INCUBATOR
Rotas to rewards – the tools you need to manage your workforce
The Incubator panel
- Jeremy Basset, founder and chief executive, Co:Cubed
- Isabela Chick, managing director, retail and beauty, Founders Factory
- Tessa Clarke, co-founder and chief executive, Olio
- Andrew Mann, managing partner of North Bailey, and former boss of Tesco Clubcard
- Matt Truman, co-founder and chief executive, True
15five
Founded by serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur, David Hassell – who Forbes once called “The Most Connected Man You Don’t Know in Silicon Valley” –15five aims to help organisations and everyone in them reach their potential and become ‘organisationally actualised’.
Don’t let that jargon put you off – 15five is an incredibly powerful tool to drive employee engagement and performance.
The functionality at the centre of 15five is the ‘pulse check’, which allows leadership teams to see, at any point in time, how their employees and teams are feeling. Wrapped around this are tools to manage one-to-one meetings with direct reports, targets and objective setting, performance reviews and feedback. It also carries the ability for anyone in the organisation to provide ‘gratitude’ or recognition for anyone else they work with.
In these new remote working days, a tool such as 15five is critical for leaders and managers to understand how their teams are feeling and performing, making sure that out of sight most definitely does not mean out of mind.
Current customers are a diverse mix including Hubspot, the American Red Cross and Credit Karma, plus thousands of others – but retailers should be taking a much closer look at how they could integrate 15five into their existing business processes.Tessa Clarke
Axonify
Axonify is a digital learning tool for frontline retail colleagues. It works effectively because it goes directly to frontline colleagues, who can take part in bitesize training exercises daily on smartphones or tablets during quieter times on the shopfloor – removing the costly need of pulling staff off of the shop floor to do classroom or desktop-based training.
The app applies behavioural learning techniques, making it fun and encouraging usage, and is powered by AI and machine learning. The result is a fun, fast, personalised experience designed to make critical information stick. It is also measurable and quantifiable in the benefits to the customer experience and specific savings it can deliver.
Operational KPIs like wastage, sales and customer satisfaction scores can be connected to Axonify and direct improvements around customers’ checkout or click-and-collect experiences can be directly attributed to targeted learning experiences that store staff have completed. Retailers can also use it to target tailored learning to specific stores or staff based on their training requirements.
Axonify is a Canadian start-up headquartered in Ontario, which already counts retail giants including Loblaws in Canada and Kroger in the US among its customer base. It now has its eyes set on Europe. Andrew Mann
Guider
Setting up a mentoring programme is extremely difficult. It’s often time-consuming to match mentors to mentees, difficult to attract participants, hard to keep the momentum and impossible to democratise (it often remains siloed and exclusive).
Guider has solved this problem by connecting the best mentors within organisations with those looking to learn and grow, creating an impactful culture of knowledge sharing and self-improvement.
Guider aims to power more than 1 billion inspirational conversations in organisations through its mentoring software, which unlocks insight and support that is already within the organisation. Its software already helps some major brands – including Marks & Spencer, LVMH and Deloitte – to implement effective and scalable programmes to help their people grow and develop. It also delivers metrics that can demonstrate a data-driven return on investment on running mentoring programmes, which are largely run on more qualitative metrics.
The platform also helps mentors grow through its Academy and helps shape the mentor and mentee experience through goal settings, feedback surveys, training, communication and event scheduling integrations with MS Teams and Office 365. Isabela Chick
More Happi
It is widely recognised that coaching is one of the most effective ways to keep people engaged and happy at work, but that can be expensive – and it’s therefore typically only available to the senior leadership team. More Happi has changed this.
Launched in August 2020, More Happi takes the price of one-to-one coaching from an average cost of £200 per session to less than the cost of a pizza.
For a subscription fee starting from £9.99 per person per month, each employee can access two 45-minute coaching sessions a month, at a time that works for them – be it during the day, in the evenings or at weekends.
The coaching sessions cover a wide spectrum of subjects including work, self, relationships, parenting and purpose. For business leaders, such a broad topic focus means you can be more certain that your employees feel seen, heard and supported in every area of their lives, not just work.
Sessions are kept 100% confidential with only anonymous testimonials and usage data shared with the company. The coaches are voted an impressive 4.6 out of five for quality and have a wide variety of backgrounds and specialist skills.
Despite being less than a year old, More Happi already boasts an impressive client base including Nike, Friends of the Earth, Pieminister, Wefarm, Pact Coffee and Blue Ventures. Tessa Clarke
Peakon
Acquired by HR giant Workday earlier this year, Peakon is an employee engagement platform that converts employee feedback into meaningful insights. Workday and Peakon together provide a continuous listening platform across the entire employee lifecycle, with real-time visibility into employee engagement, sentiment and productivity. This allows businesses to obtain multiple channels of feedback, capturing staff sentiment and finding out what matters most to their people. They can then analyse the data and create action plans, ensuring all employee voices are heard and answered.
By leveraging its ‘intelligent listening’ technology, Peakon delivers real-time insights about employee engagement, growth, diversity, equity and inclusion in an all-in-one employee success platform. This empowers business and people leaders to build an accurate view of employee experience across all levels of an organisation, leading to more meaningful and targeted actions.
Peakon was founded in Denmark less than seven years ago but it has already helped businesses like Staples, EasyJet, Capgemini and Delivery Hero make fundamental changes in how they operate, in order to improve employees’ experience and drive better business results. Tessa Clarke
Rotaready
Rotaready is quite a simple concept but mightily important. It digitises what a lot of retailers and businesses have traditionally done using spreadsheets or pen and paper – staff rotas.
This can be cumbersome and becomes difficult to manage when shifts inevitably change at the last minute because of illness, lateness or shift swaps with colleagues. The larger the organisation, the bigger this problem can become.
The Rotaready platform helps schedule rotas, optimise wage spend, record attendance and approve timesheets for payroll via an app. Because it integrates with a number of other systems such as payroll, Rotaready can increase productivity at head office, as well as at the managerial shopfloor level.
Pandora and EE are just two of businesses already benefiting from the platform, but in a post-lockdown world, where rules and restrictions around retail and leisure can change overnight, a system such as Rotaready, which enables quick and efficient changes to rotas, will be incredibly useful and important. Matt Truman
Unmind
Unmind is a workplace mental wellbeing platform that provides employers and employees alike with the tools to build a mentally healthy and resilient work environment.
Growing interest in mental wellbeing, particularly during the pandemic, has sparked an increasing number of platforms to enter this space. But Unmind was at the forefront, recognising early on that people should be encouraged to proactively manage their mental health and that businesses can become better equipped to support staff through using anonymised data.
The Unmind platform has a variety of tools and expert information, such as meditations, sounds that promote better sleep and resources to educate members on themes such as diet, relationship management and productiveness.
While Unmind’s customer base spans many different sectors, the platform is proving popular in retail, with clients including the John Lewis Partnership and Farfetch.
Retail workers face a very specific set of stressors day in, day out, from long shifts, sales objectives and brand expectations to dealing with difficult customers and doing exhausting manual tasks. As a result, in order to sustain high performance, the wellbeing of retail workers needs to be approached from a whole-person perspective – taking into account their mental, physical and social health.
By empowering retail workforces with the tools, resources and support to do this proactively, retailers can build more productive, healthy and happy workplaces. Matt Truman
VoteXplore
We know that bias flows through all organisations and people. It impacts interactions and decisions made at work. If we can understand the causes behind non-inclusive behaviours, businesses can take a more conscious approach to decision making and organisational design. VorteXplore was founded to unlock the full potential in people, performance and innovation.
The team specialises in picking up complex and nuanced biases, and partners with clients to design targeted diversion and inclusion interventions. Its initiatives help affect long-term change in how people work together, using next-generation analytics to empower individuals and build high-performance cultures.
VorteXplore captures attitudes and behaviours of teams with an innovative video survey experience that presents real-life situations. This allows people to observe behaviour and reflect on whether they have experienced it without putting anyone in a difficult situation.
The platform’s rich diagnostic then produces an organisational heatmap, including tailored recommendations to build a positive working culture for the organisation. This enables users to predict and prevent problems before they happen and to track improvements in culture and behaviour over time. Isabela Chick
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