I’m thrilled to announce that Betterworks has acquired Hyphen, a leading continuous employee listening and engagement platform based in San Francisco. This acquisition expands the capabilities of our award-winning solutions to significantly improve our customer’s ability to continuously generate actionable insights from their workforce and create the goals that will drive measurable improvements in performance.
At Betterworks, one of our guiding principles is to be data-rich and process light. This acquisition of Hyphen provides another valuable resource to help managers and HR leaders make data-driven decisions about people’s careers and compensation and address the bias that many of these processes are riddled with today. A convergence of factors has led to an increased focus on listening to employees at all stages in their lifecycle and taking action on that feedback: a younger workforce that values more personalized engagement, an understanding that employee performance is the driver of business performance and the need of both HR and leaders to have actionable insights about their workforce at their fingertips.
The bottom line is that listening to your employees is critically important to any successful company. Enterprises need to be able to track benchmarks, identify and prioritize initiatives that improve results and then track the progress of these key employee engagement metrics over time. We will be integrating Hyphen’s survey, polling and recommendation capabilities into our enterprise offering as Betterworks Engage and this completes the loop of measuring engagement, then executing on the right areas using OKRs, and then developing people through continuous conversations, feedback, and recognition (CFRs).
“Feedback is one of the most important parts of performance management, so companies want and need these systems to work together,” according to Josh Bersin, a global industry analyst, and a Betterworks Board Observer. “This acquisition is a good example of a big trend in the market – linking goal setting, conversations, surveys, and employee experience data into a single “action platform” for managers.”
Our solutions have seen multiple updates following the closing of our Series B funding round in early 2019, including the launch of Calibration in early 2020. Customers adopting Engage will have the ability to continuously listen to employees “from pre-hire to retire,” turn these insights into goals and then seamlessly track improvement over time. This capability ties the measurement of employee engagement more tightly to the delivery of desired business outcomes. These employee listening, survey, and polling capabilities also increase the data collected from and about the workforce; data that can be further leveraged to inform, transform and simplify other critical business and talent processes.
Finally, I’m also excited to share that Hyphen’s extremely talented team will be integrated into the Betterworks family! Arnaud Grunwald, co-founder, and CEO of Hyphen will be transitioning into the role of Chief Strategy Officer, Engagement at Betterworks and we’re thrilled to have him on board.
“Joining forces with Betterworks simply and powerfully answers enterprises’ demand to seamlessly link listening to doing, and to shorten their ‘feedback to action’ cycle time”, said Arnaud. “The best-run companies understand that they get a clear competitive advantage from building a culture of frequent, transparent feedback, and surfacing opportunities for people leaders to better retain their top performers and drive continuous data-driven business improvement.”
