Applaud provides a workforce experience layer that makes digital HR simple. The company works with employee-focused organisations across the globe, from The National Trust to Fly Dubai and Estée Lauder. Ivan Harding, CEO and Co-Founder of Applaud, tells Intelligent CXO about how the company started and his vision and goal for the business.
Tell us a bit more about your business and how it started.
In the mid-00s, Co-Founder, Duncan Casemore, and I, were both working with businesses who were implementing HR technology software. At this time, there was a trend of customers that had bought software solutions for core HR and payroll administration purposes and were extending them to provide ‘worker facing’ tools. We were deploying modules like employee and manager access, online appraisals, recruitment, e-learning and so on.
Trouble was, systems back then had been designed for administration, not engagement and the response from employees was pretty damning; adoption was low, complaints were high. This was around the time that Apple were changing how we all thought about user experience (UX) in the consumer world. In the enterprise world, SaaS companies like Workday and SuccessFactors were causing us to re-evaluate how important UX could be as a differentiator in the world of enterprise software.
We were working with large businesses who were spending millions of pounds and dollars buying heavy duty enterprise software that was meant to last for at least seven years. A lot of these systems were fairly new and while they offered fantastic administration support, they were already out of date when it came to the end-user experience. HR leaders were starting to demand Apple-style ease of use but found it difficult to justify throwing away years of investment in their current tech.
Duncan and I saw a gap in the market to address this need and Applaud was born in late 2008.
How has the business grown since it started and how did you ensure growth?
We just started slow – working in the day and then coming home, putting the kids to bed and cranking out code on our laptops. We worked like that for about two years – putting in a lot of hours and getting very little money in return, learning as we went about how to effectively market and sell our products.
A key event was when we decided to open an offshore development centre in India; that allowed us to scale much faster on a very tight, bootstrapped budget. We have a fantastic team out there.
In 2017, we moved to a subscription-based model where clients pay us for our software on an annual basis. That was really important as it gave us more assurances of on-going revenue. It also makes you double down on making sure your customers are happy; not a bad discipline to have!
Finally, the big trigger for serious growth was around our product offering. Our product line had been very much about user experience but we were finding the value offered to clients was diminishing. What was of more value was employee experience, which is a wider topic.
What’s the business’ approach to management?
Collaborative and supportive. One thing that has helped us keep on track is that we are very clear on company strategy and goals; at any one time, we have a set of five or six ‘critical success factors’ which determine the priorities of the company.
We all know the direction we’re pulling in and how departments working together, rather in silos, will achieve some of those goals, whether that’s revenue growth, product diversification/innovation, customer retention and so on. We are very transparent with the management team and whole company about how we are doing, even publicising stats on ‘cash in the bank’ so everyone has some sense of responsibility to the finances of the business. This open-ness creates at atmosphere where we are all pulling together to achieve a common goal.
What is your company’s vision and goal?
We are all about bringing consumer technology experiences into the workplace. We evangelise that your employees are your most important customers – so treat them like consumers.
Business systems have historically been viewed as dusty and unexciting but we’re constantly working to bring the same excitement you see with a shiny new iPhone app into business systems. I get a slick experience when looking at my mobile bank statement, why not the same when looking at my total reward statement? Booking a holiday on a phone is simple; why should it be any different requesting a holiday from your manager? And so on.
What kind of clients and market do you serve?
Ninety-five percent of our customers are in the UK, US and Middle East. Our clients are medium size clients up to enterprise level. Across our customer base, the average number of workers is around 9,000 and our largest customers have over 100,000 workers. We serve all verticals although tend to have had a lot of success in organisations that have many non-desk-based workers, for example, retail clients like Estee Lauder, utilities like Scottish Power or hospitality/tourism like National Trust.
The traditional way of delivering HR services to the workforce has been through desktop PCs and our mobile offering has been a key differentiator for companies that have workers who don’t have easy access to corporate systems.
What has your career looked like so far?
I’ve always been interested in tech and was a bedroom coder in the 80s. I was lucky enough to stumble into a programmer role at IBM after graduating with a maths degree. For a few years, I was a hardcore C and C++ programmer and bear the scars of low-level memory management – javascript kids of today don’t realise how lucky they are!
I kind of fell into my next job at Oracle in the 90s. By luck more than judgment, I was planted in the Oracle HRMS Development team, working on its ERP.
What drew me into sticking with HR Technology was the constant change in trends and customer demands. By the time I left Oracle in the mid 00s, I had a modest size dev team of around 25 people across India, UK and US.
I knew how to build software but had not been exposed to actually deploying it. I spent a number of years as a consultant implementing for customers the same software I’d spent 10 years developing. Out of that experience, Applaud was born.
How do you equip your staff with skills and knowledge?
Each department head has a training budget that is ring-fenced for just that – use it or lose it. Being an IT Company, we find it fairly easy to equip our teams with the required technical skills; you want to learn Javascript, there’s an ample number of online courses for that.
Non-technical skills have taken a little more thought; we now have management training in place for new managers. Other types of training, e.g., book-keeping, latest design trends, sales training tend to be ad-hoc.
How do you work with other executives within the C-suite to make sure your voice is heard?
The management culture at Applaud is very collaborative and non-dictatorial. We go light on meetings too; one 45 minute management meeting per week and one executive committee per month.
Most importantly, our C-suite is made up of individuals who are better in their sphere of work than I am and I trust them implicitly to make the right decisions for our company.
How do you ensure different teams in your organisation work together?
One of the most important parts of my day-to-day job is being the one who has the responsibility of knowing what is going on everywhere in the business and pulling people together when some business problems or opportunities require cross-department collaboration. Thankfully, the company culture at Applaud is such that our managers and individual contributors collaborate together without much encouragement.