This week, Glint published a global survey of 700,000 locked-down workers from home that showed burnout's a growing problem. That's probably in itself not that surprising, but what is is the scale of the dataset that the company was able to use to derive the claim: no less than 2.9 million responses.
And though you may not have heard of it, the firm, which styles itself as a leader in something called ‘People Success', is an AI-powered internal market research offering that's been quietly revolutionising the way Corporate America listens to its employees-and which has been building more and more accurate pictures of what motivates us at work, too.
The basic Glint proposition has always been that the annual employee survey is a waste of time; taking too long, not focused, and what useful results come out get buried in a spreadsheet that the CEO will finally see months later. Better: short, rapid ‘pulses', where you talk to people much more often but at less exhausting depth, and even better, use Artificial Intelligence techniques like sentiment analysis to quickly parse unstructured comment in order to capture what the team's really thinking.
diginomica interviewed one early convinced user of the platform, a major US beauty brand, back in December 2018, plus a few weeks back looked at how Docusign is striving to keep a remote workforce engaged and supported under COVID-19 with the software. Another US customer in the healthcare sector claims that after this way of gathering employee feedback was introduced an engagement metric went up by 5 points, customer satisfaction has improved by 16 points, and (coincidentally or not) revenue has increased by more than $500m. In the UK, users of the software include Sky, which has described the employee engagement data it gets from Glint and our people survey as absolutely invaluable and "the only empirical evidence we have of our return on [HR] investment".
It's an interesting idea, and one that Microsoft for one has signed up for in the shape of it telling its LinkedIn subsidiary to buy the company, which was only five years old at the time, for $400m in late 2018. We decided to find out what's been happening since the acquisition by sitting down with the company's co-Founder and CEO, Jim Barnett, who kicked off by telling us about the original idea for the brand that he claims is still alive and well inside his much bigger new home:
Glint really goes back to the beginning of my career, when I worked with a lot of companies whose leaders that just didn't really seem happy at all, though the company was perfectly financially successful. I started to wonder if happiness in a commercial sense wasn't actually to do with accomplishment itself, and I began to see what could be done to make happiness more achievable in the workplace.
Eventually, that led to us setting Glint up in 2013, as my co-founder and I saw that what managers were missing were dashboard-level access to what was really engaging and motivating the teams they were trying to help. Managers don't need scores and numbers, they need real insight into what's working and what's not working, what makes people feel included and what makes them feel excluded from what you're trying to achieve. And if you talk to your people more frequently, they soon start to feel they are important to you and that you're both connected.
Monitoring behavioural change
Glint is far from Barnett's first rodeo; an accomplished executive and entrepreneur after education in business and law and a run in the private equity space; he's run several successful tech and non-tech companies including the Google of the mid-1990s AltaVista, and he's also been a President of Ancestry.com.
But Glint's taken that nice idea one step forward; not only can it offer you real-time data from these mini-surveys that can be analysed and aggregated in the manager's dashboard, it's now offering those same managers very specific action plans based on the immediate problems or suggestions that its analysis has thrown up. In the words of HR tech guru, former Deloitte analyst Josh Bersin, as a result the company's moving the survey system far beyond that of a feedback tool into a true behavioural change system.
Barnett was quick to tell us that as part of LinkedIn, he is unable to reveal anything like market share growth or number of new wins. What he was able to discuss was what's expected to happen next for the two companies:
Before we came together, we'd always really been about people and talent anyway, and we both had a lot of excellent data about job seekers. LinkedIn was also a customer. It makes a lot of sense to work together to create a true People Success platform, we think, with Glint filling out the gaps in LinkedIn to start to build a complete people solution, though for the time being we [Glint] will still operate as a separate company and brand. What we're going to do now, especially during the Pandemic, is to help enterprises keep checking in on people to maintain connection and authenticity-and deliver true workplace happiness.
My Take
Barnett is clearly a very smart and able leader sitting on a pretty useful HR technology. The question has to be whether LinkedIn, and so ultimately Microsoft, will be able to properly exploit the potential of the distinctive Glint culture that's been the basis of the ‘special sauce' that its satisfied Global 500 customers see it providing. And of course, smart but also quick ways of talking to scattered teams that may not actually get back round a water cooler anytime soon could be a key tactic in getting ready for the post-COVID-19 ‘New Normal'. One to watch, for sure.
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