We want to make people happy at work and we want to prove the ROI of a great employee experience
Let’s be honest, for most people working front line jobs in sectors like hospitality, retail, construction and social care, work is at best… a bit mediocre. If you ask someone how’s work? Invariably their response will be “yeah fine”.
Now I’m a pretty convinced atheist. I’m not expecting a sequel. And the idea that millions of people are spending so much of their time and talent on something that’s just “fine” really bugs me.In fact it’s bothered me for quite a while…Before I started Youda I spent 15 years working in the HR, People and Culture space.
As a consultant I used to help companies experiment with new management practices to try and try to find the Holy Grail… ways of working that not only made their people happier, but also made customers happier and increased profits.
Because I’ve always been convinced that if you’re serious about improving people’s employee experience, you have to do it in a way that also improves business performance. Otherwise it becomes an unsustainable fad.Youda was born out of fifteen years of firsthand experience… more than my fair share of “qualified successes” and a shed load of reading, research and reflection.
The real problem in people management is evidencing causation: what people management ‘tactics’, experiences or investments work for whom, when do they work and what’s the ROI to the business?
Or to put it another way: no one’s sure what actually works (and what doesn’t). There’s currently no way of proving an ROI in HR. And there’s no way of accurately predicting behaviour or business outcomes.
That’s the problem we’re going to fix.
To my knowledge, we’re the only HR tech company looking at this. Our secret weapon is a field of Machine Learning called causal inference.
Causal inference allows you to identify the causal relationships between variables in a larger system.It’s basically big fancy AI powered maths that will enable us to understand the causal relationships between people management tactics or investments and business outcomes.
But to make the big fancy maths model work, we have to feed it with new sources of data.
Start by automating our customers HR processes and connecting the data flows between their HR apps.
Why? Firstly because there’s an immediate benefit in terms of improving operational efficiency, reducing risk and creating a better experience for front line team members. Secondly, because this gives us new sources of data on people’s behaviour and attitudes at work… we’re not going to be able to do anything exciting with the big fancy maths model if all we feed it is name, role and NI number!
Give our customers the tools to start personalising their user journeys and to start experimenting with employee experiences.
Why? We think creating a personalised, responsive and meaningful experience is the key to creating an inclusive workplace that enables you to attract, engage and retain the best people. But also, enabling personalisation (variability) and A/B testing of different experiences will accelerate the pace at which we can train the model.
Getting the data model to work is one thing but we also need to make it useful to you.
That means we’ll need to hook the data model up to an LLM so you can ‘have a conversation’ with your data and get the insights you need to work out what’s working, what it’s worth to you and where you ought to focusing your efforts to improve.
We can even foresee a situation where you’ll be able to ask Youda speculative questions (”What’s the expected ROI of me investing in wellbeing training for my managers?”) or counterfactuals (Hey Youda, what would have happened to my employee turnover and labour costs for the last 6 months if I’d mandated that everyone had to get at least two days off every week?”). Pretty cool eh!
Start using AI agents to automate HR processes and data flows so our customers can realise huge productivity gains, reduce risk and create more personalised experiences for their people
The agents will enable us to create the holistic data on people's behaviour and experiences that we need to train the causal inference model
People Teams will be able to ‘have a conversation’ with their data, so you can get the insights you need to work out what’s working, what it’s worth to you and where you ought to focusing your efforts to improve.
We can even foresee a situation where you’ll be able to ask Youda speculative questions (”What’s the expected ROI of me investing in wellbeing training for my managers?”) or counterfactuals (Hey Youda, what would have happened to my employee turnover and labour costs for the last 6 months if I’d mandated that everyone worked a 4 day week?”).
Pretty cool eh!
Ultimately, Youda is about trying to improve the working lives of front line teams. People who are on their feet all day. People who want to get the ‘HR stuff’ they need on their phone.
We want team members to feel like Youda is their own personal digital butler!
Which is why we’re desperate to work with People Teams who share our passion for the experience of front line teams. People Teams that want the tools and technology to create a seamless employee experience that reflects their brand, values and the aspirations they have for their culture. And crucially, People Teams who want to take a user centric, data led approach to discovering what works and how it can become a source of competitive advantage.
Happier at work.
We want to help make 100m people happier at work. We want the data to prove it and we want to show the value that this creates for companies; so People Directors can start managing their HR budget on value not cost.
And we want to be the People Team’s favourite tech partner. The one you want to share ideas with. The one who responds to your questions, concerns and suggestions. And the one that continually surprises you with new functionality, new ideas and magical experiences.
Let’s have a chat.
