Welcome to the HR Tech Spotlight Podcast. I'm Deanna Shimota, CEO of GrowthMode Marketing. The HR technology market is crowded and we know it can be hard to find the best software solutions for your business in the sea of sameness. On this podcast, we shine a spotlight on some of the best up and coming technology options out there.
Check it out if you are interested in learning about new innovative solutions available in the market. And if you are with an HR tech company and interested in being considered. Stay tuned for details at the end of the show.
Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of The HR Tech Spotlight. In this episode, we're shining the spotlight on Rippleworx, a comprehensive solution that monitors and enhances organizational performance, aligning leaders and team members to foster a thriving, productive workforce. Joining me to talk about the platform is Rippleworx President, Timo Sandritter.
Welcome to the show, Timo.
Greetings, and thank you for having me.
So tell us a little bit about your background in the HR tech space.
I came to the HR world many, years ago when we started our first company and everybody knew how to program and I didn't. So it's one of those situations.
It was out of basic need. And I fell in love with HR because it's not always black and white. My educational background at that point, Was touching on the employment and labor law side and also on the business side and so working with people trying to solve people problem has always been an interest of mine.
And so I guess 25 years ago is when I originally fell in love with the HR world. And I've been in it ever since. Even Rippleworx is basically a legacy product that combines my passion for what I do with people, my educational background, and of course my professional work experience over the last 20, 25 years in one software company and in one product, and so obviously more than just another business, but very dear to my heart as well.
Let's talk a little bit more about what Rippleworx actually does and what the capabilities of the platform are.
So to jump right into it, I'm going to tell you a few anecdotes that most people can relate to. When we look at, Rearing children or when we look at playing any kind of sports, we know that a lot of times especially when it comes to reprimanding or praising children, we don't wait a year.
We don't wait six months until we do. We do it normally on an ongoing base. And so at Rippleworx, it's built on an ongoing coaching and feedback mentality. So instead of having annual performance appraisals or even semi annual, this is more a matter of doing it way more frequent, but also doing it both ways.
Ripple was founded on the original belief that we need ongoing coaching and feedback, but we also need deliberate performance acceleration or training and development. So originally we started in the professional sports world, and we realized that in sports you measure a lot of different data, that most of those with hardware whether you wear a watch that tracks your run, or you wear a heart rate monitor, or You simply track your distance ran in a certain amount of time and your cadence or your lactic acid, but we realized that you can correlate a lot of different data points and then hopefully find a way to accelerate that physical performance.
So when Ripple was first born, we partnered with. Quite a few professional soccer teams and a few professional athletes to understand what that world looks like on the physical performance side. But as I've said, I have a passion for people and I've been in HR for many, years. We realized that there's also that very same play in the cognitive space.
So understanding employee performance and how this can be accelerated beyond just providing more training. Back in the days, we all went to our preventing workplace harassment training and we all had to do OSHA training and, all of those statutory compliance components. They have their place, right?
They're important. They check a box. They ensure that they mitigate the liability away from the company. And it's important to be trained in those. But in order for us to individually grow, we have to look much deeper. We have to look at the individual hard and soft skills. Anything related to their hard skills, where they learn how to program in C or they're really good accountants, but then also things like emotional intelligence and leadership and communication.
Those hard skills and soft skills are nice and dandy, but unless your motivation is tied to that, it's nearly irrelevant. I use the example of once upon a time, I was decent at juggling a soccer ball, right? So I can juggle a soccer ball, let's say a thousand times .
If I'm not motivated to do then It's nearly relevant or the other way around, if I really want to do something, but I'm not good at it, I have to figure out how to bridge that gap, right? To overcome that Delta most of us think we train more, which is partly right. But we also have to understand the motivation of what drives those training methodologies.
So things like attribution self efficacy and so forth. Now we got the individual drivers? The hard and soft skills and the motivation. All of this only makes sense. If it's also in the proper organizational context. So at Rippleworx, we looked into this in this organizational setting?
What is the organization set up? What is the need of the organization? Cause if the organization doesn't need me to juggle a soccer ball, even if I'm really good, and I want to do it, it's also irrelevant. So Rippleworx was based on that foundation of things have to happen on an ongoing base, basically the compound or ripple effect, they also have to be more deliberate.
In terms of how to train individuals. So those individuals have an impact in themselves and in essence than an impact on the organization. So, we look at pulsing the entire organizations. And so a pulse is basically a survey on steroids. Then we develop. They deliberate of what that means and overcoming that gap.
And we do that through micro learnings. If you know me, it doesn't take much to realize that I have a high level of ADHD, which means for me to sit in a classroom for 47 hours is nearly impossible. So we push micro learnings. That are tied to the individual through our systems and they range from let's say 30 seconds all the way to like maybe 10 minutes, but through those micro learnings, we push them through the way they need to be received from the individual.
And then we measure the results of that training, whether it was just a waste of time or whether it actually had an impact that the training provided what it's supposed to provide. And so those micro learnings are being pushed through on the back end of it. We start again with the testing. And so that's, you have this pulse develop, perform, and then we start over pulse develop, perform, and that creates an ongoing and sustainable ripple effect that is indefinitely.
So what would you say, Timo, is a big challenge or problem that you see HR departments facing today that Rippleworx can help with?
Again, I've been a CHRO chief people officer for many, years, and I still believe that there's a lot of HR executives that really want a seat at the table, but they look at HR as a cost center.
I believe HR executives have to understand how to be a profit center and have to understand what that means in terms of the P& L responsibility. So the moment HR people deserve a seat at the table is the moment to understand the return of investment. And, in for profit organizations, a lot of times it's measured in money, right?
And, with some of my peers, Especially from larger organizations, I tell them, Hey, we want to make sure that we don't just do something that's nice to have. We want to do something that, moves the needle, not just for the HR department and for you, but also for the organization.
So we measure certain levels, whether it's a decrease in attrition, whether it's an increase in engagement, an increase in employee net promoter score, performance, or an increase in productivity, all of those things can be measured. And if you follow the line long enough, you have a monetary value assigned to it.
Even if that monetary value is not just an increase in profitability, but rather a decrease in attrition and therefore a decrease in cost.
So I think we both know the HR tech market is very crowded and there's a lot of solutions across the board for HR teams to choose from. How would you say Rippleworx is different from other options out there specifically that you compete against?
I've been going to the HR tech events for many years and I've myself bought many systems and played with many systems and we positioned ourselves. In this spot where we work with high performing teams that are often distributed like a deskless worker under a certain level of stress.
The analogy I use is if you work together with your three best friends, you're in an office together all day, you don't need ripple, but the, more complex your organization if you have different shifts, different location, different tenure, different hierarchical levels and it's very hard to track the sentiment of your employees.
Then simply go out and start with an engagement study That takes forever to understand the dynamic of it. It doesn't solve the problem when it needs to be solved I talked to a lot of HR executives that do this once a year engagement survey. It takes them three, four months to get the results.
And by the time they actually set actions into place, It's almost time to do another survey. And that simply takes too long. We got to get those small wins in. We got to understand what the sentiment of the organization, what the voice of the employee is, and then we need to act now
if I have 10 employees and they tell me every day they do great. And one of those days they say they do okay. It may not resonate with me because there's so much noise going around. The system sees that outlier, when we look at Ripple. We use data and we use our secret sauce or our taxonomy that's sitting in the back end of that sentiment analysis that shows some of those outliers where, the executive, middle management, whoever the user is on the managerial side sees exactly what's going on, where those shortcomings in the organization, but also where are the wins,
and so it's really having an ongoing view, it's always life and it's always up to date. And we also say, Hey, we want to be super easy to use, right? We are mobile first as an app, there's a text message. It's an email. You can scan a barcode. We want to meet the user where they are.
And we invested heavily in our UI UX to make very, simple, questions in our pulse. They are like three to five questions, maybe eight maximum. They're very short and easy answer. You can use Likert scale to answer. You can use emoji. You can have an open text response that has a sentiment analysis through what we have is natural language processing that does all of that automatically.
So command staff, executive, they can Always see what's going on at any point of time. It's always life, and that in itself is valuable. However, it's only as valuable as the actions associated with it. There's a, term that we coined, and I hope my English teacher doesn't get mad because I'm not quite sure if it's an actual word, but a lot of times we say we analyze the data and then we actionize the data.
We actionize the data, which means that there's actionable items that come about those findings. It's basically you go to the doctor says you have sickness XYZ. But unless the doctor gives you a cure, it's almost irrelevant.
And so for us, we don't just start with the sentiment analysis. We look at the status quo, and then there's actionable items that are suggested by the system based on the data that we have fed in over time that understands those best learnings. And that's why I say we get into this understanding of pulse, measuring, developing, performing, and then we start over again.
And that's that secret sauce and that differentiator compared to other systems that are out there.
You started to allude to the type of companies that are a great fit for Rippleworx. Let's expand on that. When you're thinking about the companies that you fit right into and they really excel with using the technology what would you say are the characteristics of those companies?
The more complex the better and. It requires a an open mind towards technology that's very, important. If it's an old school HR executives or a practitioner, a lot of times we don't even sell to HR executives because they're still not yet Completely open towards digitalization and understanding what's really going on.
And so the great thing is, as we slowly migrate into a fully digitized world and millennials and beyond that are a lot more tech savvy it opens up that, market for us and I have a few peers of mine that are incredible, absolutely forerunners with them, it's very easy to position Rippleworx.
For the most part, it is really complex organizations. that are the deskless worker, like distributed teams that, where we can move the needle the most. We have true findings in that ROI that I mentioned earlier, where we can decrease attrition and we measure that in money, or we measure that in time.
So as long as the organization has some kind of data, I always say Rippleworx positions itself as a performance accelerator. Somewhere between an LMS, a learning management system. We don't create content, but we can be an LMS and we have some content ourselves, but we don't want to be a content creator between an engagement tool and between a performance management tool,
we're right in the middle. We could be either of the three. We could be all of the three, but we also data agnostic where. Whatever HRS is used by the client, or if they have none at all, we feed their data into our system and then correlate it. So you have one source of truth and you have one system of record.
So speaking about data and measuring it, what would you say is the impact organizations that work with your company experience?
I think that the biggest findings that we see we've had tremendous success of really stopped the bleeding in terms of the high level of attrition.
The areas that we serve. And I really mean serve sincerely because we work with high performance teams, especially in law enforcement and even the air force having a good solution that's reliable and that really makes a difference, makes a much bigger difference to them compared to a market that does not
have such a high risk in terms of having proper performance. And so for us to help with the decrease in their attrition simply by giving employees a voice and then providing proper training for them moves the needle a lot. In law enforcement, a lot of organizations, they're not concerned about making more revenue because they are non profit and they are funded by state and local governments.
Or the federal government, but for them to have that bleeding of losing employees left and rights. And so you constantly have to make sure you recruit more than you lose. And we are really stopping the bleeding. What we call left of the boom is what we focus on. So it's not reactionary. It's proactive to ensure that we provide a wellness solution.
And I know well as a negative connotation for my age and older, simply because it, often is attributed to being soft, being weak, but that emotional wellbeing is so important, and we look at the cognitive understanding, the physical wellbeing, the cognitive wellbeing and together that emotional wellbeing is what creates that holistic viewpoint.
So a lot of the stuff that we do is, it's not just simply providing more training material or videos. Pushed. So we overload the individual, but Drada, it even deals with that wellness, with that emotional, that understanding that sometimes yoga, sometimes breathing exercises, and I was one of those people.
I was like, I'm not going to sit in the room and do breathing exercises. until I did it and then I'm like oh wow this actually does make a difference I grew up in the 70s and 80s where you just walk it off and now that I'm spending more and more time with it I realize the true benefit and how holistic it can be and that's where we have the biggest impact when we look at all of the different components that moves an individual.
What do you see as the biggest hesitation that companies have when they're evaluating implementing a solution like Rippleworx?
A lot of times they're scared of what they find, and I use analogies, so it's like you don't want to go to the doctor because you're afraid you may have something that's It's bad.
And so we've, had a lot of clients that were like, not happy with the results because employees were not happy with management and that's okay. And sometimes you provide them a voice and if they yell, they all want a raise. That doesn't mean necessarily to give them a raise, but at least acknowledging that you've heard them is very important.
But if you don't have leadership that is a manager or a manager by appointment and a leader, then Rippleworx will never work because it still requires some human touch and an openness towards change because it's not always pretty, sometimes you find stuff that you may not want to find.
And so I guess if you are in a draconian setting or in a, dictatorship, Ripple is probably not for you because. You may not want to hear what your employees have to say and what really keeps them up at night.
Yeah you make a good point. Nobody wants to hear negative feedback, right?
But it's so important to know those things because how do you fix your culture and the leadership within and any kind of issues if you're not asking the questions to get the information, no matter how much it sucks to hear it
we pride ourselves by really going into the organization.
There's no one size fits it all. We go in and do that analysis of what is their real need? What are the pain points, there's no point of fighting attrition if they have a very low attrition rate.
We have what we call a client success team that set up to really be consultants with subject matter expertise that work with our clients understanding what their most eminent need is what is very crucial for them today, but then also tomorrow.
And that's how we set it all up. We ensure that we really stop the bleeding where we need to stop the bleeding. And then we get better, right? We don't grow when everything is always positive. And an employee satisfaction is slow, or even, if you're good today, it doesn't mean you don't have to develop.
We all know that once you stagnate, or once you rest, you start recessing. So whether it's in physical performance, or whether it's in cognitive performance, I'm a big advocate of learning. And so I went to school so many times with so many degrees because it's that constant ongoing development that one needs.
What is the future vision for the company?
Of course, if I have it my way I really am excited about the future. For many years. I said, Oh, I'm wondering if we are too early for what the market can really handle, because I've been told a lot of times I'm like five steps ahead of people.
But seeing and going to a lot of the conferences and speaking at the conferences, I'm really excited how. Organizations are accelerating in terms of their acceptance towards data. We're a data company. We have a very strong data science team. Dr. Larry Lowe is spearheading that, and they do a lot of really cool things
and so it's not just a simple sentiment analysis. I mentioned earlier, this natural language processing that we do. We have real AI and real machine learning in the back end, and not just for marketing purposes. I'm really, excited of, What the data tells us, because let's be real, we sit on a lot of data that's not utilized scrubbing that data and ensuring that data is actually not just credible, but also valid and then learning from that to set future trends and understand that performance as an organization, as an individual.
It's a really exciting time right now.
Yeah, it is definitely a very interesting time in the HR tech space. And certainly Rippleworx is part of that mix of all the cool things that are out there. So Timo, what final thoughts do you want to leave our audience with?
I think the thing I always say is innovation feels uncomfortable.
And I understand that not everybody wants to be an innovator and early adopter. But the time is now better than ever to really, giving employees a voice because it is the 21st century. We learned from COVID that we don't have to be in the same room in order for be to be productive. And so simply by doing so, even if we can't change the world overnight, creating small waves or ripples can ultimately make a big difference.
I love how you tied that together as a marketer.
I
appreciate that. So where can our listeners go to learn more about Rippleworx?
Our website, Rippleworx with an X dot com.
And of course you can hit me up on LinkedIn I definitely talk to everybody that has at least an interest in what we do, and I'm very passionate about what we do. Like I said before, this is more than just another company I started and built. This is a true passion project
awesome. That does it for this episode. Thanks so much for the conversation today, Timo. It was great to have you on the show.
Thank you for having me.
Thanks for listening to this episode of The HR Tech Spotlight Podcast, where we showcase some of the best up and coming HR technology options in the market. If you are an HR tech company leader who would like to be considered for a guest spot on this program, please contact me via GrowthMode Marketing.
com or reach out to me, Deanna Shimota, on LinkedIn. And If you found this show informative, subscribe, connect with us on social media and leave a review. This is Deanna with GrowthMode Marketing signing off. Thanks for listening. We hope you'll tune in again next time.
