By Alex Yohn
May 9, 2018
It’s funny to think how our path crossed with Lauren O’Brien’s. We had placed a job posting for a front-end engineer and Lauren’s application came through. We were all blown away. Who is this person with an MBA, a psychology degree, an investment certification, experience in development and a love for research and data insights?
When Lauren started at Kin, she was primarily in charge of front-end development, though we knew her background would move her around the organization quickly. As we began to realize Kin’s vision, we saw how data from our tool coupled with global workplace trends could transform the way people engaged with work. Lauren’s expertise and passion for all of the above was the perfect torch to light the way.
While she’ll still be helping out with front-end development, Lauren will spend a majority of her time studying our data and workplace behavior as a whole, and implementing her findings into Kin to create healthier, happier workplaces.
But before she gets to all of that, here’s a bit about Lauren in her own words.
What about Kin attracted you to working here?
I found Kin while searching for an opportunity where I could apply my business, research, psychology, and programming background to a product I believe in. After talking with Lisa about Kin’s vision, I was so impressed with the genuine enthusiasm, warmth and purpose with which she and the team pursues the goal of meaningfully improving workforce culture that I knew this was an organization I wanted to be a part of. I’m most satisfied when I’m working to find connections across disciplines that lead to understanding and betterment. Leading the data science effort at Kin epitomizes this.
Tell us a little about your career path and your education – why did you choose the path you did?
I’ve developed a fairly novel and compelling specialization at the intersection of business, psychology, technology and data analysis that has been a result of my willingness to organically follow complementary opportunities and interests wherever they have led. This has included getting my Series 65 license as an investment adviser after majoring in finance and completing my MBA in my early career; working as a process analysts and consultant in Washington DC; and eventually pursuing my doctorate in Psychology doing fMRI, social psychology, and behavior change research among other assorted experiences and roles. The thread that has tied all of these together is that I have always contributed to my teams and organizations in a technical role – automating and streamlining processes, building web-based tools, and visualizing data while applying an analytical lens to the work at hand.
When you think about the future of Kin, what challenges are you ready to accept?
Kin is on a mission to do nothing short of empower organizations to self-actualize. We’re digging into a variety of research questions about those workplace features that can be optimized to support mutual satisfaction; strengthen collegial relationships; manage and provide feedback in a way that engenders trust and appreciation; and encourage a personal balance that facilitates peak performance. If this sounds lofty and ambitious, that’s because it is, and because modern workforce mindsets are too often short-sighted and misguided in ways that squander the good-will and spirit of the workforce. My goal at Kin is to uncover and integrate the drivers of a satisfying workplace into our product — bringing the academic rigor of a proper research program to bear on business questions.
Outside of work, how do you make the most of your free time?
I usually divide my time between local adventures with my family, recreational coursework (currently learning sign language), and slowly wending my way through my reading list (Dune at the moment).
What are some of your favorite foods, restaurants, food trucks?
Nothing really hits the mark for me like homemade Italian food — the recipes my grandmother has passed down to my family were something I grew up with and associate with happy memories. After much persistence I’ve finally mastered Nana’s lasagna, meatballs, and sauce, and it brings me deep satisfaction to share these with my own family.
By Alex Yohn
May 7, 2018
A few weeks ago, my husband and I started a new exercise regime and began the keto diet. We knew one of the outcomes would be healthier bodies and more energy. What we didn’t consider at the time was how big an impact it’d have on our work lives.
Within a matter of weeks, my world turned around outside of work. We quickly dropped some weight and felt our motivation levels go through the roof. I was getting more done around the house we are restoring and my mood had dramatically improved and stayed consistent each day. I was back to being ever the optimist.
That’s where it got interesting. Sure, I was full of energy and woke up feeling well rested everyday. But even more noticeable to me, I was almost doubling my level of output at work yet the quality of it was the same if not better. My critical thinking skills were as sharp as they’d ever been and things that once appeared as big obstacles now seemed like small challenges.
It’s amazing how divvying up your attention between work and something else can positively impact both. That ‘something else’ could be focusing on exercise and health or a side hustle. At Kin, we believe our employees’ passions will never be 100% Kin. We are human beings. We have many interests and goals that don’t relate to our careers and we love to celebrate our team’s accomplishments outside of work.
In fact, we have several team members that are known for their talents that have nothing to do with our company. Just check out a Slack chat between our some of our team and our founder a few Monday mornings ago:
Maintaining constant focus on anything for too long will lead to burn out. If we had an employee that worked at Kin for five years and had no other interests outside of work, I guarantee they wouldn’t be a top performer. Employees gain different perspectives and creative solutions from other aspects of theirs lives that they then apply here. It has nothing to do with sitting at a computer staring at the same challenge day in and day out. It’s about connecting the dots from everything you’re exposed to to make the world better. That’s innovation.
We talk the talk and walk the walk here at Kin. Grant, our engineering director, is known for his home brews and paddle boarding. We are guaranteed to get a good picture of either each week in Slack.
A little over a year ago, Grant even shared a story about a home-brewing app he made in his spare time. It was a project that the company had no direct interest in, but we still shared it on our parent company’s blog. We thought it was cool and were proud of his work – whether it was for a client or not. Turns out, a lot of other people enjoyed it, too:
Sharing our whole selves means embracing it in every aspect. It’s not just asking our employees how their weekends were when they come in on Monday.
We want Kin to be known as a workplace where people can come to their job and love what they do during the day, then have the freedom to pursue their dreams after-hours. It benefits not only their work here, but their home life, too. We become the best version of ourselves when we don’t have to sacrifice one for the other.
What are your employees into outside of work?
By Alex Yohn
Apr 27, 2018
Last summer we said goodbye to our office in Chicago because we simply didn’t need a physical space anymore. It’s taken a few years to learn the ropes of remote work but moving out of a physical space seemed more a formality than anything else, given we’ve been ‘mostly remote’ for a several years now. Given that we’ve grown, shrunk, succeeded and failed all while transitioning to remote, I figured I’m the right guy to discuss a few of the challenges of running a distributed company which might not get much airtime otherwise.
Attendance is mandatory?
Working remotely isn’t flex working, and more than a few people don’t understand that. Flex time, generally speaking, implies doing work whenever from wherever. Remote work, for us, means you show up every day during normal business hours just like you would if there was an office to go to. Given we have people in all four U.S. timezones (we’re 100% US based currently), we observe one simple rule to ensure our workdays: everyone needs to be online for the majority of our core business hours of 10 AM to 4 PM Central time. It ensures everybody sees, hears, and is available to speak to everyone else in the company during core hours.
Another challenge in remote work is internet latency (can you hear me now?). If you’ve seen A conference call in real life you’ll know exactly what I mean. Just because you’re present doesn’t mean your internet connection is. We use no fewer than three video conferencing tools, phones, email, messaging, and product management tools to mitigate the all-too-common occurrence of “hey … can you hear… hello?”
Generally speaking, we get our discussions taken care of. We’re not overwrought with meetings anyways, and Slack fills in for most of our team-based asynchronous conversations anyways. However, one thing our internet connection doesn’t deliver even on a good day is good old fashioned face time. There is no substitute for getting the team together, when feasible, for the 2-3% of the time when we need everyone focused on the strategy, and not the work at hand. That said, remote working is really well tuned for our industry where flow time is mission critical.
Diction matters
There’s nothing in the world that pushes my old ornery man button more than someone’s poor written communication. A pattern I see with nearly all people online, let alone our own team members, is the tendency to communicate differently online than they do in person. Someone who’s warm and charismatic in person may be mistaken for a chimpanzee with an iPhone in written form. Given that a vast majority of a remote team’s communication happens in written form (email, messaging, etc.), writing abilities can make or break someone’s tenure with the company. It takes time and practice to develop a voice when writing, but simple rigor like proofreading and being aware that another human is going to have to dissect your writing truly do help. Every professional whose livelihood depends on digital presence needs to practice communicating well in written format. Full stop.
Where’s the water cooler?
The last challenge to share is what I describe as a lack of “digital presence.” Since we don’t walk into the office each morning whistling a tune, or head to lunch with our coworkers, we have to go out of the way to be present in the only way we can: digitally. That means having our cameras on during meetings, being proactively verbal on a call (tough for introverts!), and staying responsive with the numerous, asynchronous conversations we have going on nearly all the time. In other words, “being at work” isn’t as easy as if we were sitting in an office together.
Our team’s former office in Chicago, circa 2011.
At Kin, we do daily stand ups, rain or shine. We go around the digital room to talk about our work – what’s done, what we’re working on, what our blockers are. It feels mundane at times to do this day in and out, but it’s an opportunity to get a bead on how thing are going for folks. If someone seems off-kilter, it’s a cue to check in to see if they need a hand. Likewise, once a week we spend a extra time sharing what’s going on outside of work. Maybe someone’s kid is sick, or there’s a 5k someone is running this weekend. Whatever the case is, our coworkers are a constant in our otherwise hectic life. It’s good to share, and even vent, with the people we spend half of our waking-day with.
Be kind, be aware, be together
There’s a quote that comes mind when I think about working remotely: “Be kind; You never know what someone is going through.” There’s so much meaning people look for at work that goes beyond the day to day drudgery of work itself: the camaraderie, character development, the learning, failing, and succeeding as a team rather than as individuals.
There’s no way to be a perfect workplace for everyone, but amongst the best gifts a successful remote workplace offers is the lesson in what it truly takes to work as a team on a mission when we don’t have the luxury of being right next to one another.
It gets us back to the basics: be kind, be aware, be together.
By Alex Yohn
Apr 26, 2018
Most of my career has been in start-ups, and the role I often admire most within them is customer support. A great customer support leader influences the entire company. She or he shares our story with our customers and creates bridges to success for them even when the product fails (which inevitably, every product will at some point). They also share our customers’ stories internally, helping the team gain valuable perspective as we move forward. As the voice and advocate of the user within the team, customer support informs the product perhaps more than anything else.
I met Melissa almost seven years ago at a restaurant tech start-up we were working at together. She had such a knack for the customer service role that she went on to not only run the division, but occasionally beat our sales teams’ numbers with her happy customers constantly investing more in us.
When the time came for Kin to develop a better customer service philosophy, she quickly proved she would be an excellent fit to spearhead the mission. I could go on and on about why we’re lucky to have Melissa, but I would rather her introduce herself in her own words.
Without further ado, here’s Melissa, hailing from Chittenango, New York.
Melissa, pictured with her fiancé, Francesco, and their dog, Penny.
What about customer service attracts you to the field?
First and foremost, I love people. I’m the kind of person who strikes up a conversation in line at the grocery store. I really enjoy making connections with people, finding common ground, and just being a good human. If I can do that in my career, I’m fulfilling a personal need to interact with people.
Obviously without customers, companies wouldn’t exist. I learned very early in my career from a mentor and friend that customers are always the #1 priority, and we should always strive to make their experience the most amazing one, even in difficult situations. I’ve carried that philosophy with me and find that I can work through any situation if I’m taking that approach.
I’m right-brain-leaning, so I enjoy that everyday is different and the creativity that goes into finding new solutions. Plus, the feeling of helping someone find what they’re looking for, or working through a problem together, is a good one.
Why did you choose Kin as your next move?
There are many reasons!
I chose Kin because I am doing what I love: helping customers. I also have the opportunity to shape the future of customer service in Kin, which is a mighty responsibility but a welcomed one.
Technically speaking, Kin is also really strong when it comes to SaaS in that the software is user friendly, intuitive, and does what we promise it will do. Plus, we have a great development team which is so important for the future of Kin.
Next, Kin’s mission of creating healthier, happier workplaces really resonated with me during our initial discussions. I can’t think of one person I know who hasn’t had a bad experience in a work environment. It’s exciting that we’re taking on a big challenge of improving the state of work around the world.
Last but certainly not least, the level of talent across the team makes it inspiring to come to work every day.
Tell me a bit about your past experience, in your own words.
My career has been mostly customer-service based, with some management and sales peppered in.
I started in retail (which I really enjoyed, I know I’m not in the norm), working for a business in my hometown of Binghamton, NY. I learned so much working with the owner, Tom. He was the friend and mentor mentioned above that taught me the fundamentals of customer service and business that I would carry through my career.
From there, I moved into the call center world, focusing on managing, training, and recruiting. I was then hired into a customer service role for a SaaS company focused on restaurant recruiting, where I quickly built a team and the customer service philosophy alongside none other than Kin’s CEO, Lisa Arnold!
I spent the better part of six years there, eventually moving into a sales relations/marketing role working with major franchise brands.
What do you like to do when you’re not at work?
Spending time with my fiance, Francesco, and our dog, Penny, is high on my list. Most days, you’ll find me in the kitchen creating something delicious and taking pictures of it or checking out the newest local restaurant. Exploring local attractions and historic places are always a fun pastime, too. I also enjoy singing, reading, yoga, and the occasional dance party. I am really good at having fun no matter what I’m doing!
On the weekends, I’m likely in my hometown hanging out with my family, especially with the world’s most adorable nephews, though I may be biased.
By Alex Yohn
Apr 16, 2018
When we first launched Kin in 2013, digitizing the workplace for small and medium sized companies was in its early stages (large employers were already well serviced by companies like SAP and Oracle). Along with competitors like Bamboo, Namely and Gusto, we focused on improving the core operations we knew would help smaller organizations be more competitive employers, like new hire onboarding and workplace organization. Our view has always been that if the workplace is a product, employees are its consumers. Create a bad workplace and you lose your customers. It’s called employee churn, and our goal has always been to help reduce it.
Fast forward to 2018, and you’re likely working at a company using a slew of digital workplace tools. Your payroll is digital, your benefit enrollment and paperwork too. Throw in stalwart communication tools like Slack and Basecamp, and it’s more efficient than ever to run a workplace. While our industry has made a lot of progress in efficiency benchmarking though, our team team doesn’t think the mission is accomplished.
According to Gallup research, employee engagement has barely budged in the past five years, and that’s got us scratching our heads. Why, after all of the work we’ve done to improve core operations at small companies, is there still a big problem with churn? Employees are quitting, and employers can’t stop them. What gives?
This industry naval gazing hasn’t phased many of our competitors who are doubling down on workers comp insurance products, payroll, and benefit management. In our eyes though, that’s not solving the problem our companies have, so we’re doubling down on the original course of helping companies be better employers.
With that, we’ve reassessed what our own mission at Kin should be and, while it hasn’t upended the product itself, it has shifted the way our team views its role in improving how we spend a third of our lives (at work!). This renewal in purpose has not only shined a light on a growing problem, it’s shown us the ways Kin falls short and needs to improve if we’re to really live up to our promise.
So, what’s the Kin mission?
Kin is on a mission to improve the employee experience at organizations of all sizes.
Why is this important? Engagement and fulfillment at work aren’t just “nice to haves,” and we know that helping organizations and employees be more empathetic means we’re not only improving retention and profitability, but we’re helping everyone get more out of life than just work, work, work.
How do we do this? Kin approaches employee engagement in a no-BS way. We don’t promote lofty, unproven theories from PhD’s or hide behind multi-year implementation plans. Rather we focus on proven methods which yield better employee sentiment and quantifiable metrics to prove it (to us and our customers) and, believe it or not, simple workplace tools like proactive time off policies do just that.
What this means for the product.
There are three words we’d like our customers to use to describe Kin, and that’s how we’re designing our roadmap: Insightful, proactive, and efficient.
Be Insightful
Kin should help employers and employees learn what makes them tick as organizations and individuals. We’ll do that through a combination of quantifiable metrics and goals, and tools that encourage more productive and empathetic communication at work.
Be Proactive
Kin needs to do more of the thinking, rather than waiting around to take orders. Workplace trends such as time off utilization and manager/employee engagement patterns can help workplaces get out in front of potential causations of employee turnover, such as burnout and isolation.
Be Efficient
Kins needs to be more operationally efficient as a tool, pure and simple. We’re chipping away at bottlenecks across the product to help get our users out of the browser and back to work. From navigation, to better new user onboarding, a large part of our roadmap is simply improving the product based on the ample customer feedback we’ve received over the years.
We have a lot of work to do.
How our company is adapting.
Our company itself is adapting as well. While we’re still entirely self-funded, we’ve increased the team’s dedication and alignment for a business that, in our opinion, hasn’t seen its best years yet. Our CEO, Lisa Arnold, took the helm last fall and brings both urgency and vibrancy to Kin’s presence. Our engineering team, led by Grant Black, has risen to the challenge to rise above pure production and drive the product. Our design efforts, led by Gage Salzano, have shined a new light on both Kin’s visual identity and its UI experience. As for me, well, I’m still the founder who sat in front of a whiteboard back in 2012 and saw a need for a company just like ours to lead the way to better places to work.
Here’s Kin, with a bow on it.
I’ll admit I’m a sucker for a great tagline. A successful tagline acts as a landmark for a brand, a place to come home to. To be proud of. To remind us why we’re here. To even seek out when we’ve lost our way. Kin’s new tagline “We build healthier, happier workplaces.” sure seems aspirational doesn’t it?
For me, our new tagline is impactful for a few reasons. It denotes our responsibility to not just show the way, but to build it. It rises above pure technology as a solution. It shouts out from the rooftop that there is an ideal workplace out there, but most companies have a long way to go to get there. Most of all, it speaks to an idea we want every person either using or working on Kin to resonate with: We spend too much of our lives working to spend so much time exhausted and ready to throw in the towel.
It’s time to make a change.
By Alex Yohn
Feb 27, 2018
If you’re an employer who hires globally, you’ve likely heard rumblings about the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the effect it will have on personal data-processing technology. We’re here to chat a bit more about that and how it will affect you and your usage of People by Wagepoint.
Regardless of where you are headquartered, if you hire in the EU, have current employees in the EU or store vendor data that includes personal information about individuals within the EU, GDPR compliance is not optional, it is mandatory. Not complying with certain provisions of GDPR, such as processing data in an unlawful way, can result in a fine of up to €20 million or 4% of your gross profit, whichever is more.
What is GDPR, exactly?
GDPR is a law that aims to strengthen European Union residents’ rights to privacy and protect their personal data. It will come into effect fully across all European member states as of May 25, 2018. Organizations and tools that collect personal data from EU residents must be compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in order to continue conducting business within the EU.
People by Wagepoint plans to be a GDPR-compliant HRIS/employee engagement tool as of the May deadline. We are currently taking all of the necessary steps within our app’s features and security surrounding said features to ensure we’re good to go. As we finalize the steps toward compliance, we’ll be sure to keep you posted via our blogs, emails and in-app messaging.
Becoming GDPR compliant is a multi-step process. It includes not only the security framework and feature reconfiguration, it also focuses allowing users (not just employers) to have access to their personal data entirely, and to have the ‘right to be forgotten,’ or RTBF, which is pivotal to GDPR.
RTBF allows employees to refuse having their data stored online as well as reserve the right to have their personal data deleted at any time within any application that their employer (or any organization) uses. Of course, there are certain pieces of information that employers who have legitimate interest can fight to keep, such as signed NDAs or other agreements between two parties that may later need to be used for arbitration. You can learn more about what you can and cannot keep as a GDPR-compliant employer here.
While People by Wagepoint is making sure that its tool is GDPR compliant, it is up to your organization to be responsible in complying with GDPR requirements from the perspective of what the law calls the “data controller.”
A data controller is you. The definition of it means that your organization is determining the purposes and means of progressing personal data. IE: You’ve hired someone and now you need to have them onboarded and store personal information on them within your People by Wagepoint system.
That’s where People by Wagepoint comes in as a “processor.” A processor is defined as a person or agency that processes personal data on behalf of the data controller.
It’s important for you to take time to understand the laws of GDPR as a data controller before it takes effect in May. Just because the tools you use are GDPR compliant, does not mean that you as a data controller are automatically compliant as well.
While People by Wagepoint is not a legal consultant, we do know that great employers want to be prepared for when things change. There are a number of great resources to help you understand your responsibilities under GDPR. We’ll continue to post helpful blogs along the way, so be sure to check back often!
Here are a few other articles and posts to check out in the meantime:
What is GDPR? Wired explains what you need to know
The Law Society: Obligations of the Data Controller
What are you doing to make sure that you stay GDPR compliant?