My guest on this week's episode is Ian White, Founder and Chief Executive Officer at ChartHop, one of the fastest growing and most exciting new technologies in our space. ChartHop has grown by more than 10X since the start of the pandemic and has a prestigious list of investors, including Andreessen Horowitz. Josh Bersin recently highlighted ChartHop as “a cool tool that displays every piece of data you need in a visual way” which is high praise indeed and deservedly so. Ian believes that when people have the full context, know what they are trying to achieve together, know their roles and fundamentally trust that Managers and Leaders are transparent and fair, you can achieve great things.

You can listen to this week’s episode below, or by using your podcast app of choice, just click the corresponding image to get access via the podcast website here.

In our conversation, Ian and I discuss:

• How Ian's own experience as a customer of HR Tech helped inspire him to build and scale ChartHop

• How to bring data to life so that it is accurate, accessible and applicable and so leads to actionable insights

• Why agility, organisational design and workforce planning all need to evolve, to support the world of hybrid work

• How CHROs can build on the last year and have an ability to experiment, to explore and to respond quickly

• How having the right people data in place supports a business operating in a fast paced environment.

This episode is a must listen for anyone interested in technologies that help organise, manage and visualise people data so that it drives actionable insights. So that is Business Leaders, CHROs and anyone in a People Analytics, Workforce Planning or HR Business Partner role.

Support for this podcast is brought to you by charthop. To learn more, visit https://www.charthop.com/digitalhr.

Interview Transcript

David Green: Today, I am delighted to welcome Ian White, Founder and CEO of ChartHop to The Digital HR Leaders Podcast. It is great to have you on the show, welcome. Can you provide listeners with a brief introduction to you, your background and also your role at ChartHop and also a bit about ChartHop as well?

Ian White: Sure, great to be here. I have always been passionate about the intersection between people and technology. I think technology is only as good as its impact on human beings. So I built various startups. I was the first Head of Engineering at Business Insider and other media type companies. But at the first company that I founded, Sailthru, we went into hyper growth. We went from 2 people to 200, in under three years. When you are hiring that quickly and the org is changing that quickly, I saw first hand the pain points of scaling a team without the tools or technology to plan that growth with intention and clarity. And so once I left Sailthru, I consulted with a number of organisations, everything from scaling startups to public companies and I realised that the pain points that I had experienced, the constant exporting of data from different systems and the V lookups and pivot tables to get basic answers. The fact that all the strategic work happened in these stale, manual, instantly out of date spreadsheets, was endemic to all these companies. It wasn't just a startup problem, it was an organisational problem. So I felt there had to be a better way. So with a lot of feedback from HR and Executive Leaders across many companies, I set out to build ChartHop the world's first org management platform, that brings people data to life. It centralises data from across your HR and Financial Tech stack and not only does it bring all your people data together, for example, if you have got some US-based team members on ADP and other international employees on some different system, you can finally bring them all together on one strategic platform. It also streamlines people teams workflows by connecting key systems throughout the people management process.

So for example, your HRIS to your ATS, your ATS to your identity management systems, performance and compensation data, we bring it all together. Unlike most legacy people systems, we don't just store the data, ChartHop also makes it easily actionable with custom insights and colour coded visualisations.

And so the power of bringing this data to life through action is unmatched.

David Green: Great. That is a big challenge that you are trying to solve with ChartHop. As the company has been set up, how have the problems that you are trying to solve for customers evolved?

Ian White: Well I started ChartHop because of a problem I had faced myself. I was a Business Leader at a fast growing organisation and I wanted to have a comprehensive way to understand my people data. So at my last company, I was spending hours pulling information together, pulling it out of the HRIS, pulling it out of other systems and building out tables in Excel or Google sheets when I was making critical decisions on how to promote, how to build hiring plans, how to define compensation and levelling across the company.

The past year has taught us that org’s aren't all prepared for the unexpected because they don't actually have a full understanding of their people and their business. That is where ChartHop comes in, by giving HR and Business Leaders the tools that they need to make strategic decisions, that propel their business and most importantly their people, forward.

David Green: If we get to some specifics now, what are some of the biggest challenges that your clients face, particularly organisations that are scaling, with regards to people data analysis?

You have talked about some of those, but maybe there are some examples that can bring it to life a bit?

Ian White: When you are scaling quickly, the organisation is changing every day. So giving people that real time insight into, where is their organisation today, what is the state of open roles, understanding past, present and future and having everyone have a shared picture of that past and present future, drives alignment and drives better decision making. When you are planning, the first is planning and the second is even harder than planning, it is articulating and communicating that plan to the org and doing that in real time, as things are changing. There is a lot of funding happening right now, a lot of scaling companies that have big, aggressive growth plans and a lot of those companies think that you can just hire a bunch of people and throw them into the fire and it will all sort of work out. But that often results in a mismatch between the people and the actual needs of the business. So being intentional, transparent and directional about what is it that you were actually trying to accomplish for your business and where you want it to go, starting there can give teams the context they need to get their work done and it helps you hire the right people at the right time. One of our customers for example, it was a fast growing Ed Tech startup, they use ChartHop to align both his board and his staff to the same hiring plan. They didn't have one picture of it and now with ChartHop, they did. It took the plans that were being made at the Board level, from pie in the sky to clear and action oriented, in align with the everyday reality of employees. Another one of our customers, Starburst Data, use ChartHop to find that their Marketing Team hadn't grown at nearly the same rate as their Sales Team. So when they addressed this imbalance, they were able to grow the prospect pipeline, to adequately feed their reps the leads that they needed to unlock the go-to market growth that they needed to accomplish their unicorn scale goals. When you are planning, it is vital to have an aligned plan, but beyond that, it is then vital to have contextual data that is in real time and that can inform your strategy. So customers use ChartHop to conduct weekly one-on-ones with employees, which especially with people working remote, can humanise the relationship and address any issues before they become a big issue. So they can use ENPS surveys in ChartHop, to understand engagement and overall happiness. And then you can take that data on engagement and motivation and the real time loop of weekly one-on-one data and bring in performance data and understand and analyse where do they have attrition risks? Where do they have skill gaps that are in need of attention? What does a succession plan look like if there are risk factors?

Finally and I think this has been one of the most meaningful things in the last year, especially, is taking DEI goals from awareness to action. Every company wants to solve or improve their progress on diversity, equity and inclusion, but being able to embed those goals in companies from day one, with the ability to visualise and track data over time, informing your People Leaders of any gaps in pay, gaps in representation, Leaders can understand more intentionally where they are and scale their orgs with a rich range of identities and perspectives that ensure the company is staying on the cutting edge of innovation. That ability to visualise, to analyse and to track and manage, can help achieve those goals for an organisation, which are just as critical as the other people goals that an organisation has set out to accomplish.

David Green: And I guess from, from listening to you, some of those key things is the ability to bring that information together in a transparent enough way, that actually drives action because ultimately it is great to get the insights, but what you want to do is drive actions from it. DEI clearly is an area where that has to happen because we have just been reporting stuff for too long, we need to take action on it now.

Ian White: That's right and legacy systems, which are usually HR systems, are built to store data but not necessarily to derive insight or intelligence from it or to really use it. So it is no good just storing or recording information, you want to actually have the tools you need to be able to plan and take action, measure your progress over time, see the impact on scenarios or processes you are running across the organisation and really be able to get out of the spreadsheets and into a system of record, that helps drive people strategy for everyone.

David Green: You talk passionately today and I have seen you speaking passionately before about the importance of bringing data to life, that was a great example there. In your view, what makes the difference between organised data and data that leads to actionable insights?

Ian White:  So to make data actionable, it needs to be accurate, accessible and applicable. So firstly, automatically collecting and organising the data, removes a lot of the manual work and human error. You want to have this real source of truth for the people who need it. What we find is we have much higher adoption rates for employee use of our platform and for everyone's use of the platform, because it saves a ton of time when you have this data from all your HR system. So step one is, bring the data together, but then it is important that you have easy ways to organise and drive insights from that data. ChartHop gives the ability to slice and dice by virtually any filter or field. We have got a really advanced analytics system under the hood, which unlocks all kinds of tailored insights. So for example, you could have a really good aggregate ENPS score for the organisation and feel like, all right, our work is done here, we have got a great top level number. But if you look more closely at the number, you could find that maybe Caretakers as a group have given low scores. So when you can use the data to identify the most pressing problems, you can then create informed ways and action plans to solve the problems. The reason I started with an org chart as the first visualisation that I built is, it is true that a picture is worth a thousand words and it is probably worth even more numbers because when you are strategically using colour to organise and format your data, you are drawing your eye directly to the matter at hand. We hear a lot of customers telling us that part of the magic of using ChartHop is that their planning meetings went from “oh yeah, great effort on this” or “what assumptions did you use here?” So almost questioning of the data. When people see it visually that conversation instead goes to “okay, I see the issue. what are the next steps?” It helps people tell data-driven stories that are informed by the actual information, that can help create the change and alignment that HR Leaders are trying to create in the organisation.

David Green: It sounds like you have designed the platform so that it can be used by Executives, by HR Professionals but also by others in the business as well. Is that one of the foundational building blocks that you are trying to achieve?

Ian White: I think for communication and alignment, it is really critical to have a single place, that everyone understands, is the up-to-date source of truth on what is happening with the organisation. Of course, different types of data may not be appropriate to share with the whole organisation and there is confidential and private data that must stay confidential and private. But you want to be able to give everyone, whether it is new entry-level employees who are navigating the organisation for the first time, or it is a tenured employee who wants to understand the structure of the team they are on, or it is an experienced Manager trying to understand what headcount is available and how that might match up to the headcount requests on a peer team.

So many different use cases of understanding, navigating and mapping your organisation are for not just the Leadership Team or the Executive Team, but for everyone. That is part of what ChartHop is built for, it is a transparent aligned source of truth for the whole organisation.

David Green: So not all of us, but a lot of us have been working exclusively from home for about a year now, maybe over a year in fact, in some cases. I know that you have experienced incredible growth as a company, since the pandemic began. Why do you think demand for solutions like ChartHop, has accelerated during that time and do you see that sustaining in the future?

Ian White: Gosh, it’s been some year. It was a year and a couple of weeks ago that I shut down our office and said let's all work from home for a couple of weeks, just in case this pandemic thing starts becoming a big deal.

And here we are, we have embraced fully remote. I think for us, it has been an incredible year for us, our business has grown almost 10X over this past year. The pandemic, I think, put a spotlight on so many issues in the workplace that had previously been ignored or under addressed. So systemic racism, lack of clarity on decision-making, proactive planning, pay equity, remote work and more. In some ways this pandemic accelerated a lot of trends and things that were already there but it brought them to the surface. Even just basics of who is who and who does what around here wasn't easily answered before, but now that you have people on-boarding remotely and not in one office and remote almost becomes this default expectation, this becomes even more important. And so all of these are issues that ChartHop addresses, having a clear system of record, a distributed knowledge share for a distributed organisation becomes even more important. So people, organisations, everyone, needs ways to plan for an uncertain future and they need to do so in a way that is fair and equitable and humanises the employee experience. So we are seeing, across the broader lens, an emergence of a lot of vertical solutions to address employee engagement or performance management and so on, but with that, it is frustrating to have to bounce between 40 different applications every day and a lot of those tools become one-off tools that people only log into when they are asked to by the HR team. And so we have built Charthop to be integrations first, connected first and API first. I think this year, with all of the changes, it also taught us that top down approaches to work don't always work, especially in a globally distributed workforce. I think that distributing access to information and ownership over key business functions, those who understand the business, understand people most, like Middle Management, empowering your Middle Management Leaders will be a major competitive advantage for companies.

David Green: Yeah, I know you talked about the ability to bring in survey data for example, we have been seeing companies have been generally speaking, surveying more regularly during the pandemic. Thank God they have been actually looking at prioritising employee wellness as part of that. But ultimately, if you want to act on that data, it is Middle Managers that really need to act on that and where issues have been raised, communicating that we are going to do something about it, what we are going to do and how are we going to do it. Interestingly I smiled when you talked about how the pandemic accelerated a lot of trends that were happening, we had Michael Arena from Amazon Web Services, on the Podcast a few months ago and it was exactly that. The fact that we were talking about how, we were going to get there anyway, but the pandemic has just put it up like that.

Your 10X growth over the last year is probably similar to the speed in which we have increased moving towards the future of work, if we want to call it the future of work. So if we look forward to the future of work, I am not going to hold you to anything that you say around this, do you think organisations are becoming more proactive and preparing in advance for a world which is likely to be more hybrid working than the pre pandemic? It would be quite interesting to understand your views around agility, organisational design and workforce planning and how you see that evolving over the next couple of years?

Ian White: I think many of us are just embracing that the future of work is hybrid, maybe that is scary for some and that is exciting for others, but I think we have all recognised that there are some incredible strengths to remote work and there are some incredible strengths to in-person models. The flexibility of work is going to grow and so strategic and forward thinking Leaders are building that infrastructure for hybrid models now. ChartHop is a tool that our customers are using to support remote and hybrid workforces by fostering collaboration, supporting asynchronous and agile work and taking the guesswork out of planning. Understanding workforce planning may sound sometimes like an abstract concept, but it is all about understanding your people, their passions, their skills, their professional ambitions and with tools that support that data collection, you can plan your workforce knowing exactly who you need and what you need them to do. And then you can create a strategy to either see your existing team members to the needs of the business or source it externally for what the organisation and the people in it, most need.

David Green: I think this is where tools like ChartHop are really showing their value. In HR for so long, we have had all these silos, a silo looking at learning, a silo looking at planning and talent strategy, a silo looking at recruitment and I think what tools like ChartHop can do is they bridge the gap between and they break down those silos, so we start looking at things in a much more holistic way. Like you said, planning is as much about developing our people as it is deciding about what to put in which box.

Ian White: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. It is not just about having rigid ideas about the future and how you get there, it is about embracing that the future is uncertain. None of us know what the next year is truly going to bring. At the beginning of 2020 all of our plans changed and so if we embrace the fact that we want our organisations to be anti-fragile, we want our planning emotion to be continuous. When we can embrace that we have multiple scenario contingency plans that respond to future outcomes, both good and bad, we can be more prepared to switch things up swiftly as needed and communicate those plans out to the organisation.

I think the future is all about experimentation, learning from mistakes and building our ability to respond, even when we don't truly know what is going to happen next.

David Green: To pick up on that experimentation point, it is a really good point, because there is not going to be a one size fits all, even within companies, around hybrid working. There is a little bit of understanding employee preferences, understanding the business need and there is understanding the task at hand. In terms of helping your clients understand hybrid work and are you looking at things around, for example, activities that can be done independently, remotely, maybe more productively and other tasks that you would do together, collaborate, more innovative tasks, is that the sort of thing that you are helping your clients with?

Ian White: When you are doing any kind of talent mapping or any kind of planning, you want to understand both the people. What are their preferences? What are their skills? What does that look like? And what is the job function? How much of this job function needs to be in person? How much might be more optimal in person, but can be done remotely? How much maybe is more optimal remotely? Then you want to be able to map the different job functions, you want to be able to map that to employee skills and map that to employee preferences and understand where there is a gap. Because I don't think there is a one size fits all, for sure, what one organisation chooses is not necessarily going to make sense for a different organisation's culture, goals or strategy, but a data-driven approach to answering these questions can help bring a company to the right decisions that are going to make sense for any given region or part of their org.

David Green: You talked about experimentation and I think there is an opportunity here for Business Leaders and for HR Leaders to actually experiment a little bit around ways of working. Moving forward, how can they do that? How can CHROs and Business Leaders intentionally keep what has been built over the last year, an ability to experiment, to explore and to respond quickly amongst other things. How can we keep the good stuff that we have had from the last year and keep that moving forward?

Ian White: Well that is always a challenge, right? You always have to learn and determine what we can take. I think the good to take from the last year is the understanding that we need better, more flexible, more fluid, more anti-fragile, more continuous means of managing organisational change. I think if we have the understanding that, as an organisation, it is not top-down, we are all in it together. If we can get the right information and context to everyone in the organisation, about what we are trying to accomplish and then we can get the right information, both bottoms up and top down so that the organisation can react quickly to changes. I don't know, hopefully we won't have another pandemic, but if there is one thing I am sure of is that the 2020’s will be full of changes and things that organisations will want to be poised to react quickly to. Having the data all in one place, having the tools to iterate on that data and having the means to communicate their plans and decisions and build tight feedback loops, I think, is going to be what determines the organisations that succeed the best and react and adapt the quickest.

David Green: Yeah, what has been interesting over the last year, we have been watching some of the clients, how they have used people data initially to help drive business continuity. So for example one pharmaceutical distribution company, actually used people analytics to predict when they would need to close their distribution centre on the East Coast and were able to put contingency plans in place. As we have talked about the whole collection of data and doing regular surveys to understand how employees are feeling, either those employees who have got to continue traveling into work because they are working on a production line versus those that are suddenly remote. Then, moving through to what a lot of organisations are doing now which is trying to understand new ways of working and how that might work in a hybrid environment. It is really, really interesting and shows the power as you said, if you have got this data, ideally in one place, it is a lot quicker to do that analysis and come up with those recommendations.

What advice would you give to CHROs and Heads of HR when trying to engage more effectively and efficiently with Business Leaders? We see this sometimes as an area of potential improvement.

Ian White: I think a lot of the issues that we have experienced this past year are falling directly on HR's shoulders.

That has been a challenge for HR, but I think that also has elevated the role and the impact of HR in today's workforce. It has always been a strategic function, HR Leaders know that, but Business Leaders are now recognising it as such. So I think we need to equip HR Leaders with the tools to empower them to do their most important work and to do this work, which affects the company's most important investment, their people, HR Leaders should feel confident in advocating for what their team needs. Just because you can do something in spreadsheets, doesn't mean you should. You will spend more time on the spreadsheet gymnastics, instead of thinking about the strategy, executing the strategy and sharing the strategy. And when HR Leaders have easy and clear visual ways to showcase their successes and how their initiatives tie directly into business outcomes, they have a powerful tool to support their work and advocate for their people to other Business Leaders.

David Green: So it is that thing when you get asked a question by a Business Leader, can you give them an answer quite quickly. As you said, if you are having to manipulate loads of Excel sheets, it is going to take time especially if you are bringing data in from so many different sources, cleaning it and everything else and then testing it is actually right. Then even more than that, it is actually being proactive, being part of those discussions and actually saying, did you know? Have you seen this? Do you know if we did this, this would happen? And I guess that is the difference, as you said, HR has really been elevated over the past year and I think those HR Leaders who have great data, have great People Analytics Teams, have good stakeholder equity, are the ones that are really helping make an impact on their organisations.

I don't know if you have got any examples, you might not be able to name names, but any examples of organisations that you are working with and have seen that happen?

Ian White: Yeah. I think it is not just getting to the answers quickly, which is critical because if a business is changing quickly you need to have your pulse on the data, but with also being able to present that data in a way that drives the positive change and that people can really see and understand. I think ultimately data is as good as what you do with it and giving people the means to present that data and share that data in a way that is going to help people understand the challenge, is really important.

David Green: Last question to finish. I think we could probably talk all afternoon Ian, because we have got a shared passion. We are asking all of our guests, on this series, this particular question. How does having the right people data in place, support a business operating in a fast paced environment? I appreciate it we have been talking about this throughout our conversation, so you might just want to give the number one or top three benefits of having the right people data in place, if you had to choose of course.

Ian White: I would say, it all goes back to what makes data actionable when it is accurate, accessible and applicable. When people and the whole organisation are grounded in shared knowledge and shared context, they are better equipped to steer the business towards outcomes that are better. Towards more agile futures and more equitable and inclusive futures as well and data can reshape organisations for the better.

David Green: Great. Lovely and well succinctly put. Ian, thanks for being a guest on The Digital HR Leaders Podcast, can you let listeners know how they can stay in touch with you, follow you on social media and find out more about ChartHop?

Ian White: Well, we are charthop.com. We have got a lot of materials on our website, including some guides to everything from a remote compensation strategy to DEI initiatives. I am @eonwhite on Twitter, I am also ian@charthop if you want to get in touch. I love hearing from both customers and other folks in the industry that are working on these challenges and love to hear from you.

David Green: Ian, it has been a pleasure having you on our show so thanks very much for taking the time and sharing your passion with our listeners. I think that it will go down very well.

Ian White: Thank you so much. I really appreciate the time.