How Happeo helps high growth company Uberflip scale their communication processes

“We use Slack to connect on a basic level, and dig deeper with Happeo. That's just the different in content lifespan – Slack is for short-form content, Happeo hosts mid-to-long form content. That's also why we're happy that Happeo and Slack integrate together.”

Empowering flexibility for one of the world's most innovative workforces

With 110 people in their native home of Toronto Canada, Uberflip scored a $32 million investment for their game-changing content experience platform. 2018 marked the start of a different, scaling Uberflip – and that brought some growth pains along.

The company needed a better understanding of hiring processes, new joiners needed a consistent onboarding experience, and then there’s the “War for Talent”. The phenomenon that makes talent retention crucial. Luckily, Uberflip already has a great culture in place, but to keep people happy, continuous alignment and engagement is necessary. Enter Happeo. 

A place to scale culture and processes 

Uberflip recently acquired SnapApp, and this put word to deed for a few growing pains that they’ve been feeling for a while. Getting a remote team in Boston, when HQ is in Toronto, means it’s more important than ever to stay aligned. Add to that Uberflip’s desire to continue to scale, and the need to reinvent processes, documentation and communication becomes clear.
Slack by itself wasn’t cutting it anymore – it’s message span is too short lived and fast-paced.

To find a solution to their problem, Uberflip’s revamped People & Culture team set four base requirements for their social intranet. It needs to be:

• A central place to store all their documents, policies and processes – a single source of truth
  
  
• An easy way to streamline the onboarding process of new employees
  
  
• A place where the Product team could share their story, in-depth 
  
  
• A place that compliments Slack, but creates a real knowledge base

Going live

Amanda Steel, Uberflip’s People Experience Manager, talked us through their findings: “We went live after six weeks. People’s first reactions to Happeo have been incredibly positive, which is important because we’re not an average business. We’re a content-experience company that builds hubs for customers to sort their own information, so you can imagine how important that is to us. Our product goes well beyond a resource library, but it can act as such.

Now with Happeo, we’re finally organizing everything internally. The combination of Pages and Channels particularly has made it click for people. In other words: Happeo acts as our resource library, but also goes well beyond that. That’s synergy!”

Visibility and findability

“Happeo has had a positive on our culture. Before, people would sometimes feel lost. Documents were everywhere and their visibility was low. Just being able to show that we're cleaning up processes and communicating them through Pages already goes a long way. Embedding Drive files really helps here, because you just have to keep your information up-to-date in one location. It's not just myself that's being responsible for this single source of truth. For example, our executive assistant has been killing it at managing teams and keeping everything up to date. This clearly demonstrates that we've been able to create champions out of high-performing team-members, and now they're visible with Happeo.

“And that’s what our people use it as – a visibility and leadership tool. They’re proud of what they’re doing, and now they can show it. That’s great for their employee retention, but it also aligns teams. Even in these early stages, the impact has been positive and significant.

Going further, I see this as being a home for Uberflippers, and particularly for new hires. Here they can find a quick way to strengthen their knowledge of the company.”

We’re also rebuilding our curriculum on product knowledge, and the knowledge of Content Experience too – something intrinsic to our product. Some folks won’t need to know the ins and outs, but it needs to be available for anyone to dive deeper. Now it is.

We're redesigning our onboarding process and program everywhere. Not just the standard IT setup, HR basics, our history, culture and values. We can go deeper now, so we're starting with department introductions.”

Engaging technical minds beyond Slack 

“Slack is for in-the-moment updates that create short-term or low impact. If our product team wants to release a really complex feature, one of those things that the entire company is excited about, then Happeo is the place to share that information. We use Slack to connect on a basic level, and dig deeper with Happeo. That’s just the difference in content lifespan – Slack is for short-form content, Happeo hosts mid-to-long form content. It also helps that Happeo and Slack integrate together. Our product team went crazy with Happeo once they had access to it. They started building their own Pages and subpages right away.

It just shows that before, there was a gap for them, but now they have a space to tell the product story in a way that shapes the organization. I think there’s a stigma and expectation around engineering and product. The ‘Let us do our work and we’ll keep our heads down’ way of thinking. But that’s just a stigma. When we ask people to join us, we need an entrepreneurial mindset, and they need to take ownership of what they’re doing.

Ownership means communicating clearly what you’re doing, and how it benefits the business. To enable that, we need to give them a path.” “We know people want to feel that what they do has impact. Giving them a tangible way to see that, beyond just lines of code, is our way of increasing our Human Capital ROI (HCROI).”

The features that changed the game for Uberflip 

• Google Workspace  integration, to create a single source of truth
  
  
• Easy-to-build Pages that streamline onboarding and create department visibility
  
  
• Slack integration to bridge rapid, dynamic and static communication together
  
  
• User-friendly Channels that offer a variety of post-types and rich media

Uberflip leverages Happeo for business outcomes 

• Speeding up the onboarding process
  
  
• Strengthening culture
  
  
• Increasing employee retention
  
  
• Increasing their Human Capital Return on Investment (HCROI)
  

  “We'll continue to use Happeo to further break down information silos. Happeo makes it easy for everyone to find what you do and what you're responsible for, from leadership to new hires. Next quarter we want all our projects in there, including milestone data, showing that Happeo's potential goes beyond knowledge sharing and employee engagement – use it well, and it's a business-critical tool.”