengths as well as areas of curiosity and identify ways to build on those through whatever traditional and non-traditional paths make sense for them. Then, look for career opportunities that enable those strengths to shine, will be self-motivating and offer a path to evolve faster than automation does.

Despite the doom and gloom predictions, there are, and likely still will be, jobs available. How do you see job seekers having to change their approaches to finding not only employment, but employment that fits their talents and interests?

There will be jobs available for the foreseeable future and those job seekers who take the time to understand their talents and interests will benefit the most. This might mean doing some “me-search” to learn what drives them, working with a mentor who can provide outside perspective and guidance, or simply following an area of interest in many directions to seek out ways to learn and contribute.

If one is certain about the path they want to pursue, sheer determination can go a long way. Having the courage and resolve to keep trying is itself a worthy skill. Many people owe their success to this kind of grit, particularly when it is accompanied by natural talent.

For job seekers who are still figuring out where they want to focus, they might consider pursuing low-risk experiments, like a short internship or volunteer opportunity, in fields that will continue to thrive in the future (e.g. customer-facing roles, hospitality, coding, finance, etc.). One constant imperative in these experiments is to develop the ability to tell compelling stories about the things they do (how they solve problems, the food they cook, why great code matters, how finances shape great businesses, etc.)

The statistics of artificial intelligence and automation eliminating millions of jobs, appears frightening to some. For example, Walmart aims to eliminate cashiers altogether and Dominos is instituting pizza delivery via driverless vehicles. How should people plan their careers such that they can hedge their bets against being replaced by automation or robots?

Roles that are based on hyper-consistent, repeatable task patterns are potentially at risk, a pattern we’ve seen since the Industrial Revolution. AI and automation will augment many existing roles, but there will still be a need and desire for human interactions, creativity and storytelling.

Retail stores like Walmart may replace cashiers but are still looking for many customer-facing roles because human-to-human interactions that make or break the customer experience are essential to the brand and impossible to digitize ‘with feeling’. Consider a parallel in terms of creativity, advances in technology reshaped the way we consume media, content and music, but artists continue to find ways to surprise, delight and entertain us.

Educating oneself about where the new ‘automation line’ is and staying informed about evolving opportunities can provide a sizable runway as well as a future frame for career planning. One thing is certain: Denial about the coming AI and automation era and a fixed mindset stuck in the way things were will be a risky approach.

Technological advances and pandemic restrictions hastened the move to working from home. Do you see this trend continuing? Why or why not?

Because the labor market will be more transparent and more fluid, companies will not always get their way. Those that insist on their way will pay a price for maintaining policies that fall short of the talent market’s expectations. Most organizations will continue offering more flexibility and land somewhere in the middle between the office and home. There will be three implications resulting from this shift as we think about management and leadership:

1. The global pandemic proved that people could get work done remotely. But when work happens in a decentralized way, managers lose the ability to absorb frustration and mitigate risk in the moment as they did in the office environment. The reality of interpersonal conflict and frustrations emerging from work friction now explodes in the privacy of people’s homes, or worse, becomes a buried grievance. In person, managers can intuitively take on the role of shield and ‘friction absorber’, which is greatly diminished in a remote context.
2. Managers will learn to lead with only occasional live interactions. They are not there yet because there was little preparation when the pandemic-driven shift in work was happening. But post-pandemic work life offers opportunities to level up remote management in new and effective ways rather than relying on the false sense of control that in-person management provides
3. Companies that rely on managers to absorb employee frustration will have to find another way to design work ergonomically so that it fits employees. Rather than spending their time making up for work friction, managers can spend more energy growing skills and helping with career development rather than compensating for work friction.

What societal changes do you foresee as necessary to support the fundamental changes to work?

The future of work is in the hands of employees as much as it is in the hands of employers. This used to be a one-sided game, but now needs to be a partnership. “Work activism” can be designed to make life at work better while also improving shareholder value. It no longer has to be a zero-sum game with tradeoffs in favor of the organization at the expense of the people doing the work, or the other way around.

Individuals have more agency than in the past — they can move to a company that better suits their values and needs. This will force employers into partnership to make their work environments not only more attractive, but also easier to work within.

Employers are going to have to acknowledge employees as individuals and not simply as numbers on a spreadsheet. There is an expectation of freedom to be who you want to be and not be judged. That means accommodations will need to be made to bring employees with different views together under one tent.

Companies do this today for their customers and now they need to do this for employees. When people are treated well in the consumer world, they come to expect it in the work world. And expectations matter. If they aren’t met, employees will walk away or stop working.

What changes do you think will be the most difficult for employers to accept? What changes do you think will be the most difficult for employees to accept?

Employers know that maximizing shareholder value is tied to better work environments for their employees. Being profit-driven means meeting employees’ needs. This shift may be difficult to make for middle management teams as they typically operate a system designed to control what, and how much, employees do rather than leveraging their agency. So, it will be incremental and take a while. There is a trust component that will be new for this middle management cohort.

Bureaucracy 2.0 will allow for more human agency and employ design methods to make work better for workers. Organization-first principles will shift to a more balanced approach which means learning to let go of some old ways of thinking. The way forward will be human-centered, iterative and data-driven.

As employers go through this shift, they will need to accommodate the needs of various constituencies, generations and circumstances. For example, commuting is increasingly intolerable for younger generations. Companies may set universal mandates that ultimately impair their ability to create a sustainable work environment where multiple generations want to contribute and grow over the long term. Conversely, employees insistent on never going into an office will miss out on social connections, mentor opportunities and personal growth. Again, balance is key.

Despite all that we have said earlier, what is your greatest source of optimism about the future of work?

Both shareholders and employees share a common cause: To create economic value for the business and make work more fulfilling for employees. Some companies realize it is not an ‘us vs. them’ logic and begin to walk on a new path. There is an opportunity to live your brand, and to define your values based on those you demonstrate rather than the ones you write on the wall. Some companies will achieve this because they will align both customers and employees around these values and focus their every effort on delivering on these promises. Competing organizations will follow suit to keep the pace performance-wise.

Delivering on promises has a lot to do with removing nonsense from work (aka ‘Work Friction’) to let people perform rather than attempting to force them to perform. That is an immense, untapped opportunity — let’s do the math: As mentioned earlier, 2 hours of wasted work is 25% of my 8-hour workday. If we clawed back these 2 hours, we could give 5% more output to shareholders AND make my work week 4 days instead of 5. How is that for a win-win?

The definition of a company is a group of people coming together to build a thing (vs. an artisan). There is a bidirectional, mutually beneficial thing that happens when individuals break out of the “Me vs. the Man” and “The Man vs. Me” mentality and a cease fire puts an end to the zero-sum game. When I see this happen, it gives me hope that we can truly make work better for everyone.

Historically, major disruptions to the status quo in employment, particularly disruptions that result in fewer jobs, are temporary with new jobs replacing the jobs lost. Unfortunately, there has often been a gap between the job losses and the growth of new jobs. What do you think we can do to reduce the length of this gap?

The rising fluidity and transparency of the job market is driving these disruptions. Dropping the degree requirement opened things up in a way that recognizes diversity matters as a driver of business success. Companies have more access to more talent faster which makes them more competitive because they are more diverse.

Barriers to employment which were class-driven are falling (e.g. college degree). Career paths don’t necessarily go up the ladder. It’s now more common to move cross-functionally and switch careers vs. staying in the same job for a lifetime. Skills are no longer non-transferable now that there are fewer barriers.

The dearth of workers and wealth of opportunities available to them drive this and people feel more comfortable taking risks. The system is maturing to accommodate these changes. To reduce the length of the gap, companies must also accommodate these macro changes and not stick their heads in the sand.

Okay, wonderful. Here is the main question of our interview. What are your “Top 5 Trends To Watch In the Future of Work?”

1. Globalization and “fluid-ification” of work — Today, where you find workers, where they sit, and what job they can do has evolved quickly. Companies can source talent from anywhere in the world and there are many tools to help make the legal and payroll requirements easier such as DEEL and Oyster. We built FOUNT as a global-first organization and are proud to have employees physically located in far-flung locations from Iceland to Ireland to Indianapolis. The competition for talent gets more interesting when the world opens up in this way.
2. Turnover trends for frontline workers have been rising for the last decade and will continue — Until companies recognize their old tools can’t solve the new problems, they will waste money and likely repeat the same mistakes. One FOUNT customer was struggling to address a huge drop in attrition within the first year of tenure for their call center agents. They tried everything in their tried-and-true HR toolbox — more training, more incentives, remote work, more performance management. None of these tools could tame that dragon. But once they shifted their perspective from trying to fix the call center employee to instead focusing on what within the environment is making it hard for these new employees to do their jobs, they had a breakthrough. This new tool showed them exactly what to fix.
3. Work friction — The invisible headwinds that get in the way of employees as they go about their day-to-day work — or said simply, “Energy I shouldn’t have to expend at work” — is costly. The rise of work friction as a disproportionately important factor in retention, burnout, wellness, etc. will be particularly acute for large organizations. For a typical 10,000 person organization,’ this amounts to 78.4M lost per year. Organizations are on an endless journey of transformation, digitization and structural changes, which make work ever more complex and demanding of humans, who have grown less tolerant of it with every generation. HR teams should evolve their employee performance framework of “Will x Skill” to ‘Will x Skill x Hill’ to account for work friction.
4. Changing roles of managers — The old way of always fighting fires to make up for the lack of flow in work is not actually the manager’s job. They should be coaching on career and skills development, providing guidance and feedback, yet most of their time is spent absorbing or diffusing friction. Companies need to support them by systematically removing friction and re-focusing managers on boosting employee growth and career mobility.
5. AI/ML — It’s difficult to talk about future trends without mentioning artificial intelligence and machine learning. Both will eat up a bunch of transactional and tedious tasks that HR does which will free them up to focus on the aforementioned trends (converting friction into flow). It will also support the evolution of managers to accelerate the business. HR can be a catalyst for this shift and show both parties the benefits they can each derive by working together.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how this quote has shaped your perspective?

I credit my wife for most of the enduring lessons that have become part of my life. One that has stayed with me and also influenced the philosophy underlying FOUNT’s product. On our first dinner date many years ago, I might have said something silly as I was trying to impress… she stopped me there and said, ‘don’t be a prisoner of your own perspective’. It took me a while to recover and realize that she was right — that’s exactly the leap that leaders need to make: Shifting their perspective to their employees and see the work environment employees live in day in and day out. That reality is in many ways more real than the view from the top, as Uber’s CEO recently demonstrated to his leadership team when he started driving and delivering food for Uber: He struggled to sign up, got tip-baited and was punished by the app for rejecting rides…

Our readers often like to follow our interview subjects’ careers. How can they further follow your work online?

I encourage readers to follow FOUNT Global, Inc. on LinkedIn and visit our website where they can learn more about reducing work friction and improving employee experiences at their organizations. Reviewing FOUNT’s 2022 State of EX report findings is also an excellent way to understand the essence of our work. The report found employers should dig deeper to find the root cause of employee dissatisfaction and correlate which misaligned workflows, policies, behaviors, technologies, and processes are most important to solve for key talent segments.

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this. We wish you continued success and good health.

FOUNT was asked to discuss macro-economic pressures, such as inflation, geopolitical uncertainty, the recent run on regional banks, as part of Big50 Hot Startup competition

Startup50 was founded by Jeff Vance in 2013 as a site that would hunt for signal within all of the noise and hype surrounding startups. The original idea was to come up with a process, one featuring rigorous competitions and challenges, that would strip away the spin and force startups to focus on what really matters: real people and the real-world problems they’re struggling to overcome.

Startup50’s biennial Big50 Startup Competition kicked off in January 2023. Every two years, the team investigates hot technology startups to find 50 with the right combination of experience, innovation, and financial backing to upend established market sectors. To earn a slot in the Big50, startups must complete a series of challenges that focus on everything from pitching VCs to moving markets via thought leadership.

FOUNT was one of 30 startups selected to be featured throughout May based on answers to two open-ended questions: 1) How is the current market turmoil impacting our market sector? 2) Why is our startup well positioned to navigate the current market troubles and continue scaling up in 2023? Responses from our CEO, Christophe Martel, are featured below and on the Startup50 website.

How macro-economic turmoil is impacting their sector: “Wasted worker effort damages productivity and retention. In this macroeconomic climate where uncertainty and a tight talent market exist simultaneously, enterprises need to find ways to remove friction for employees in order to attain higher productivity and lower attrition among frontline workers and other value creators.”

How they will navigate macro-economic pressures: “FOUNT is solving a critical economic problem for companies at a time when there are few alternatives that enable companies to pinpoint and resolve these issues. We are well-funded, have an ambitious product roadmap, and our customers are getting results and deriving value from our solutions.”

If you’d like to learn more about how to reduce work friction at your organization, you may request a demo using this form.

This article originally appeared in the Washington Business Journal as part of DC Inno’s roundup of local tech and startup fundings.

A D.C. company has built an app to help workplaces get feedback on finding and fixing internal bureaucracies that keep employees from being more effective at their jobs — and it just raised $8 million to further hone its tech.

FOUNT Global Inc., a workplace analysis company, dispatches targeted surveys that give upper management a heat map of sorts showing which corporate culture or work environment issues are causing the most frustration and, notably, result in attrition.

The technology won the attention of Series A investors in a round led by Lavrock Ventures, based in McLean, with participation from existing backers Osage Venture Partners, of the Philadelphia area, and Grotech Ventures, of Owings Mills, Maryland.

With the new funds, FOUNT plans to invest in its engineering and product teams to expand the scope of its surveys. Currently, the firm targets them to workflow issues in the health care industry and others that rely more heavily on call center setups, but CEO Christophe Martel said he sees potential across more industries. By the end of the year, Martel said, he sees his 25-person remote team growing to 35.

Their approach, however, will continue to center on the surveys. Take a FOUNT client, Northwell Health, for example. The large New York health care system, which counts more than 81,000 employees, might see considerable nursing turnover, and Fount will direct its surveys to get the root of what’s causing the most friction in workflow, rather than asking more general questions around whether they have sufficient tools for the job or are satisfied in their current positions.

“Unlike big typical employee surveys that go to everyone,” Martel said, “we tend to only take a relatively small sample of the population who understand what these blockers are and get really sharp data that the leaders can go and act upon and make the environment better for employees.”

As Martel describes it, “if 10 people said there is a pothole on Connecticut Avenue going north on this side of the road, that’s all you need to know, to know that there is something to fix. So instead of surveying the entire D.C. population to know how they feel about Connecticut Avenue, it’s actually a much more targeted approach to understand what to fix in people’s workflows and work environment to make their life better.”

FOUNT was founded in 2022 as a spinout of Germany-headquartered employee experience consultancy TI People, which had a D.C. footprint. In its first year, FOUNT collected 20 customers, including sportswear giant Adidas, German industrial manufacturing company Siemens and IT services company TEKsystems, based in Linthicum, Maryland, but operating offices in Bethesda, Falls Church and Glen Allen.

Martel declined to disclose the company’s revenue, but said it more than doubled last year’s recurring revenue.

The company works to distance itself from other big-name survey giants like Qualtrics, arguing its output is the analytics and insights, not just the survey administration itself. Though, Qualtrics, a $1.5 billion revenue generator based in Provo, Utah, also offers curated group feedback — and just inked a deal to sell for $12.5 billion to private equity firms.

Ultimately, Martel said, Fount’s most difficult job often lies in convincing a company’s C-suite to adopt the perspective of its employees.

“One of our customers didn’t realize that [employees] had to juggle seven systems to respond to a customer,” he said. “It’s that kind of thing where when you look at it from the perspective of employees, you suddenly see that work is not really ergonomic.

“The problem is not the worker,” Martel added. “It’s actually the company ecosystem that the workers work in that is actually really difficult for workers to navigate.”

This article was authored by Donte Kirby, Staff Reporter at DC Inno.

According to a 2022 survey by Workvivo, 98% of HR professionals have recently felt burned out. These rates are higher than those of other divisions, such as sales, which record a burnout rate of under 90%, according to Gartner.

One of the significant challenges facing HR employees is senior leadership. Workvivo’s survey found that fewer than one in three employees felt valued by their employers.

Without support, work will inevitably be unrewarding. Sigler’s sentiment was repeated numerous times across Reddit.

“As an HR professional, I can invest a great deal of effort over months or even years to accomplish a change I believe in, and all that time, I see no evidence that I’m making a difference.”

Jennifer E. Sigler, Ph.D., head of research at FOUNT Global, Inc.

Sigler believes the problem persists because companies are still using the 200-year-old lessons from the Industrial Revolution in today’s modern workplace. She said managers need to stop working to these principles and instead break down the assembly line style still in use by too many HR teams.

Some suggest that leaders are not prioritizing the human elements of the business. Alexis Robin, co-founder of pLink Leadership, said, “A large percentage of HR professionals are experiencing burnout due to overworked and overwhelmed internal customers struggling to prioritize time for recruiting, leadership development, and people projects.”

To rectify this, allow HR professionals to exercise the full spectrum of their creative and problem-solving skills, suggested Sigler. When HR teams can utilize their humanity positively, there will be a positive impact on others in the business, and results will be seen early, not years later.

As Sigler noted, the bureaucratic set up of many current businesses result in siloed programmatic divisions that are over-layered and connected with numerous processes. These cumbersome and impractical systems are unrewarding and prompt HR professionals to feel like they’re diverting attention from their primary focus: the people.

HR teams need to be allowed to decide what metrics are essential and report on those. And senior leaders need to take the reports seriously.

Read the full article, Why HR Professionals Are Burned Out, According to Reddit on the Reworked website.

Employers would be keen to note, experts say, that efforts to strengthen EX must go more than skin deep; perks can only get the company so far, as today’s employees are looking for an experience rooted in purpose.

Christophe Martel expects to see even more investment in EX redesign as the world of work continues to transform.

“While EX improvement can’t happen overnight, the environment may be ripe for it. According to recent research from FOUNT, a provider of an EX management platform, 94% of respondents agree that EX work is a long-term commitment at their organization; more than 60% have an EX strategy for at least the next six months. No long-term strategy is possible without leader buy-in and about 40% say senior leaders view EX improvement as equal to other business priorities.”

Christophe Martel, Co-founder and CEO of FOUNT

Read the full article on the Human Resource Executive website.

Beefing up an EX strategy requires first understanding what the experience is—and where the problems are. For that, you need to capture very specific employee feedback in the context of their day-to-day work experience and environment.

In a summary of findings from the State of EX 2022, FOUNT cofounder and CEO, Christophe Martel describes how organizations can address the operational cost of attrition by collecting the right kind of data. The Human Resource Executive article, What HR gets wrong when it comes to using EX data, includes advice about delivering a frictionless work environment for employees by focusing on small projects.

HR leaders, Martel says, are used to creating “big, broad business cases” for transformation initiatives that will touch all employees—but, when it comes to EX, they need to close the aperture a bit to be able to demonstrate true business impact.

He advises HR teams to focus tailored EX work on one particular talent segment, business unit or geographical area and, from there, scale to other areas.

Read the full article on the Human Resource Executive website.

David Green’s interview of Jennifer Sigler originally appeared on myHRfuture, an Insight222 brand and learning experience platform for HR professionals looking to invest in their careers. Read the article on myHRfuture.com

In a recent report by TI People and FOUNT Global, Inc, “The Big, Bad State of EX”, 70% of the respondents reported that their organisation’s Employee Experience (EX) data is inadequate for their needs. Another finding was that HR professionals take too much responsibility for EX, with 76% of EX professionals responding to the survey saying they are primarily accountable for the quality of EX at their organisations, while business leaders and managers are the #1 influencers of EX in their company. 

I was delighted to sit down recently with Jennifer Sigler, FOUNT’s Head of Research and the author of The Big, Bad State of EX report, for a discussion on the issues identified in the study in relation to people data for this executive article.

Jennifer explains that the inadequate data problem is rooted in a love of “big stuff”, including enterprise-wide surveys on broad topics, infrastructure-building within HR, and giant strategies that take forever to finalise, and that people analytics and HR professionals need to take a smaller, more agile approach to EX improvement to make more progress, faster. 

People analytics teams have tons of people data, but the problem is that it is not always useful data. I discuss the topic in more detail with Jennifer below, enjoy!

Jennifer, you published the provocatively titled “Big, Bad State of EX” report back in November, replete with adorable social tiles of Little Red Riding Hood. What’s so big and bad about the state of employee experience?

Two things mainly: HR is using data that isn’t really suited to improving EX, and they’re taking too much responsibility for EX.

So, for example, 70% of respondents reported that their organisation’s EX data is inadequate for their needs. And that wasn’t just HR or EX professionals saying that. That 70% includes respondents from outside of HR, like line of business leaders and executives.

On the responsibility front, 76% of EX professionals responding to the survey said they’re primarily accountable for the quality of EX at their companies. Yet when we asked all respondents who the #1 influencer of EX is organisation-wide, everybody agreed it’s business leaders and managers—including the business leaders and managers themselves. So, it’s a bit of a problem those groups don’t bear much responsibility for the quality of EX, don’t you think?

The title’s really a play on words, though, because when you dig down into these two issues, what you find is that they’re both rooted in a love of big stuff: enterprise-wide surveys on very broad topics like engagement and wellness, infrastructure-building within huge silos (especially HR), giant strategies and plans and alignment documents that take forever to finalise, prioritisation of only those projects that’ll impact every employee, and so on. And that’s bad, because at FOUNT, we’ve found that people who take a smaller, more agile approach to EX improvement actually make more progress, faster.

Can we zoom in on the people data for a moment. Why do 70% of respondents feel it’s inadequate?

Well, it’s not just people data, first of all. The #1 challenge reported across respondents (so again, EX leaders, HR leaders, and business leaders) was measuring the business/financial impact of EX improvements. So yes, people data is a problem, but arguably, an even bigger problem is that people data hasn’t been linked up with business/financial data in a way that allows HR teams to track the impact of their improvement initiatives beyond individual employees to the business. Fully 85% of respondents said their organisations struggle with this.

And if you bear with me just a moment longer—I swear I’ll get to people data in just a sec—I want to point out a possible idea for connecting the people and business/financial dots. When we asked EX professionals who their most important, most helpful, and most frequent partners in the business were, guess who came in last on all three of those measures?

I presume it wasn’t business leaders?

No, they came in most important, fourth most helpful, and fourth most frequent. There’s a whole different story just in that finding. I suppose the question is a little unfair, because you have to know who was on our list to guess who came in last. If I told you the list, you’d surely guess it.

Anyway, it was Finance—you know, the people in the organisation who know how to track money better than anybody. We don’t partner with them. We don’t even consider them important. Is it any wonder, then, that we struggle to connect people data to business/financial data?

Good point. In Excellence in People Analytics, Jonathan and I describe how important it is for people analytics teams to work closely with their Finance counterparts, but in our experience this is still the exception not the norm. So, 70% of survey respondents feel their EX data is inadequate because they don’t have enough data.

Not quite. When it comes to business/financial data, they don’t have enough. At least in the sense that they don’t use what the organisation has available to measure the impact of people initiatives. They don’t connect those dots.

But when it comes to people data, they have TONS of it. 92% of HR leaders said they run employee surveys, and nearly all of those run them at least once a year: 17% run them twice a year, 6% once per quarter, and 14% more often than that. And 71% of respondents also use employee interviews and focus groups. 53% enable employee-initiated feedback via email, chat, phone, and so on. And 45% have on-demand feedback forms built into product/service interfaces.

So, the problem is most definitely NOT that they have insufficient people data. I know HR and other shared services functions frequently complain that they can’t run more surveys because they need more input, but all the employees have survey fatigue (the clear solution to that is random sampling—it’s magical, folks). The truth, though, is that most HR teams are wallowing in data. It’s just not useful data.

We’re back to why data is inadequate for their needs…

Right. You see, the type of data makes a difference. With business/financial data, they need to go get it in the first place and figure out how to connect it to people data. But with people data itself, they need to “zoom in”, as we say.

Think about it: When you run a standard engagement survey, what are you asking people? Hold on, let me open a file here and I’ll read you some actual questions from widely used engagement surveys… Ok: “I feel a sense of accomplishment at work.” “I would recommend my employer to friends and family.” “I know what’s expected of me at work.” “I see myself still working at [company] in two years’ time.” And so on.

What do you get out of those questions? Usually, People Analytics gives you a percentage of employees who responded above/below some agreed-upon threshold. Maybe they even run some correlational analyses to figure out which employee segments score higher/lower. So, we get a sense of how people feel about accomplishment, recommending, expectations, and leaving—but we still have no idea why some employees feel a sense of accomplishment and others don’t, why they’d recommend their employer or not, why they do or don’t know what’s expected of them, or why they’re thinking of staying or leaving. And if we don’t know why, what exactly can we do about it?

We can go dig further, interview some employees or run another more-focused survey on a specific topic or with a specific employee segment and find out. But that’s a lot more work so it’s not normally what happens. Normally HR just assumes it knows what the problem is, or it asks managers what the problem is, and then it develops some kind of improvement top-down and inflicts it on employees. Maybe it helps, maybe it doesn’t. We won’t know until the next round of survey data comes in—and even then, because of the lack of specificity in the survey questions, we won’t be able to say with certitude that it’s the change we made that made a difference.

That’s why, even though the #1 challenge our respondents faced was measuring the business/financial impact of EX improvements, they didn’t exactly find measuring the impact of any improvements that were implemented for employees easy either. That was their #4 challenge, after cross-silo coordination stuff. In other words, 65% of respondents said they can’t even usefully measure the stuff it is People Analytics’ job to measure.

And that’s because of the altitude of people data. It needs to zoom in.

That makes a lot of sense. When it comes to business/financial data, we don’t have enough and we don’t connect it to our people data. But when it comes to people data, we actually need a different kind of data, data that gets at the why of the other questions. And I think what you’re saying is, if we can get those two things sorted, we’ll be able to improve EX much more effectively and efficiently. Yes?

Well… Maybe. [laughs] Remember that HR, EX, and business leaders all agree that the #1 influencer of EX is not HR. It’s business leaders and managers. That belief tallies with our experience at FOUNT. I mean, we have about 3.6 million employee datapoints at that zoomed-in level in our platform right now, so I can tell you: a lot of the problems aren’t owned by HR. But remember also how often EX professionals said they collaborate with business leaders: fourth most often, after three other HR functions. Given everyone acknowledges business leaders are their most important partner, that’s indicative of an HR silo.

You have to ask yourself, though, why are business leaders first in importance but fourth in partnership frequency and helpfulness? Other questions we asked suggest a possible answer. For example, it was business leader respondents to our survey who were least satisfied with people data, so that zoomed-out thing—and the lack of a tie to business/financial metrics—appears to bother them more than it does HR or EX teams. Business leaders also showed signs of preferring different ways of working than HR or EX: They were more likely to want smaller, focused, local improvements, not the enterprise-wide stuff HR usually prioritises.

But we think there’s a two-pronged problem here: On one hand, yes, HR is typically collecting data and otherwise working in ways that don’t meet the needs of the people who have the most impact on EX, so naturally those people are hesitant to collaborate closely. On the other hand, though, we also saw indications that business leaders may view EX as “HR’s job”, not as their job. Like that point about 76% of respondent organisations placing primary responsibility for EX on the EX or HR team, not on business leaders. Or the fact that fully 90% of EX professionals told us their EX improvement projects are most often initiated by the EX/HR team, not the business. Or that 72% said that on EX improvements, the EX/HR team usually owns or leads, rather than supports or enables business leaders.

I could go on, but the point is: If business leaders have the most impact on EX, then business leaders need to step up to own EX—and HR needs to facilitate that, both with better data and with more agile, problem/solution-focused ways of working. And probably the first step to getting business leader buy-in to do that is to get them better people data that can show them exactly what their specific teams’ problems are (meaning, the why), and also data that clearly shows them the business/financial impact those problems are having on their bottom lines.

All of that is People Analytics’ job.

Those are some pretty demanding, long-term challenges for any HR or People Analytics team. I mean, to make them responsible for business leader buy-in… that’s not typically done.

Indeed. And to be fair, they wouldn’t be solely responsible for that buy-in. Relationship-building also matters of course, and that’s the job of HRBPs. But HRBPs and others throughout HR need better data to make the case to business leaders to get onboard with owning EX. And that data’s going to come from People Analytics.

Think about it: What drives change in business today? What is every business decision (at least purportedly) based on? Data. So… Data people carry a lot of responsibility. Including in HR.

I see your point. But before people analytics teams run off and rethink their whole data strategy, do you have any evidence that getting zoomed-in people data, tying it to business/financial data, and collaborating closely with business leaders is a more successful way to approach EX improvement?

Of course. [laughs] But not from the survey. I mean, in the survey, we did have people tell us about what we see in lots of organisations, like that when the Great Recession hit, they saw leading indicators of it well in advance, but they were too slow to respond because of buy-in issues, and so they suffered a huge hit that cost them a fortune and took forever to recover from. Of course, as we know, some organisations’ data is so poor they didn’t even see it coming. They’ll be even worse off. 

Contrast that with a case study I’m writing now about a distribution warehouse that used what we call “interaction data” (which is basically “zoomed-in” people data) to identify sources of friction in their warehouse workers’ jobs. In one year, they lowered attrition 35%, solving a headcount problem that had been costing them upwards of $1 million/year. 

Now, in distribution warehouses, they are super productivity oriented, so using their zoomed-in people data, they were able to track the EX changes they made not just to people outcomes, but to a whole host of business and financial outcomes they track daily, like late truck departures, damaged orders, overtime paid, and so on. They know exactly how much that stuff costs them, so with their people and business/financial dots connected, they can tell you exactly how much difference each EX improvement makes, in cold hard cash.

And you know who led that project? It wasn’t HR. It was the warehouse general manager, with HR supporting him. He sought out the better people data, he tied the people data to the business and financial metrics he was already responsible for, and he led the change initiative. That’s the power of getting this data—and EX ownership—into business leaders’ hands.

Thank you, Jennifer for sharing your insights. Your discussion on how people analytics and HR professionals can make more progress faster was enlightening and insightful. If you’d like to discover more about FOUNT’s research please click the link here.