"What is most important for building engagement in a company? A clear vision. Defined team values. Giving people work they enjoy. Clearly defined responsibilities and goals for individuals. And a regular check of the course on the company compass."
I invited Zdeněk Hesoun to Zážeh for the third time. Why? Because it is a turquoise well of inspiration. Zdenek is the CEO and co-founder of Happenee. The original platform for physical, hybrid and virtual events is now being expanded with additional modules. At Happenee, they also focus on employee communication within companies and on pre-onboarding and onboarding candidates.
They're a turquoise company. There are a lot of chimeras about turquoise. Is it general chaos and a bunch of friends where everyone does everything? No, it's not. It's a well-functioning and well-oiled machine where everyone has a responsibility and can be heard if they want to be heard.
Even a turquoise company has a clear framework and the people in it have responsibilities and can represent several roles in the company. According to their knowledge, skills and experience, but also according to what they enjoy.
I spoke with Zdeněk not only about the turquoise company, but we also touched on the topic of employee engagement and answered questions:
🔸 How to find another market for an existing product?
🔸 How to balance custom development and your own product vision?
🔸 How do computer games help employee engagement?
🔸 What to do so that employees don't oppose the owners' vision?
🔸 How to start building engagement and turquoise?
If you also want to have engaged employees, download Zdeněk's bonus "10 tips for building employee engagement"
BONUS
10 Tips for Building Employee Engagement (Bonus Code: 10TIPANGZA)
TRANSCRIPT OF THE INTERVIEW
Martin Hurych
Hello. I'm Martin Hurych and this is Zahžeh. You'll meet a familiar face in this Zažeh, because he's been here twice before. Today we'll be with the CEO of the startup Happenee, Zdenek Hesoun. Hi, Zdenek.
Zdeněk Hesoun
Hey.
What has changed with Happenee?
Martin Hurych
Today we will talk about people engagement regardless of the size of the company, how to surf the market demands, how not to drown and how to constantly innovate. Zdenek, I've discovered you're a sailboat fan, so come tell us what's happened since last time. You were here a year and a bit ago, so what wind is in Happenee's sails and where have you moved since then?
Zdeněk Hesoun
A year and a bit, that's an awfully long time. You kind of tied it back to the market a little bit, a year and a quarter ago we were still in a Covid situation. Virtual events were blowing up, no one could do it any other way and we didn't know where to jump first. The moment Covid started to recede, offline events, which was actually our line of business before, started to come back. So we started to think about how to take those digital worlds that we were creating within the 3D environment and how to use them further, because the offline world was logically not very supportive of that. However, our customers started to use those digital environments on a long-term basis, so not just for a two-day virtual event, but also for pre- engagement and other engagements that lasted maybe two months. As a result, we started to think about how to use these solutions further. So we took the biggest competency that we had from those two years in digital worlds. It was connecting people to each other, engagement, and also a new playful consumption of content in a different way than what people were used to.
What does Happenee do?
Martin Hurych
I'm sure we'll dig into that more. Just for people who haven't seen the prehistoric ignition part, come tell us in a few words what Happenee actually does and how you got into Happenee.
Zdeněk Hesoun
Happenee started some 7 years ago with a mobile event app for corporate event attendees. Then we turned it into an entire event management system, from invitations, registration, payments, tickets to on-site check-in. Then came Covid, which cut us off because they stopped doing offline events. That got us into building digital worlds because those customers started saying a webinar was fine, but they needed to have something where people would stick around and want to be with them. So we started creating virtual venues and worlds around that, where we addressed gamification, playfulness, connecting people, networking, and so on. Then it got to the stage where we did virtual trade fairs, long-term solutions that were not just for a given event, but for the whole year. That moved us to today, where the target for us is still the corporate customer, 1,000 plus employees. We solve events for them, event management system for employees or for their customers and partners. Now we've turned event management into an engagement platform for growth within the company and we're addressing the entire employee lifecycle. So that's the pre-onboarding part, candidate experience, onboarding and the whole community. We do the same thing in the marketing part, but for customers and partners.
What is the situation in the field of virtual events?
Martin Hurych
A year and a half ago you were very successful, you were doing global events for big brands like Microsoft. What is the situation now? Back then, Covid was raging everywhere, or at least that's what we were officially told. What's the situation now in virtual events?
Zdeněk Hesoun
I would evaluate it in the sense of what the target audience is, or where it sits. At the moment we are talking about the Czech Republic, after two years there is a huge hunger to meet each other, which of course makes sense. At an event where that audience was within two hours of arriving, or in that same building, or in that same city, it all switched back to offlines. With international events, or teams like Microsoft, 2,000 people where there's one department across the world, they haven't even done it before by physically meeting each other. They used to do more smaller events, but if it was something this big, they needed to make it a big event, and that's how it's stayed until now, nothing has changed there. So a lot depends on the audience. What we're also seeing is a hybrid model where you do a physical event for 200, 300 people and let the rest of the people connect remotely. Doing a physical event obviously costs a lot more work, money and time, and I feel like it's kind of a sine wave right now. Virtuals are basically going a little bit to the back burner, but it will come back. We're counting on some stabilization coming next year, unless of course, God forbid, Covid lands again and the market completely blows up.
How to find another market for an existing product?
Martin Hurych
What we're going to talk about next is a de facto range extension, not an escape from what you were doing to something else. Let's talk about what was going on with your original product and how you came to think that it was a good idea to tweak, scale and redesign it to something you didn't even intend originally.
Zdeněk Hesoun
We've spent a long time thinking about how to communicate this. It was actually quite complicated, but we realized one thing we've been doing since the beginning, we started making a mobile event app. That was actually one module. Then we added registration to that and some web interface where people sign up, which is another module. Then we added tickets and payments to that. Suddenly, we started adding modules and when we did offline events, we already had, including email campaigns, 7, 8 modules. Once virtual came in, we added a virtual 3D lobby, we added booths, we added gamification stuff, and the modules expanded. Then when we looked at it, our product is actually a modular software as a service platform that offers the customer the module they need at the time. We said we're a modular platform and it was just a matter of figuring out how we can tie those modules together because they're interconnected. So we haven't expanded product-wise, we're still doing the same thing, we've just bundled the modules differently and used them in the customer's problem environment. I'll give you an example in candidate experience or HR marketing. Unemployment is still low today and will be for the next year. The fight for people is quite big and you need to differentiate yourself. You have an advert that makes an impact, you click somewhere, you apply somewhere and you need to find out more about the company. So it's nice to be able to click into an environment that visualises your company, shows your values, shows the different departments and draws you into the brand a little bit. It shows your vision in a different way than a one-line website. That's actually what we've always done. In between there's some fun, there's some point scoring, gamification, and at the same time of course the application to that particular advert. We can figure in that as kind of an update to the career mailboxes. We actually just took a couple of modules and put them together. Our target group is still the same, except that we have only ever dealt with events. Now that we're addressing the entire employee lifecycle, engagement and information delivery in a different and more fun way. We do it from the time the employee comes in to the time they leave the company. Basically, it wasn't even our invention. As we keep discussing with our customers, they've come up with the idea that they do one event a year, but they'd like to do onboarding and have it open all year.
How to balance custom development and your own product vision?
Martin Hurych
Employee life cycle is terribly comical in the context of a corporation. I've been through two life cycles myself and often it's not entirely pleasant at the end. It's terribly dangerous and I see it a lot with startups, where you see a new opportunity in the market that you abandon the original path for. How do you have that with yours? When is it better to go your own way and when is it better to leave the path and take a new opportunity in the market?
Zdeněk Hesoun
I think you have to remember that every day and we answer that every day. I'll give you an example of low touch business and high touch business. A low touch business is something where you say you're going to have a totally easy to use tool for $20, but you're going to have to have thousands of customers to be profitable. High touch business says you need to make $50,000 a year on a customer and there's a completely different structure. There's customer care, or customer service, success manager and you grow with that customer. In terms of breadth of product and idea, we're not really leaving what we were doing at all. We just perceive that our counterpart, our customer who is doing events and doing two conferences a year, doesn't perceive that they could use this solution for their other pains within the event. We realised this through discussions with our customers and we said we still have the same target audience. We still have the same product, we don't change anything product-wise, we don't develop anything new, we just create a connection between those individual products and some line of communication. We help HR not only with event clearance, engagement and with the community at large, but also with those solutions that come before. Our customer will start with one part, typically events, but somebody will start with the pre-boarding part and then build on part of that with the community and event part. So we're not moving away from that, the only difference is that we're expanding the scope and the practical application of that with our target audience. Even the discussions with the customer are different. If he wants to do events twice a year, we are interesting for him twice a year. But we can also help in better engagement, delivery of candidates, better pre-boarding so that those people don't leave at the offer and signing stage. And then of course that leads to the community and the events that are done within the structure of the company.
Martin Hurych
I'm not letting you off the hook that easily. If a high touch customer came in and said, let's do a new module for them, what and how would you judge Happenee to see if you would approve it or is it too far gone for you and you won't do it?
Zdeněk Hesoun
I think this is an eternal topic. For us, it's always important if it makes sense to our product roadmap and vision for the company. We want to merge the digital and physical worlds into one and our main idea, some brand commitment, is uniqueness. That means making it unique in some way for that customer. We do that a lot with 3D. The other thing is to make it stress free. You need to have a person to walk you through it. The last idea is to make it fun and quirky. It needs to be about the person leaving excited because they had some fun. Those are the three commitments we stick to. When we think about going into something new, it has to fit into those three parts and the second decision factor is the product roadmap. The third thing is if we're able to use it multiple times. When we were doing big events, a module would come up, for example the idea of a photo booth. At that point, it's not a problem for us to take a photo booth, integrate it and not develop it at all. It's like an hour of work for us. But the moment we see that there is a demand in the market, we make it ourselves because we know that we are able to sell the product several times and in that context it makes sense to us.
It has to make sense to us in terms of repeatability, but at the same time it has to make sense in terms of the values and the brand commitment that it's something that the customer can always expect from us.
Martin Hurych
I thought I'd put a computer game in it. But as I understand it, the Bible is your roadmap and also the 3 values of the company. Is that right?
Zdeněk Hesoun
That's right. And the computer game is already one of our modules, we've got six of them, even. We've got that old school stuff, Pac-Man, the old driving cars, Pinball and other fun stuff. But those games aren't there for the purpose of people coming to play. The idea behind it is that you're scoring points and somehow getting ahead, but at the same time you can relax. We have a lot of interesting management events where those games are obviously stopped for the main event and people really enjoy them. It's just about being fun and quirky.
How do computer games help employee engagement?
Martin Hurych
Now I've come up with a divine donkey bridge to another topic. How does Pac-Man help employee engagement?
Zdeněk Hesoun
Again, this was created by our customer. We were hosting an event for half the world's executives where there were some 300 people and it was just top management. They came in saying they wanted to play a game and they liked Pac-Man. It was a terrible success, it was something different because people are used to having Zoom on here where the most you get is a chat. That way they could play Pac-Man with a colleague on their break. There were some points and giveaways and that helped because you can put those games in a part of the platform where people wouldn't normally go. That underpins the leaderboard feature, for example, which is something that's used a lot. You're able to tell yourself what the goals of the environment that you have with you, you want people to go to the booths, download the materials, watch the videos, and play the games here. You say they get certain points for doing that, and they collect those points based on what they do. Then they see a leaderboard that you can announce once a month or during the event who the most engaged person was and that way you recruit people to try harder. They're going there because they enjoy it, because they want to collect points, but at the same time they're consuming the content.
Where in the employee life cycle does Happenee work?
Martin Hurych
So let's wrap it up somehow and summarize where the wind has taken you at this point. So you have a product for big corporations. If somebody applies to a corporation and the corporation uses your solution, I'm going to see you from the outside going where?
Zdeněk Hesoun
Basically, you'll see me. You can choose, of course, from the five solutions that come in sequence, but if the corporation uses all of it, all of it, you'll see me the moment you're on Jobs. There will be a virtual 3D world within Jobs that allows you to see the company before you actually enter it. That's the first part. It's basically an interactive landing page where all the boring stuff like the code of ethics and stuff like that.
The second part is about when you go into the offer and you have 3 months before you actually start. In terms of the statistics we've gathered, it's interesting that up to 20% of people don't actually join you at all. The pre- onboarding phase is relatively forgotten by corporates and there's a lot of money spinning around. Once you've got that person on boarded by an agency in some way, it's important to keep in touch with them. As part of the checklist that's there, you connect him with a colleague, show him the medallions of people who have worked there briefly, and draw him more into the company. What we run into with corporates is that they have 1,000 people for every 3 HR people who don't have a chance to do that great personal engagement. Next, the onboarding part jumps out at you. You come in, you sign, you're in a similar environment, and you're already doing the major things like ethics and compliance, legal, training. That lasts maybe 2 months and you seamlessly transition into the event and community part. You're still in a similar environment, but there's an extra events section where you can register, there's a feed where you have news and so on. This part is on top of some sort of intranet. None of these parts replace HR software or intranet software, but it's the part above them. We typically encounter internal communication that no one reads it because no one goes there. If you don't just take the events that are part of the constant communication, this is a case that we deal with. Even out there it's actually similar, you're building that community as an employee community. You have like 3,000 partners around the world and it's the same case. You communicate with them, you do events for them, you send them a newsletter once in a while and you build a relationship with them. That's what the platform is for.
How do they build employee engagement at Happenee?
Martin Hurych
This was how you do engagement in big companies. My bubble is smaller companies, mid-sized companies and employee engagement is a neverending story. Let's take a look at how you do that because when we first sat here, we dug into a topic that came up a few times after that, which was turquoise organizations. Like how do you do people engagement in your country?
Zdeněk Hesoun
I would say that every organization has a lot of colors. Orange is the corporate orange, the classic one that we know, and you need to anchor those basic principles to make the company work as a whole. Green is more of a non-profit where there is shared decision making. Then there's turquoise, which is very much about independence, purpose and self-management. I think all of those things have to come together. We've had a pretty big problem balancing a happy team and an executive team. That's a balance that we didn't quite grasp at the beginning. Nowadays, it's about the classic OKR and KPI settings and the responsibility of individual roles, which is extremely important for turquoise. Shared responsibility is the biggest hell that can happen, and we had exactly that. You're then not able to measure it, you're not able to evaluate it, and those people themselves don't know if their work is delivering value or not. In general, I think it's terribly important, when we're talking about responsibility, to be able to have an impact on the management and operation of the whole company. I'll give you an example. In our company we have a Happy Happenee team where the whole company can be on it, people nominate themselves and it's about building a healthy and happy team within Happenee. Different topics and issues come up there and are further addressed. Groups are formed, that come to a result and the company then applies it. This is important for the involvement of individual people. It's basically like small project teams and it's about some competencies. It's terribly important and crucial to have anchored the vision and mission of that company so that we always know what our main focus is now and what activities will get us to the goal. Now, if I take our OKRs, we call them boulders, generally they're some top priorities for maybe a quarter, so we create them with the team. We create some basic structure within the leads and then the teams put all the ideas on how to make it happen. When it meets well in the middle, it works. The moment it's ordered from the top down, it doesn't make sense. Then, of course, we have sports clubs, which arise naturally because someone likes to run, so they started running, someone likes to play badminton, so they started playing badminton. We also have breakfasts together once a fortnight where everybody prepares some part and we try to create and invent such activities.
What to do so that employees don't oppose the owners' vision?
Martin Hurych
I can think of two questions about this. You said that you were going to prepare some boulders or proposals of boulders for the next quarter within the management. What if the company opposes it and people say it doesn't make sense?
Zdeněk Hesoun
It's still really about the vision. I think we spend a lot of time on the discussion, and any of these people can say that something doesn't make sense to them. We challenge them to do that, but it has to be said that you also have certain competencies on that team and some people have a knack for connecting those things some people don't. In the beginning, we wanted to create everything together. We thought it was naturally good, but then we found that 3/4 of the team had nothing to say because they didn't have the competence, knowledge, or maturity to do it. It was so abstract to them that they were bored all day and would much rather have something from people who have the talent to do it. This brings us to Gallup, which we would like to apply. It's kind of terribly familiar, but you feel like you need to do things you enjoy on that team. You need to find your talents, which you don't have to do just through Gallup, but it's some way to bring those people together in the right way. For example, we've got a great even-timer who does the work, he's a great hack, but the moment you ask him to innovate, he just doesn't have the cells. That's why it's a good idea to bring in someone else to help him with it, but he wouldn't be able to blow it up again because he would forget. That's our job now, how to get to know these people well amongst ourselves so that we can get a person from another department in time to help us fire it up.
Turquoise Organization: "If I want to be heard, I will be heard."
Martin Hurych
So if I simplify it, turquoise is when I want to be heard, I have a chance to be heard. Is that it?
Zdeněk Hesoun
Absolutely, there's a huge responsibility. For turquoise, or any free company, the fundamental aspect is that it's not chaos and people can't do whatever they want. It has to have a framework.
Martin Hurych
Let me make a small comment. Often, for example in my age group, turquoise is considered something that we are still a bunch of friends and when we can't make sales, someone sacrifices and volunteers to go do sales. If the code is broken somewhere, we go fix it, if we need the windows washed, someone goes to wash the windows. That's not how it works, is it? Because it's total chaos.
Zdeněk Hesoun
The whole idea is that you need to be in a framework. If you don't want to have a sugar, whip, control mechanism, you need to have people in charge. That's the foundation, of course.
Second, you have to have those responsibilities written down and know who's going to take on what. Generally, you can have multiple roles in the company. The scorecard is one part, but you have maybe 3 roles where you have some responsibilities, some way to measure it so you know if it's working or not working. I think that's terribly important. It's very much about the rules. We borrowed some part of the conflict resolution from Vrat Kalenda from Applifting, they have done a great job. When a person in a corporation has a problem with another person, he goes to his boss to sort it out. Then he can go to HR and so on. The idea here is that you're responsible for yourself in that organization. If you have a problem, you go to that colleague first and follow some framework to try to resolve it with them. If you don't do that, you find a mediator to help you, but you both have to trust them. If that doesn't work, then offboarding may come, which means the end of the job. It's a decision the whole team has to agree to leave. If one person says they don't agree, it can't happen.
Martin Hurych
So the corporation is a bit of a kindergarten for children, and turquoise is already a normal adult human life.
Zdeněk Hesoun
At the same time, I have to say that it is a big problem that we are not educated for this. Young people are used to sugar and the whip because of school. It's not their fight, it's just what we're brought up to do. Getting those people to be responsible enough to come out and say they don't like something, regardless of whether the manager does it, is very challenging. For example, the offboarding thing was already quite an interesting social experiment, where 6 people decided if they wanted to continue to be with their colleague. There were objective problems, why not, but there was no manager to say we have to say goodbye. There were these people who, if they said they didn't want to hurt him, that they could handle him, their day-to-day work would be disrupted by this person. It's very difficult to take responsibility for a decision like that. So it's not for everybody, onboarding is quite complicated and long, and of course it's best done with senior people and people who have some seniority. At the same time, those who have some seniority and are in this mode, it's terribly new to them and the more they've been in the classic corporate style, the more difficult it is for them to unlearn. So we're constantly struggling with that. In the retrospectives that we have once a month, we address our values and behaviors, so that they're not just some written values, but that we demonstrate them in concrete situations. That helps us shape how we function.
How to start building engagement and turquoise?
Martin Hurych
It's obviously a long-term process, and probably one of the easier parts is when you have a chance to do it and you spend months, years, recruiting people into the company who are attuned to it. Let's give Zdenek's ten or five for companies of the following type. Sometimes I see that what you just described is kind of the holy grail of the entrepreneur. I want to have engaged people, I want them to like coming to work, I want them to do well, I want them to be interested, I want them to come up with an idea every now and then, but the situation is completely different for whatever reason. You have to nudge people, they don't want to think too much and there's still not many people on the market. Where to start? You yourself went from the big corporation HP to Happenee, so where would you start and what would be the first steps? You've got a company that has 10, 15 people that you can't just fire overnight and hire new turquoise people. So how do you slowly start to turn that into something so that you're at least halfway there in 2, 3 years?
Zdeněk Hesoun
Seeing it now in hindsight, what I would have done for each step, I would have created those team values with those people in the first place. That's how we started. The vision and mission of the company is something that's good to put together with people if you have a team of 15. It's important to talk about it, to act on it, because you need those people to believe in it, to be committed to the journey and to gravitate towards it. It has to be for them natural. If they have objections, it is important to discuss and resolve them together. Company culture is defined by the worst tolerated behaviour. If you tolerate the little things, it's going to build up over time, and that's wrong. If you build that together, do a nice workshop to walk you through it, then it's something that people can breathe behind. You want to work in a team that works to the values that you've put together. Even here, of course, you may find that some people get it wrong and they naturally leave. That already crystallizes for you whether the team together makes sense or not.
Martin Hurych
I'm a maximalist. At this stage, you're already sorting out the dropped eggs and unwrapped flowers? Is this some first inkling that it might not work for you to take it up a level?
Zdeněk Hesoun
You can of course deal with it from late arrivals and things like that. I have a big problem with time, for example, and if I want people to stick to it, I have to do it myself first, that's the basis. That's where it's important, once you've established those values, to talk about them once a month or once a while and say what are the values that maybe are bothering us and what do we need to focus on. At the same time, there you're talking about behaviors that are desirable and those that are not desirable. It doesn't really matter if it's completely wrong on the scale or if it's a small thing. The important thing is that there is widespread awareness of it. People need to be aware of what we want and what we don't want in the company. That holds some kind of boundary for you. That's the other point where I would hold some regularity. Once you've got it in there, you've got to play with what type of people make up your business. Of course, everyone only wants the committed and the inventors. But if I were doing this, I would do a Gallup or some other methodology that helps you pull out the talent from people and reshuffle the roles accordingly. Because I think you have to do work that you enjoy. Some people will figure it out and some people just won't. Somebody needs to show it, and there are ways to get that person to do that. One of them is to discover some talents, some aptitudes, and if you find that the person is not suited for something, then you put them in something that they'll enjoy. You're already picking up engagement at that point. Of course, the problem is that the person should not do several things at once and lose focus. So those are some cornerstones, vision and mission, clear direction, team values, which are very important because then you can do anything with the team. So the next thing is competencies. So on top of that, there's also a sorted out framework of how you're going to resolve conflicts, how you're going to resolve things that are not dependent on some manager to make that decision. You need to decentralize power to the lowest level possible.
Martin Hurych
I think I counted 4 cornerstones, vision and mission, team values, give people work they enjoy, and look for talent and clearly distribute responsibilities in given roles. 4 is a stupid number. The marketeers say we can't have 4 so we have to delete one or add one.
Zdeněk Hesoun
I think the fifth thing is some kind of rhythm and regularity. The moment you set it up, it doesn't end there, it starts there. The worst thing you can do is you set the values, the rules here and that's the end of it. Imagine if the whole company is in the office once a month for 3 hours and that's all they're dealing with. Sometimes the topic is different, it doesn't have to be just values, sometimes it's something that we're more passionate about and that's what we focus on. If you take it financially, economically, it's a lot of unproductive people, but the energy that you get back afterwards is worth it. So, for me, the regular rhythm of all these things to make it work well is fundamental.
Where does Happenee go from here?
Martin Hurych
All these things will be written in the bonus. Finally, one more thing burns me. When you're back here in a year and a half or two, because you're a permanent guest and always welcome, where will we see you now? Where does your roadmap point?
Zdeněk Hesoun
We, when we tried to draw a vision for a longer period of time, the market would always change and reshuffle it in six months. But in general, now we're all about engagement and engagement. It's actually the playfulness, it's in us as well, we want to go in a different way and we want to show that you can work with those people and that content in a different and fun way. I don't really care if we have 20 models or 15. As long as we fulfill that vision and keep going down that path. One of the things we learned that was a big problem as we grew was defocus. Every week we have to tell ourselves what not to do because we really come up with a lot of those things and one of those things is we said we're going to be at one target, which is the 1,000 plus employees. I'm not saying we don't do smaller ones, but otherwise we focus on those types of companies because we think that's where we add the most value and can help the most with our solutions.
Martin Hurych
I was wondering when we will see Happenee in the Czech school system, but that's probably for many, many more episodes of Ignition. I rather daydreamed about that, but immediately realized that it's mission impossible here in this country, because seeing my son graduate from school is not much different from what I did.
Zdeněk Hesoun
That's right.
Martin Hurych
Thank you so much for visiting.
Zdeněk Hesoun
Me too, thanks a lot. Have a nice day.
Martin Hurych
This was Zdeněk Hesoun from the startup Happenee and his experience with engagement and people involvement. If you enjoyed this episode, we'd love to hear from you. Don't forget to download Zdenek's bonus, which will be on my website, www.martinhurych.com/zazeh. Be sure to give subscriptions and likes wherever you're listening right now, whether it's the podcast app or YouTube. I have no choice but to wish you success and keep my fingers crossed, thanks.