How To Save HR & Back Office Teams Hundreds of Hours

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Welcome to the did you know Podcast by Varisource, where we interview founders and executives at amazing technology companies that can help your business save time and money, and grow. Especially bring awareness to smarter, better, faster solutions that can transform your business. 1.2s Hello, everyone. This is Victor with varisource. Welcome to another episode of the Did you know podcast. Today, I'm excited to have Sophie Wine, who's the CEO and co founder of Ariglad. 3.5s I tried to still practice making sure I get it right. Yes. 1.1s

U1

But yeah, they help use AI to automate HR workflow and communication with employees, and that is such a great topic. So super happy to have you, Sophie. 

U2

Thanks for having me, Victor. Really excited. 

U1

Yeah. So you're actually currently in Europe, right, but you're usually in the US. But you're currently just traveling in Europe? 1.1s

U2

Yes. Traveling in Europe. Been in the Bay Area for the past few months doing YC, which we finished last month. And, yeah, we're excited to be done the program and getting back to work. 

U1

Yeah, we've worked with a lot of YC companies. It's amazing incubator and amazing companies come from there, so you're definitely in a good spot. So why don't you give audience a little bit of the background and what we love as the founder story of how you came about this idea. 

U2

Perfect. So my background is I worked in a bunch of different industries before starting Re Glad, so really got to experience many different types of cultures and ways to approach work. So I worked at the 1.5s United States Department of State, I worked for Bristol Myers Squibb and then ended up in the tech industry. And what really sparked my excitement about this space is I actually worked in cybersecurity, and I was working with CIOs to identify and mitigate risk, primarily at Fortune 1000 organizations. And because I had worked at so many different organizations and different industries, I had also experienced some cultures that were better than others and had kind of befriended many different HR managers in different industries that really struggle to get an idea of what's going on in their organization at any given time. And so when I was working with these CIOs that essentially had all of that data at their fingertips of where their devices were and what was at risk, what wasn't, really wanted to bring that type of insight to the HR space. And so we started out really focusing on the kind of ticketing communication experience, 1.3s really wanting to make sure that that was as streamlined as possible, and then being able to, at the same time, capture that data and give HR teams and leadership a bird's eye view of what their employees care about at any given time. 1.6s

U1

Yeah, 1.2s that's a great background to kind of have that perspective in kind of both sides of solving the problem. So you have a very interesting story on the name of the company, though. Can you kind of share with the audience? 

U2

Yeah, well, as you mentioned at the beginning, I'm currently in Denmark, so my family background is Danish. And when we were coming up with a name, there's this word in Danish that's very unique and it's called Apaidskill, which basically means that you love your job, you wake up every morning and you're excited to go to work, and APA's a little bit of a mouthful to that for your company. So we shortened that to Re Glad, and my co founder is Turkish, and we realized that re in Turkish means bee like honeybee, so it essentially means be glad. But it's kind of a fusion of both of our backgrounds and yeah, really kind of encapsulates what we want to do with Re Glad, which is making work better and more exciting and satisfying. 1.1s

U1

Yeah. No, I love that. That's why I love these founder stories and kind of the mission sometimes that it kind of tells a lot about the founders and the business. Obviously, HR teams, HR teams are so critical to every organization, especially now, right in this economy. Companies need to do more with less. You had a really interesting stat you were telling me, is that HR teams globally spent up to 80% of their time on staff communication and repetitive tasks. So why does it take so much time for HR and operations team to respond to questions? And I think that's ultimately one of the main things you guys are solving. But maybe talk about the problem. Why is it so time consuming? 1.1s

U2

I think it's less to do with something wrong that HR is doing. I think it has more to do with just the reality that HR is saddled with all of the questions that come in from employees. So it could be everything from an engineer wanting to renegotiate his compensation to someone in sales wanting to extend their bereavement leave all the way to a quick dental benefits question. And all of those touch points can really make or break an organization's relationship with their employees. And so HR, of course needs to take that really seriously and they do. But over time when you get all of those questions coming from many different sources. So employees usually like to stay on the platforms that they're already using to communicate. So that would be Microsoft Team, Slack, email, what have you. You essentially have this situation where they're getting a barrage of questions coming in from all of these different platforms. They're having to essentially project manage those, and half the time, if not more than that, a lot of those questions are really just pointed to a general HR manager. So if I'm an employee and I know one person on HR that onboarded me, I'm going to go to them for all of my questions and they're going to have to basically coordinate who those questions should go to. And even just kind of listening to all of those examples really gives you a sense of how quickly your day can get taken up by answering those questions and making sure that communication is kind of getting resolved. But I think where we see a lot of opportunity is making sure that we're a helping automate as much of those really low hanging fruit questions as possible. And then number two, really automating all of the admin work that goes into triaging questions to the right person and making sure that employee questions are answered, but also with as little kind of person time as possible. 1.8s

U1

Yeah. So you and I talked about where when you look at departments like sales and marketing and revenue generating departments, there's a lot of technology focused on building for that. Right. And so in the last four or five years, definitely there is a new rush of new technology focusing on HR, focusing on procurement dollars. Do you feel like what you guys are creating there's not a great solution today, or are you guys just doing it in a different way? 2.9s What do you think about the overall growth of just overall technology in kind of the HR stack? 

U2

Yeah, I think a lot of this has been made done to do with what you have. So maybe you used a ticketing system like Zendesk because it was being used by your customer service team, or you use ServiceNow because it was used by it. I think that was fine like before. Now it was okay. It wasn't great, but it was okay now because it really comes down to technology. It's changed and it's improved to a point, especially with AI. AI is really the kind of fusion point of everything that Re Glad does, and it uses it to streamline and automate while ensuring that employees are still feeling valued and taken care of. AI today was not what it was a year ago. We wouldn't have been able to help organizations manage and kind of improve their productivity to the point that we are now a year ago. And so now it really makes sense for organizations to invest in their back office teams to increase efficiency, but basically making do with doing more, with less. 1.7s

U1

Yeah, I think, again, one of the really smart moves, I agree with you. I think AI in the last few months alone has really transformed every industry, every product that we know. 1.2s And again, I think with technology, user adoption is always a concern. What have you seen from your clients, the HR teams? How are they? I think one of the, again, smartest thing you guys did was integrating with tools that they were to use, right? Which is the team, the Slack. So they're still in the native experience of what they do every day. Is that how you kind of solve kind of that user adoption layer for the users, for the HR teams who's utilizing the platform? 

U2

So yes and no. I would definitely say for the average employee who's not an HR, who basically just needs to get their answers as quick as possible, the integrations with those platforms has been great because the average employee can use teams in Slack and email to reach out to HR, get their answers, and kind of move on with their day. For HR folks, they are living in re Glad and essentially what they get is a super inbox of. So let's say I'm in charge of immigration questions. I work at a big company. I'm in charge of immigration questions for the United States, all employees. So any employee that is in the US. And we can identify that because we integrate with the his system. But if they're asking about immigration questions that's related to my expertise, it doesn't matter if they ask it through email or Slack or wherever, we are going to identify that and we're going to automatically trigger it to this person. And we're also going to automate the workflows that are necessary for maybe that specific visa type or what have you. And so essentially from an HR perspective, you get this very specific kind of to do list of what you need to do and then helping automate as much of those admin tasks as possible. 1.9s

U1

Yeah, no, I love the workflow. And then we have a couple of questions about that later on in the conversation. But we've all worked for large companies and I think different size organizations. One of the hardest things I think in HR and companies in general is not just being there and answering questions for the employees, but is to understand the morale and the feelings and how they're doing, how they're feeling, and really have that 1s great 1s feeling about the place you work. And so those are all sometimes tangible and not tangible at the same time, right? So it's very difficult to manage and have visibility. So how does your tool help with that? 

U2

So yeah, as I kind of mentioned with the example before, so I'm an employee in the US. I may be a sales engineer, I am in Orlando, I'm asking questions about Visa or maybe I'm an engineer in San Francisco and I'm asking about a compensation. We basically can identify and track not only all of that communication, but we tie it back to their characteristics. And so if there is an uptick of questions about compensation by HR or by engineers in San Francisco by 7.5% last quarter, that's now something that we can provide to leaders. And they're able to suddenly be in a position where they can be proactive instead of reactive because they're able to see this real time view of what's going on in their organization. And so really we're able to of show that morale and understanding what employees care about at any given time and what they're reaching out to HR to advocate for. 1.9s

U1

Yeah. So obviously, every organization, you have the SMB, you have mid market, you have Enterprise, and you have companies from ten employees to thousands of employees. And they have different challenges 1.1s that they have to manage. So when I look at It teams, they have ticketing systems, right, to help them manage tickets. So is this kind of what your vision to create that same thing for HR and operations teams? And can you kind of maybe on the second part talk about how your system might be able to help? Is it targeted more for Enterprise? Is it for really any organization that would like to 1.4s implement for their HR 

U2

teams? Yeah. So I'd say to answer your first question, definitely are creating It especially for back office teams. So we started out with HR, but now we're seeing it expand really quickly to finance and legal as well. And for those back office teams, it's much more nuanced than other departments. It's much more confidential. And because we are also the first help desk that has AI driving all of its feature set, we're also able to provide an extra layer of automation and helpfulness that hasn't really been done before. 1.5s Sorry, what was your second question? 

U1

Yeah, the second question is for the different size organization from SMB mid market Enterprise. Is your solution more catered towards one of those or how does it help differently for each of kind of these market segments? 

U2

So it's interesting. We thought it would be mostly for 1s kind of mid market and above, so kind of large organizations. And we do have publicly traded companies. We have really huge amounts of employees in each of our many of our organizations. But we've also had a lot of interest and customers, frankly, from small customers. So we have organizations of 30 people, 150 people. And that is really interesting. But essentially it's because these teams want to stay lean. I think a lot of the time these teams end up having to hire more and more people to manage more and more questions from employees to ensure that employees are being taken care of, that there is a level of satisfaction. But essentially they want to bring in something like re glad because we automate so much and we make everything so much more streamlined that you can stay a three person team for much longer. And that's been really exciting to see kind of happen right in front of our eyes. 1.6s

U1

Yeah, no, that's awesome. It's interesting to hear that because I think when you look at legal, even procurement and some other back office teams, this operating system has an even bigger appeal. So I think that's an amazing thing that you're seeing that progression. So what has been kind of the benefits? 1s Why did you think about integrating with Slack and email right off the bat? Is that just for the ease of use? 1.3s Kind of the integration, so obviously the users can then interact with it automatically. And I guess to that currently, how are HR teams and these teams, like you said, are they just managing it through multiple emails and Slack and teams and different tools and it was hard to kind of manage so many places at once. Was that kind of the 

U2

challenge? That's exactly the challenge. Yeah, you hit the nail right on the head. Essentially, most of the time when we come in, the HR team is managing communication from every which communication platform. Maybe they've attempted to try and implement jira. Jira is usually what they will try first because it's already in the organization and then typically it won't work out for a lot of different reasons, but confidentiality and it's just not built for it top of the list. And so we knew we needed to integrate really well into those systems because employees are just never going to not want to stay on Slack or email. Especially for tech companies, trying to get them off of Slack is just kind of like the opposite. It goes against everything that they want to do. And so by meeting them where they're at, we get really high adoption from employees. We had a big organization join our platform in beginning of January, and they were supposed to only, so they were buying us just for two HR teams. But the adoption and the productivity was so much greater than they expected. They actually expanded to seven teams by the end of the month. And so that was really, I mean, it was for a lot of different reasons, but we definitely attribute that initial adoption from an employee standpoint to meeting them where they're at and not adding a bunch of additional levels that they have to go through. And it also just keeps that familiarity, I think, a lot of the time, especially HR, but goal in finance to a certain extent, they want to maintain that closeness that they have with the employee. They don't want employees to feel like they're a ticket number going through a queue. They want them to feel like they can keep that DM kind of experience. And so that's something that we've been able to maintain. 1.5s

U1

Is and is the AI that you guys are implementing able to take kind of internal knowledge 1.5s and really kind of automate the answers? Maybe things that are very generic or things that are very easy to answer. You don't have to wait for a person. Is the AI also responding to those so that the people don't even have even less tickets to kind of have to manage, 

U2

or yeah, exactly. So we actually are just about to roll out the first AI driven ROI calculator. So essentially the way that it works is we would integrate into your communication platform like email. We can actually identify which questions in your inbox we would typically be able to answer automatically. So if it's like a dental benefits question, we will have already been plugged into your Hrs, we'll already be plugged into your knowledge base. And we can also identify what tone of language that your HR team tends to use, what's most successful. And so essentially, employees, when they ask those types of questions, we can respond. Or Arai will respond in a way that gives them the information they need right away. Make sure that that low hanging fruit is kind of taken care of, but also ensuring that if it's not answering their question, that we can pass it on to someone in HR right away. And we really want to make sure that HR is getting kind of the most kind of cultivated and nuanced experience that is really necessary for the department. 1.3s

U1

Yeah, I love what you just explained there. Sounds like a unicorn idea to me right there. And when you make it big, Sophie, make sure you remember we helped you on our podcast, 

U2

of course, 

U1

in the early days. 1.6s

U2

I love that vision. I can't wait to partner with you guys and help you a promoted to companies out there. So, one of the last questions I want to go over with you is, obviously ROI is very big for every company looking to do more with less, and just think about anything they buy needs to generate 1.1s

U1

ROI. So what have you seen 1s with your platform? Obviously, you talk about all the benefits, but if a company were to be interested in considering or buying your service, 1.3s what kind of ROI can they expect and where are those ROI 1.1s would show up? 

U2

Yeah, I mean, kind of pointing to what you were talking about earlier. Definitely hiring Mitigation, we're able to automate so much of the communication between employees and HR. We're able to streamline a lot of the workflows and making HR's job more exciting and fun because you're essentially able to do the things that are fun and not those more admin tasks. But it also means for the organization, you're not going to need to keep hiring more and more people with the more people that you have in other departments. And so I think that's a huge one. I think the other side is really being able to have one place in the organization that has a lot of the tools for communication. So whether it's knowledge base, ticketing analytics, it's all kind of centered in one platform. And I think what ends up happening is that as organizations scale, when they don't have a system like that, you end up just building out more point solutions. And so you end up with 17 different apps that are each doing very specific things, and that's really expensive, and it actually silos data so you can't see that bird's eye view of what's going on. And so I think those are the two ways that we've really seen in kind of real examples with our own customers, how we've been able to help them save costs. 1.5s

U1

Yeah, that's awesome. So obviously you've seen a lot, done a lot. 1.5s And this is kind of the last question we always ask our guests, which is, if you have to give one personal and or business advice that you're passionate about, doesn't matter what it is, what do you think that would be? 

U2

That's a great question. I'm I don't know. Right. You're kind of getting me, right off the top of my head kind of an answer here, but 2.9s yeah, no, I love it. Yeah, no, I was actually chatting with someone recently about and they were asking me, what is an organization that you really look up to and kind of want to kind of go after the same culture that they've cultivated? And I think that my answer for that has ended up becoming an advice for other business leaders and founders, which is actually really looking to Netflix's 1.1s culture. And Netflix has done a really phenomenal job at really setting expectations around an organization is a team. And teams manage expectations. They have goals. If someone is falling short of those goals, you help that team member to reach them. And really, just having the idea that you as a team is kind of like a sports team, I think is kind of the new generation of what you used to say was a family. But I think a sports team is just much more kind of grounded in reality. And yeah, I don't know, just really. 1.6s Read that recently and I've been chatting with it about that with a few different leaders. And yeah, I would say that's probably the first thing that comes to mind is best advice. I can think of 

U1

any kind of ideas on how you would implement something like that where you feel like, again, is it everybody? And especially now, a lot of teams are also remote, right? It doesn't mean they're always next to you. And do you have any kind of quick thinking or thoughts on how you might implement some of those things to create that family or team? 

U2

Yeah, team, not family. Yeah, I would definitely say just keeping goals in mind, 1.7s think about it. If you're on a swim team, like if you're on a swim team and you want to make it to some kind of competition, then you're probably going to have certain goals that you need to achieve in order to reach that and being able to break those goals into smaller goals. And we all understand OKRs and all of that, but I think cultivating the team around those goals in a way where it's okay to fail and it's okay to fall short of those goals and letting team members know that really allows for them to be more creative and feel more comfortable and relaxed and trying things that are potentially going to make the team succeed even more, but making sure that they understand what is essentially expected from them. And if they don't reach those, what essentially the next steps are. I think that is a really important way to cultivate productivity, but also ensuring that you have a safe enough environment where employees feel that they can bring their best selves to work. 

U1

Yeah, I think we 1.4s think a lot alike in that way or aspire to be. And so we're super excited to partner with you. That the founder you are, but also this amazing technology. So thanks for being on the show. 

U2

Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Victor 1.5s

U1

that was an amazing episode of the Did you know podcast with Varisource. Hope you enjoyed it and got some great insights from it. Make sure you follow us on social media for the next episode. And if you want to get the best deals from the guest today, make sure to send us a message at sales@varisource.com.