The rapidly growing employee feedback market
Late last year at the HR Technology Conference, Josh Bersin came past our booth and said to my team, "Look around; you see this; you helped build this." It was big praise to be recognized as one of the employee feedback platforms by the pied piper of HR technology.
While there's been software to support employee feedback for a long time, the industry has traditionally been heavily consultant-driven. Culture Amp was among the first to deliver sophistication through a self-service platform. We've given people a powerful tool that they can run themselves, and that's something I'm very proud of.
Employee feedback has evolved
Over the past five years, we've seen a significant shift in the market for employee feedback. People have moved away from employee feedback projects and towards employee feedback platforms. They don't just want to do a survey every year or two; they want to collect data continuously.
Organizations now want to understand the entire employee lifecycle. They want to be able to pool their data together and use it to make better decisions in areas where they've never used it before.
While employee feedback strategy is still often led by HR, HR leadership is also changing. They're becoming more sophisticated with data and increasingly desire numbers. Many organizations now have people science departments or bring in expertise from other parts of the company – i.e., we've seen customer research teams work closely with the people team.
In some companies, line managers are now owning the employee feedback process. It's no longer a side project – sales and engineering leaders demand this information. Employee feedback is now easier to collect, driving change throughout organizations.
Technology has made employee feedback more accessible
For most large companies, the cost saving in moving from consultants to DIY has been an order of magnitude (e.g., 90% reduction). This has opened the door for substantial investments in people analytics and data science at an organizational level.
At the same time, this means the amount of companies that can afford to do surveys has grown. It's no longer just the Fortune 100 who can get detailed employee feedback. Platforms like Culture Amp are easily accessible to companies with more than 50 people.
I think the opportunity at the small end of this market is so ample it's hard to see. An employee feedback strategy is something every company needs to be successful as we move into the new world of work. Once an organization has a few different teams, collecting information, understanding it, and acting on feedback becomes much harder manually. All of these companies need a platform to help them do that.
We've worked with over 1,500 companies and collected feedback from over 1 million people. We work with organizations in all industries, languages, and sizes - some of our customers have just a few people, and others have 100,000.
Culture Amp is now in almost every country worldwide, and we're only just getting started. Our mission is to help every company with more than 50 people understand their people and use that information to drive change throughout their organization. We're six years in, and I couldn't be more excited!
