285. "I built OfficeVibe & here's why most HR Tech doesn't work," with Jeffrey Fermin

0:00Leanne:A few months ago, I posted on LinkedIn. I was venting a bit, you know how it is. And I listed 50 things I wanted to throw in the bin. I think I actually said I wanted to banish them in 2026. It was things like Myers-Briggs, Gen Z bashing, January, and also a little piece of software called Office Vibe. And then something pretty mortifying happened. One of the comments came back and it said, hi, I'm a co-founder of Office Vibe. Awkward. But he did say as well, I 100 % agree with you. So I immediately DM'd him. It turns out he's not only one of the most refreshingly honest people in HR tech, he's also spent 15 years watching the industry he helped to create fail to actually solve the problem it promised to fix.

0:46Yeah, Jeffrey Fermin, I hope I'm saying that right, Spanish pronunciation. Jeffrey built one of the first employee pulse survey platforms back in 2011. There's now almost 200 of them, I think. And yet employee disengagement seems basically unchanged. So today he's going to tell us exactly why and what he thinks it's going to take to actually fix it.

1:06Leanne:This one is going to be uncomfortable, but in a really good way. Hello and welcome to Truth, Lies and Work, the award-winning podcast where behavioral science meets workplace culture. Brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. My name is Leanne. I'm a Chartered Occupational Psychologist. My name is Al. I'm a business owner. And we are here to help you simplify the science of work. Now, Geoffrey co-founded Office Vibe back in 2011. And as I said, it was one of the very first employee pulse survey platforms before it was acquired and became what's now known as Work Leader.

1:39He's now head of demand generation at All Voices, an employee relations platform. And he also hosts the People First podcast. Basically, if there's a problem in the HR tech world, Geoffrey has either tried to solve it or is currently building the thing that might actually solve it.

1:53Leanne:And he's here because I publicly called out his software on LinkedIn and he replied to say he agreed. So after this quick break, we'll find out what Jeffrey hoped to fix when he did start Office 5 and why 15 years later, the problem may still very much be alive. HubSpot makes impossible growth impossibly easy for their customers. And here's a perfect example. Lee, your turn. Morehouse College needed to reach new students with fresh, engaging content, But with a massive 900-page website, even the tiniest updates took 30 minutes to publish. Breeze, which is HubSpot's collection of AI tools, helped them write and optimize their content in just a fraction of the time.

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2:48my name is jeffrey fedming i always like to pronounce it the spanish way but everyone could call it the typical english way uh with that said jeffrey fedming i am the head of demand generation at all voices i run an awesome podcast called people first where i sit down with uh content creators in the hr tech industry and we just talk about what's going on in the world of work, so to speak. What am I most famous for? I don't think fame is the right word, but I am best known for starting Office Vibe, one of the first post-survey platforms, People Analytics Tools, back in 2011. It came from a great place.

3:24We wanted to solve the disengagement issue and came up with a fun, unique post-survey system that encouraged people to really talk about some of the things going on in their office. I also want to highlight that fast forward 13, 14 years, however long it's been since 2011. I don't know how to do math. I now serve as the advisor for a similar company called Hoogly.ai, and we are solving employee engagement by having, you know, contextual data or, you know, just written responses, conversations had with AI and turning them into actionable takeaways that could help improve culture issues. So yeah, working on a lot of cool stuff.

4:04All Voices is fantastic. We're an employee relations platform. I am the connector of dots between employee relations and employee engagement nowadays. So I want to solve all the big workplace issues. Tell us, 15 years ago, you started Office 5. And now, what, 15 years later, you're now working on Hoogly or working with Hoogly. What did you hope to, what problem did you hope to fix when you started Office 5? And is that different to Hoogly now? I want to take a step back. I want you to meet Jeffrey 2011. Jeffrey back in 2011, very ambitious. And I wanted to start something with my friend Daniel at the time.

4:43And we we kept on finding all this research around work stress, you know, job dissatisfaction. dissatisfaction. Obviously, the big phrase is employee disengagement. Back then, 11 % of people were considered actively disengaged, meaning that they would go above and beyond to actually ruin their workplace and say, hey, I hate it so much here. I don't know what extremes they would go to, but they just would purposely go against their workplace. With that said, it was a very near and dear, you know, problem to fix, disengagement and just work stress in general, mostly because I saw my parents, what they had to go through working those long hours, working in corporate settings, and they never really got a voice in their workplace.

5:28And I wanted to sit down with Daniel and our team and figure out how could we do this? How could we figure out like, you know, what are the underlying issues within a workplace, whether they be cultural or larger, and how could we bring them to light to, you know, senior level people in a way that wouldn't scare them around making decisions when it came to culture. So we came up with a poll survey system. We used animations and different ways of kind of displaying, you know, emotions in there, you know, happy faces, sad faces, somebody walking on a rainy, cloudy, messy day outside versus sunny days to answer how are they feeling about work, right?

6:04Small little things like that were able to really reflect how people were feeling and capture the vibe of an office. And on the back end, we would have a full-fledged people analytics dashboard where all this information would be shown and displayed in a way that an HR person that might not necessarily have a data background, they could make actionable decisions that could literally help people's lives. So we started off with good intentions. We actually got Aqua hired in 2013-ish by GSoft Group out in Montreal. They now still run Office Vibe. It's called WorkLeap. And they've done some pretty good things with it.

6:41They've added a lot more like functionalities around it. With that said, you know, what am I doing at Hoogly now? And why is this still a problem 15 years later? Well, you know, we've seen things kind of stay and remain flat. There's, if you search in G2, how many employee engagement solutions there are, I believe it, there's nearly 200 or so. And then it's this whole, you know, field of different types of platforms. You'll have Lattice kind of touching on some things related to employee engagement. You'll have HRIS tools that have some kind of employee engagement component. Reality is there's not, in my opinion, not much has changed in terms of the tech being used.

7:23And a lot of the same issues are still kind of out there and prevalent where employees still feel actively disengaged or disengaged. Gardner studies have shown that, you know, it's been pretty stagnant. And what, So what can be done? Well, that's where I started kind of learning about Hoogly and what they were doing. I met Mo, the founder, and he pitched me this idea where, you know, can we get AI to actually have conversations with people? And with that, can we get large sets of contextual data to help understand what are some of the cultural issues that are happening within the workplace and how can we escalate them and obviously visualize them to an HR team or even just senior management teams?

8:03And that's where I've been kind of helping out. I've been bringing my perspective, bringing my ideas, my knowledge, my experience and and just trying to say, like, hey, you know, if we build a product to look and act a certain way, employees are going to love it. And more importantly, HR teams and senior management, they're going to be able to make decisions that truly impact lives, similar to what we saw in the early days of Office Vibe. So, yeah, I serve as their advisor while still doing all my work at All Voices. And like I said, I always like to say I'm blessed to be able to solve the full spectrum of employee issues, whether it's culture issues or just things that kind of require a little bit more, you know, I guess you could say compliance or employee relations issues.

8:49We're not short of data, are we, as business owners and HR teams? But I feel like, is there a gap for someone who actually could be able to translate that data into what I should actually do tomorrow to make it better? I'm going to get ahead of myself here. I want to get to a solution already. This is the beauty of AI. This is the beauty of the AI era. And whether it's systems like Hoogly or any of these others, you know, dare I say competitors, if they'd like to step up and really start finding ways to incorporate artificial intelligence, one, ethically, but to make sure that they do it in a way that that fits and suits and can actually, you know, get those bits of data and turn them into action.

9:31that's really the added benefit of having a data analyst with AI, right? Like you can see all these things that exist currently in whether it's numeric or, you know, quantitative, qualitative, right? You could grab all these things and say, wow, we're having, you know, 1 ,000 people complain around these issues. How should we approach this? What's the internal comm strategy? What is going to be the rollout of this? What's the ROI? You know, are there any other companies that have some sort of benchmark information for us to like make a change, right? Like, I think, you know, going back to the original question is like, yeah, a lot has changed, right?

10:09Technologically has changed. That's like, how can we incorporate the current existing technology and build on top of it? Because the issue that you've described, this one that's been far too long where, you know, we have all these datas where, you know, back in 2011, we were pioneering the big data space. And that's what everyone knew. We were competing back then with SurveyMonkey, Qualtrics, and then eventually Coltramp 15-5. We also started kind of like, you know, coming up in the same exact way. We addressed issues, but we never really were there with the follow through. And we never were able to kind of figure out how can we get, you know, companies to actually make changes.

10:49funny enough a lot of the times you know companies would come back to us and say hey we see that we get a lot of negative answers around this part of our culture what should we do and then it becomes us as a software provider to almost be an advisor of sorts and that was very strange early on not saying that's the case now I'm sure there's like you know recommendations and things to do but the actual rollout of a new initiative I'm sure it's something that you know with the help of AI and with all the advancements in technology, it could be a little bit more strategic as opposed to just like, you know, hey, we have data, let's make some changes.

11:26No, we could have an actual internal comm strategy. We could do like strategy planning sessions with, you know, higher ups in an organization. And it allows for organizations to make actionable changes with knowing what are the risks and more importantly, how it could affect the overall organization. I think you've touched on an issue there, which if you are a SaaS, then you are obsessed with MRR, so monthly recurring revenue, I believe it's called. So your incentive as a SaaS is to not solve the problem. How are we reconciling this, particularly in the modern apps where we want to have a problem, but then if we solve it, you don't get any money?

12:06Fantastic question. I always feel like people say, you know, great question, good question as a buffer. I actually mean that. That is a fantastic question. It is an issue that I've personally really don't like with the current state of SaaS where it just in general as a whole. I want to take a quick step back and say, like, I don't like the subscription economy as someone that has benefited from it. I truly don't like it. With that said, there are certain platforms that it makes sense. You're paying for, you know, upgrades, approvals. If you're going to get a video editing software, do you really need to be paying a monthly service?

12:39You know, can you just have the current iteration and just pay lifetime membership for that and then maybe have a SaaS component to it for upgrades, right? This is the main issue with HR tech. I think as a whole, not just, you know, post surveys, employee engagement software, and that we really have to determine like and complete opinion. I don't mean to cause waves throughout the industry here, but we really need to find a way to benefit organizations that isn't going to affect the bottom line so much. A lot of organizations are investing tens of thousands of dollars either a year or a month if they're a larger enterprise just to maybe solve a problem.

13:25I don't necessarily like that economy. And I think we, you know, there should be some kind of smarter rollout for, uh, for what's it called? Like, you know, working with these customers and almost acting as a partner, whether you want to maybe backload some of those contracts and say, Hey, let's work on the rollout initially. And then you can do like maybe 25 % upfront, let's get you activated and 75 % on the latter half, you know, something like that. I do. I'm very pro-consumer in that standpoint. I do feel like we do get a little, especially in the culture space, we do get disincentivized for just kind of like saying like, oh, we got this contract.

14:00There's nothing more to it. You know, they're going to collect all the information. We're going to have all this stuff. We're going to house their data. We're going to collect their information and keep all things safe. We're essentially paying for security at that standpoint because a lot of the information is anonymized or, you know, it's very sensitive to the culture. But like, we're not really acting, right? That goes to the previous answer, right? We're not acting on that data. We're encouraging you all to have it, but how do you all keep on going next? And for a long time, I think 14 years since I've been in the employee engagement space, there really hasn't been that solution where it's like, okay, well, you're paying us monthly.

14:42We're going to help you solve the issues. No, the engagement space, you're paying us monthly. We're going to let you know the issues and we'll just keep it in this dashboard. And I feel like that's very unfair to the consumer. I have to pitch Hoogly again because I do think this is a major differentiator, but there's a mentorship and continuous coaching component to it where if you continue talking to Venn, the AI employee engagement app that exists in Hoogly, you get more information on the coach. You're able to reveal different things. And then on the other end of the spectrum for HR people.

15:16You continuously work with all that information in order to address those issues. To the points that have been going on or to the point that we all were getting at earlier, it's always been a, you know, just like, here's the data, work with it. Okay, nothing else. You're going to pay us monthly and we're going to just keep throwing more shit your way and you have to figure it out. So too damn bad. Like that is not how HR works. They don't want more issues. They want to be aware of it and they want to be able to follow through. In charging this monthly subscription you're only making problems kind of pile on and you're not really able to act on it so yeah all that to say is i don't agree with the month the month to month uh it's month to month subscription just to have more shit thrown your way if i wanted to start some kind of hr tech how much of this should i be bringing in psychologists to help and how much do i just need to bring in nerds to write the code i think my biggest regret starting office vibe is claiming that we had like all this like scientific backing and the reality is we were just getting questions that existed from some research and then saying like science back questions uh granted things have changed now i'm sure you know they decided to tighten things up but you're working with assumptions from day one for a lot of these platforms especially like in the startup realm you're saying that like hey we found some research on this and we're going to tailor it to I do believe that especially in this realm, you know, organizational psychologists, they are needed to kind of help understand what could be very useful for larger scale organizations.

16:53A lot of the times companies are working off of assumptions and what they've gathered from a study or one little headline that they got and they were able to reverse engineer a solution for said headline. Once you start getting a little bit more scientific and start adding research to it and bringing some more folks or cooks and chefs in the kitchen to help kind of dissect what's going on, you can actually make some better breakthroughs instead of just assuming that things are going to work because you have a nifty product. So I just want to say that's one of my regrets. I actually, you know, love the fact that whether it's All Voices Hoogly or any of the newer HR tech companies out there, they are working with research, researchers and and organizational psychologists to kind of understand what goes into, you know, collecting all this information and the potential like potential long term effects of having something like, you know, a question being asked or a platform being introduced and decisions off of these platforms, what it could eventually lead to.

17:55So, yeah, I'd say it would be impactful. And I think we need to find ways to make it a little bit more widespread, not just in HR tech, but across, you know, every type of technology or every type of SaaS. Like, you know, the same way, I think we need designers on project management tools to help you kind of understand how to lay out information i mean there's there's so much benefits from having people that are knowledgeable around the subject matter um it could pay dividends when when you actually get pen to paper and start bringing those developers and the big brains in to start coming up with cool things so yeah totally agree with that and i think there's there's some apps out there let's i'm not picking on office i'm saying there's lots of them out there but they they may show you've got an 80 percent um sort of 80 % engagement rate, but you've got a 40 % turnover with you and I know that something's not right there.

18:49So are these apps just trying to show us what we want to see? So if we go back to that prior question, like, yeah, we, not only do we, we shovel more shit your way, but then we kind of tell you, uh, as, uh, you know, engagement platforms, we tell you like, look at this score that, that I did my proprietary, my proprietary score, this system, it shows that you have a 94 % survey response rate because you're sending out questions once a week or once every two weeks. And then you feel empowered where you're getting all this information. Maybe you're not acting through it, some of the negative feedback.

19:26But then you sit back that year and you notice that you had probably one of the worst years when it came to retention or turnover that year. That is just showing that you are a vitamin and not a painkiller. And and that's really where like some of these tools have historically failed. And, you know, you said it best. It's not nitpicking at Office Vibe. It's goodness. I don't want to like lay out all the logos, but, you know, you have 220 solutions out in the market right now. But yet you still have this engagement out there. You still have high turnover rates and cultural issues that are going beyond what's being shown on these systems and their proprietary scores.

20:10So, you know, what are we doing to address that? Is it useful at all? And where can you get to the nitty gritty things? Like, you know, one of the big complaints that I had working with my Office5 team is like, why did back then, granted, there are more evolved systems back then, like, why was it only 10 drivers when there's so many different things that go into an office? This is not just like, you know, manager to manager relationship, employee to employee relationships, corporate wellness. Like, no, how are how are people just overall like feeling about going about the future of the company, about the future of like innovation at the company?

20:46You know, I know Glassdoor has their like CEO approval thing, but how can we never like bake that into culture app or Office5 or even manager approval ratings? Like there's so many different ideas that that were never really brought to light. And to this day, there's a lot of engagement platforms that aren't bringing real true blue issues up to light. So, yeah, that's that's my two cents on it. I think a lot of these systems could be done better. And I hope that my advisor role at Hoobly, we were able to like really kind of, you know, keep on adding some features that are innovative like that, that actually address issues.

21:21So, yeah, we'll see. I mean, I'm I'm still excited. I'm still very much one of the people that want to drive change forward in the sector, but only time will tell how things will go. So what do you do differently? You said that people raise issues. You want to just not put that as a, oh, here's an issue on a dashboard. You want to deal with that issue. So how are you dealing with it? Going back to that example, so I know it's about their time. Employee engagement, employee relations, two separate kind of deals. I would say more culture and, you know, dare I say serious shit on the employee relations side.

21:53that's when things need to be addressed. It's way different than, there are two different products addressing two different issues, but both are very relevant to each other. So I want to talk about all voices a little bit. Whenever there is something that could put your business or your employee safety at risk, that's when it needs to go into all voices. So we provide a, you know, encrypted to way anonymous way of having employees report things that are going on. And it could be a wide range of topics. I always joke around and say, you know, sexual harassment, discrimination all the way to a oil spill.

22:28Not really, not definitely not a joking matter, but we cover that wide range of topics in there. Whenever an employee feels in danger, that's kind of what they need All Voices for, to help kind of, you know, have documentation on everything, to bring in certain stakeholders and really protect the employee as well as the business from, you know, something escalating. So All Voices does their best to be a good preventative way of keeping businesses and employees safe. And yeah, you know, we want to ensure business continuity, employee safety, and Claire has done a fantastic job from day one building this product up.

23:03And I really enjoy being the like, you know, one of the marketers on this team and really like getting that message out there that we exist just to like protect employees. You go on to the Hoogly end, that's where we get more into the culture side. And I don't want to promise any features, but we might even find a way to like kind of say, hey, if you need to escalate from Hoogly, go to All Voices. But I'll let all the tech teams and business people get involved with that. I just do a good job of working with both companies. But Hoogly is definitely more, you know, ground level grassroots, understanding what's going on in your workplace?

23:42You know, all those whispers of why I might not want to be here beyond a couple of months. You know, why are employees disengaged? Is it a leadership issue? Is it a, you know, I don't like the way that I'm being treated. I don't like my compensation. I don't like this, that, the third. So finding all the things that are day-to-day issues that really help us understand what's going on within a workplace that a lot of managers might not normally, I won't say care about, but a lot of managers might not necessarily be aware of. And these aren't things that are going to put, you know, a business in danger or an employee in danger, but it's going to put that turnover or retention percentage in danger where some folks might not like the workplace and they'll be able to write out why and really have a voice within their organization is to like you know really put all those issues to light i'm trying to think that if i was a ceo of a company and i had a platform something like you were talking about there with all voices then if it's anonymous anonymous sort of like tip off or whistle blow if that's the singular of it i might go oh maybe it's just someone who's a little bit annoyed with me they've had a shit day at work and they're just stirring the pot i mean how are we dealing with that i'm trying to put myself in the shoes of a person that would say that i or would address a situation like that.

25:07I do feel like when you go into the investigation within All Voices, you do need to provide evidence and you could upload files and, you know, you could eventually de-anonymize yourself and say like, hey, I'm this person. And like, this has actually been happening to me and I do want to escalate it and take it further. And I want to bring in stakeholders. So, yeah, there is the component to of like, you know, adding and uploading evidence and files and emails and all that, all the things that could help make that case. And from there, it's really up to HR compliance or employee relations specialists to then address and escalate that issue and figure out what's the best course of action, whether it's something as small as a performance improvement plan or maybe having to fire that person.

25:59If there's enough information for that, that does require termination and it is something that is putting either the business or an employee in danger, we take all those complaints very seriously and we make sure to house it and facilitate it and give HR and compliance officers everything they need to make the right decision. And granted, we do have AI recommendations, obviously not for, you know, how to approach the actual like final part of it, but we're going to have, you know, help guide you every sense of the way. And I know AI becomes scary in this HR space because it feels in HR space in general, because it feels like it is taken away from jobs and all these things.