Technology That Personalizes the Workplace

We started Reframe as a service company with ambitions of helping big companies accelerate change and marketplace growth that reflect the Future of the Marketplace.  With a large technology and media company as our charter client, April 2015 we began our “start-up” journey, grew quickly and expanded into other industries like financial services, travel and leisure, consumer packaged goods and beauty.  In year two, we got a client ask to help them build an employee engagement strategy and accelerate workplace change.

Even though Reframe’s focus at the time was marketplace services, we took on the workplace ask.  For the employee/workplace and consumer/marketplace services, we found the desired outcomes were similar. Both wanted to understand their return on investment, and how best to acquire, retain and reward their employees in this case.  Simple right?

Unlike the consumer/marketplace space, when we got a client ask to build a consumer strategy, we usually had a technology solution to help track the “lifetime value” of consumers as well as how to engage and retain them throughout their journey.  Most important, we had the ability to measure the impact of our consumer experience and engagement strategy and return on marketing assets.  That was not the case for the workplace.

Why the urgency for the workplace vs. the marketplace?  Most companies, large and small, spend 10% – 30% of their operating budget annually on sourcing, acquiring, engagement, rewarding and retaining their talent without a clear path to addressable data.  There is a new majority entering the workforce with significant differences as to why they come and stay at companies.

Addressable employee data helps a company better understand who the employee is, what they like, how they feel and what they want throughout their employee journey.  Again, there is a lack of addressable data in the workplace.  We kept seeing this problem over and over in our workplace change projects.  Korn Ferry, a global organizational consulting firm, predicts by 2030 this will be a $8T problem globally.

Solving for this problem not only helps increase employee retention but also productivity, engagement and growth while building a more inclusive workplace where their employees feel like they belong.  Having addressable data throughout the employee journey, provides a level of visibility that makes the workplace more personalized with actionable outcomes that gets business owners, HR professionals and start-up CEOs a higher return on human capital.

In 2018, my co-founder and I moved into WeWork Labs and expanded our offering to include software.   

We committed to building a scalable and sustainable software product to solve for the $8T generational problem.

The Reframe Employee Experience Platform Workplace Technology Stack

Based on our actual client work and feedback, we’ve designed and built a workplace technology stack for the start-up CEO with 10 employees to middle market companies with HR professionals that manage 500 employee experiences or the large company with 10,000 employee experiences. They  can now use the following workplace technology stack to personalize the workplace.

Employee Assessment (EA) Feature

If you are a tech start-up CEO, small business owner, HR professional for a mid to large size company or just a people leader, you always want to know how your employees and teams feel about their place of work.  When we started designing and making our technology stack, we knew designing the right employee assessment tool was important and it had to be integrated within the user’s feed.  The benefit?  No need for an external survey add on and get real time feedback on the employee’s terms.

Teams and Groups Management (T&GM) Feature

From a growing start-up to mature enterprise organizations, no longer are all team members located in the same workspace.  For companies organized by functional teams like marketing, research and development or sales, using our Teams and Groups Management feature enable mobile teams and increase communications because of the embedded feature with messaging capabilities within the platform.  In addition to the team management function, users can organize groups based on specific communities like Employee Resource Groups (ERGs).  The Teams and Groups Management feature accelerates inclusion and mobility within the workplace while providing an immediate sense of belonging.

Content Management System (CMS) Feature

One requirement for our workplace services was integrated planning meetings with people leaders across talent acquisition, diversity and inclusion, internal communications, corporate communications, and learning and development.  Why?  The one constant within the workplace is the need for clear communications and content throughout the employee journey and experience.  This needs to happen regardless of who owns the employee relationship.

Unfortunately, within the workplace, content is messy because it is usually managed under the Chief Communications Officer (COO) and not the Chief Human Resource Officer (CHRO).  See the employee journey and experience disconnect?

feature brings all of this together where all function and people leaders log into the same system to plan and deliver the right content at the right time throughout the employee journey and experience.

Learning Management System (LMS) Feature

Recently, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced a $750 million commitment to up-skill and retrain employees.  Training, development and up-skilling are now significant employee retention levers for companies. From our workplace services, we found there was a need to modernize the quality of content and the Chief Learning Officer (CLO) needs a seat at the integrated table with other people leaders.

We designed our Learning Management System (LMS) with that in mind.  The feature is integrated equally for the CLO or anyone responsible for managing learning content based on their employee skills gap.  The LMS will host and distribute content from articles to curriculum-based content for up-skilling or compliance or facilitate a repeatable task like on-boarding.  It can be done within the Reframe Employee Experience platform.

Events and Rewards Management System (ERMS) Feature

Not all phases of the employee journey and experience happen online.  The best employee experience within the workplace is an actual human connection (i.e. 1 on 1 meeting, office hours, corporate event, all-hands).  Company events are used to off-set the always on and mobile workforce.  Not every employee can make it to their off-line events.  Within our employee experience platform, workplace events can be streamed or viewed within the integrated feed with our other features at the individual, team and company level.

Measurement and Reporting (M&R) Feature

Data, analytics and reporting are heavy lifts within the workplace because IT systems and addressable data are nearly impossible to organize and located all over the place.  When we designed our Measurement and Reporting feature, we made sure we built a “data – first” and integrated technology stack with the admin or buyer in mind.  All of our features and database architecture support understanding the employee journey and experience with deep learning capabilities with the intent of reducing employee experience drop-offs based on their attitudes and behaviors.

Our ambition and mission at Reframe is to drive outcomes that increase the return on human capital by personalizing the workplace.