EngageRocket, a company dedicated to applying advanced workplace analytics to improve talent retention and productivity, has recenly secured S$450K from investors in an angel round – the first startup of its kind in Southeast Asia to be funded.
Based in Singapore, EngageRocket was founded by ex-consultants Leong Chee Tung and Dorothy Yiu. Their announcement comes within a month after a study found that Singaporean employees were the least engaged in Asia, with younger workers exceptionally unhappy.
Pulling together the latest developments in data science with organisational behaviour and psychology, the company promises insights throughout an employee’s life cycle in a company to improve their motivation and productivity at work.
This is done through automating the survey administration, analysis, and the resultant generation of advice to management.
As the workforce continues to spend longer hours at work, and continues working to even later in life, such a tool becomes even more critical.
It would serve to lubricate the social contract between workers and companies, and improve both satisfaction at work and profits.
This development marks the arrival onto Southeast Asian shores of a broader global wave of ‘people analytics’ companies.
A 2016 report by Deloitte identified that the market for feedback tools was $300M in size, and growing at 100% annually.
Multi-faceted challenges in the future of work demand informational tools to support better decisions: multi-generational and multi-cultural workforces, the ‘gig economy’, and other developments have made it essential for companies to gain a better understanding of their people.
1. In one sentence, how would you describe what your product does?
EngageRocket analyses employee feedback in real-time to advise you on how to improve their productivity and motivation.
2. How does it work?
We automate the administration, analytics and the generation of management advice from employee surveys.
Using a validated survey instruments or a customised questionnaire, we tackle organisation issues from understanding how to improve the onboarding process for new staff, to helping companies through leadership transitions, to enhancing project team collaboration.
3. What are the key benefits that your product bring to companies and/or candidates?
The key benefit is real-time employee intelligence for management to make data-driven people decisions.
What used to take specialised expertise and weeks or months of number crunching with large teams can now be available at the click of a button.
This facilitates habit formation for good management practices, and decisions about people that improve over time.
Furthermore, we reduce the administrative load for running surveys by more than 80%, allowing leaders and HR professionals to focus more on their people than on the process of getting the surveys done.
4. Any existing local case study?
We work with a multi-national retailer with their APAC HQ based in Singapore, who were previously using a traditional consulting company to run a global organisation-wide survey once every 3 years.
They switched for several reasons:
- Their regional HR director needed more regular feedback about various new HR policies that were being rolled out, in order to better tweak the communication plans or implementation strategies before it was too late.
- The traditional process required a latency of 2-4 weeks before data could be released, making it challenging to make quick decisions that are time-sensitive, whereas EngageRocket provides immediate reporting on dashboards for every manager.
- They were previously only able to see reports generated at the department level, making it hard to coach middle-managers on their performance as people managers. EngageRocket is able to deliver dashboards for people managers at all levels in an organisation, allowing for more specific leadership development, coaching and mentoring.
5. Who are your closest competitors?
There are two: companies like SurveyMonkey as well as traditional HR consulting companies.
SurveyMonkey is a great tool for simple 1-off surveys, but the moment you need to do complex analysis or trend data over time, you need expertise, time, and a process layer to organise the data you are collecting in many different spreadsheets.
You also need to manually track participation rates, send your own survey invitations and reminders, and possibly even add demographic questions to enable you to do meaningful analysis post-survey.
EngageRocket does all of this behind the scenes without even bothering the user.
Traditional HR consulting companies have a high-touch servicing model that can be useful for full-blown change management programmes.
However, if you want to bring data-driven discipline to the people management process, while allowing senior leaders visibility into the ‘softer’ management skills of the leaders under them for coaching and mentoring purposes, and having real-time availability of data to enable decision-making, EngageRocket does the job much faster.
6. How much does it cost?
Our cost structure is on average less than 20% of what you would pay traditional HR consulting companies, and is dependent on the size of the company or team that is using us.
We encourage companies interested to contact us at [email protected] for a customised quotation.
7. Where can people find out more about this?
