Employees are the most important part of a business and success really does depend on the efforts of its employees. More and more businesses are starting to realize it and teams are becoming more employee-centric. Now, for forward-thinking companies, retaining staff is generally achieved through having dedicated people teams, attractive perks and benefits, and a workplace culture that encourages and inspires team members.
But, just how do you keep high work standards while retaining your staff and giving them what they want?
Apart from the salary, employees usually care for pleasant work culture, growth opportunities in their job and extra benefits such as a nice work environment. The relationship between the company and the staff can also be a factor in employee retention. Some companies also care for employee rewards, extra perks or providing them with very advanced technology.
Helping businesses achieve this balance – whether they be SMEs or global enterprises – are startups. Across Europe, there are many exciting HRtech startups innovating in this space, helping companies to better provide for their employees and empowering employees to feel more valued, respected and supported. Here, we take a look at 10 that have been shaping the sector:
HeyTeamBased in Paris, HeyTeam is a PeopleOps platform that is streamlining the employee journey, creating workflows that are more personalised and collaborative, with the aim to increase employee recognition and retention. Founded in 2017, the product has been specifically designed to support HR teams at each part of the employee journey – from onboarding to offboarding and every step in between. HeyTeam has a dual objective – to increase employee commitment and loyalty by making their integration into the company as seamless as possible, using enhanced HR tools. The tool, through automated marketing processes, proactively proposes actions that increase the well-being of employees – for example, at times when an employee needs additional support such as for parental leave, moving house or salary increases, or, in situations where employees need more adaptability from their employer. This year, the startup raised €10 million and prepared to launch in Spain and Italy.
TrickleEdinburgh-based Trickle tracks real-time employee experience to keep them engaged and happy at work. The platform enables employees to share their opinions and make suggestions in the form of Trickles, or posts. The platform lets employees stay anonymous while raising concerns or reaching out for support, fostering a safe work environment based on open communication. Trickles are solved by Problems Solvers or ‘Champions’. In the Champions chat area, colleagues collaborate and work together to innovate, make improvements, and solve issues. Founded in 2017, the startup has been advocating a collaborative problem-solving approach which increases employee engagement and creates a whole-team experience. Additionally, the ‘MoodSense’ feature lets the managers take a ‘temperature check’ on how people are doing. The startup’s real-time insights dashboard also allows them to identify and respond to emerging issues.
WorkvivoIrish startup Workvivo has designed an employee communication platform that combines an enterprise social network, a social intranet, and an employee app – describing itself as a new breed of employee communication. The enterprise social network offers employees and managers a common ground to interact on a professional as well as personal level. The social intranet software is a centralised space for all corporate resources and content, which eliminates the need for email attachments. Additionally, the employee app keeps the workforce updated about recent developments in the company through quick announcements. It also allows employees to engage with content via personalized activity feeds through liking, commenting, and sharing updates with their peers. Founded in 2017 in Cork, Workvivo has received €17 million in funding and is enjoying annual growth of 200% year on year with customers across 50 countries.
FactorialBarcelona-based Factorial is a small and medium business human resources software platform and planning tool, and one of Barcelona’s newest unicorns. Factorial was developed with the vision to enable SMBs globally to make better people decisions based on data and increasing data-driven insights. The platform operates horizontally, meaning it can make every HR feature more powerful and efficient by having them operate seamlessly in one place, rather than a complex suite of multiple tools, platforms and features). For example, having time tracking automatically connected to compensation, performance management and payroll becomes easy when every feature lives inside the same SaaS platform. Factorial was founded in 2016 and has experienced over 200% annual growth in revenue every year since 2019 as well as expanded to a team of 800 across offices in Brazil, Mexico and Spain.
CoverflexFounded in Braga, Portugal and now operating as a remote company, Coverflex is a startup for modern businesses trying to navigate flexible remuneration. Founded in 2019, the vision is to improve the way companies compensate their people, making it more transparent, flexible and easier for everyone to make the most of what they get. The platform’s ‘wallet’ offers different pockets, such as a department for benefits like childcare, retirement, health and fitness, a pocket for insurance, one for meals and one for discounts which employers can fill with flexible rewards. The fully digital solution helps companies manage every part of compensation beyond salary — benefits, insurance, meal allowance and exclusive discounts — while empowering people to spend on what suits them best.
FiguresParisian startup Figures has been a pioneer in the salary compensation benchmarking market, innovating in this space since 2020. Figures is one of the first European players aiming to help companies to design and run their compensation policies. The startup’s vision is to bring about more salary fairness and transporency with is SaaS platform. The platform gives users access to 50k+ reliable and real-time compensation benchmark data from 700 European startups, across a wide range of 100+ job types, locations and at companies of varying stages of growth. This data set allows businesses to take a proactive approach to talent acquisition and retention. It helps companies bring transparency to the previously muddy waters of remuneration with the aim of bringing fairness to employees, helping highlight gender pay issues and allowing businesses to better manage their remuneration budgets. Figures raised €6.67 million just a couple of months ago.
CobeeFounded in 2019, Cobee is already one of Europe’s leading employee benefits management digital platforms. In 2021 they secured €14 million for their mission to improve employee wellbeing. Based in Madrid, Cobee provides a flexible employee benefits management platform that brings benefits to staff – from gyms to insurance products and vouchers. The benefits are all pulled into one place which staff can then redeem via the Cobee card. Increasingly, companies are transforming their approach to employee wellbeing, recognising that giving some benefits and perks go a long way. Cobee has been well-positioned to take advantage of this cultural change and has seen rapid growth across Spain and Portugal. The likes of Glovo, Petronas, Avis and Tripadvisor are all now using Cobee to manage employee benefits and improve wellbeing.
YourCampusDutch startup YourCampus is aiming to reform how benefits and perks are approached – making it simpler for management and giving employees a better experience. Born in Amsterdam in 2021, the YourCampus platform enables employees to access a personal budget that is paid for by their employer to choose from a variety of fringe benefits and modern perks in categories such as well-being, personal development, financial well-being and mobility. Existing salary components can also be used flexibly, such as a pension plan, holiday pay and days off. YourCampus thus responds to the fact that every employee has different needs, due to being in different stages of life or working from different locations. Already, the Amsterdam-born team has fueled benefits processes for over 100 companies and just recently it picked up €2.7 million.
LedgyZurich-based startup Ledgy has been encouraging a culture of ownership across Europe’s business landscape since 2017. The equity landscape is pretty complex and can be hard to navigate, so while teams may want to use it to retain talent, it’s not necessarily easy to do so. Zurich-based Ledgy wants to empower teams with the tools they need to leverage the full value of equity. Recently, the team picked up €22 million to scale its presence across Europe. The platform supports high-growth companies by enabling them to better understand their cap tables so they can successfully raise the funds they need while motivating and retaining employees by demonstrating what their equity ownership really means. Further, the platform can run different country-specific equity plans side-by-side – which is incredibly useful for high-growth startups which are often working on a global level.
BeekeeperBeekeeper was founded in 2012 and is a provider of an enterprise communication platform for multiple industries. It allows users to communicate with employees and team members. Its features include secure one-to-one messaging, group messaging, private & personalized updates to the individual, content management, chatbots, information sharing, employee surveys, engagement analytics, and feedback polling. It also provides smart automation features such as workflow-based communication and scheduling of internal messaging campaigns. Beekeeper is from Zurich, Switzerland and Krakow, Poland and has received about €86 million in funding from 24 different investors, including Energise, HighSage and Swisscanto.
Apart from recognition, sharing, good communication, giving extra perks and good benefits, employee satisfaction is also helped by making use of good technology, making work processes as seamless as possible and having flexibility at the workplace. Some startups are working on gamifying all these aspects. So, there is much more on the horizon to enhance employee satisfaction in the future!
