Unlocking Employee Potential Using Technology: A Conversation With April Crichlow

In the final episode of the GetApp Small Business Strategy Series, Brian Moran, founder and CEO of Small Business Edge interviews April Crichlow, CMO of Centrical, a technology company that provides businesses with strategies and tools to unlock employee potential at scale. In this conversation, they focus on the benefits of technology for employee engagement, unlocking performance success, and the effects of hybrid work on retention and business growth. Below are excerpts from their conversation.

Brian:

Would you mind sharing a little bit about what’s happening at Centrical and in the employee engagement space?

April:

It's such an exciting time right now in the employee space. Around 10 years ago, there was a revolutionary shift in customer experience—with the focus being completely on the customer and how important their experience was. Now we’re really in the age of employee experience, what that looks like and how it can benefit businesses with employees truly being at the center of the work.

We've all had a front row seat to the “Great Resignation,” which at Centrical, we like to call the “Great Reengagement.” As a growing start up company, our mission is to pioneer the growth of employee engagement and performance success for businesses. It's all about putting the employee at the center of businesses and thinking about the things that they need to truly do the best job they can each day while learning in a personalized way and reaching their highest levels of performance.

Brian:

Centrical has been on the forefront of the wave of changes that have happened between employers and employees since the start of the pandemic. What are some of the silver linings?

April:

I think what the pandemic has shown us is that we can work in remote and hybrid situations.  Centrical started at the right time, because our best use case at Centrical is “how do we support frontline employees?” A lot of sales and support employees who work in call centers were still working but started doing it from home.

The question for businesses becomes how do you manage remote teams, and how do you do it across the globe? It became really important to think about personalized engagement, learning opportunities, and coaching opportunities that were available through a technology like Centrical. Centrical came at the right time and was able to truly help support the shift and the pivot that companies had to make in the pandemic.

From that, we saw that it worked. When we look at the research, we are seeing that many companies won’t fully go back to the way they did business before. Even in a workplace that is so traditional, like a contact center, we're seeing that upwards of 50% will allow their employees to do their work from home. That’s just one example of many where we are seeing this hybrid and remote work really take shape, and I think it will help define the ways people work in the future.

Brian:

What kind of impact do you see technology and artificial intelligence (AI) having in the future of work going forward, and are employers embracing it fully?

April:

I don't know if everybody has started to embrace it fully, but we know companies that have made the leap from the traditional way of working (in an office, nine to five) and are having success. There are also some employees who want to go back to some time in the office after so long working from home. But this can be coupled with the positives of remote work, because it gives employees a better work/life balance and more flex time. At Centrical, we are showing how we can make the best of both worlds for business. That's where technology can help businesses make that leap—so if you don't feel comfortable having people be fully remote, are there other ways that AI technology can help you do that?

Through Centrical’s AI capabilities, there's coaching actions that a manager or coach could be given based on different employees. For example, say you have 10 people on your team, and you can see this one employee is doing really well so you can give them a congratulations or a kudos. Then there might be another employee that’s not doing so well, maybe they had a bad day and their meetings didn’t go as planned, and so that employee gets a different type of coaching or support option. This is where businesses can augment the data and insights, and give the manager what they need to be able to truly know what their employees need in terms of management and coaching. The older way of performance management and coaching was blanket analytics or blanket insights across the board. What we're seeing now is that the journey has to be personalized for every employee and the only way to be able to do it in the flow of work is through AI and solutions that give you that intelligence to know how to give your employees what they need in the moment.

Brian:

How often are you talking about culture, company culture, in the course of a week with your clients?

April:

This is a daily, constant conversation. Before it was all about the customer, but now the employee culture experience and culture is more important than the customer experience. Because if you have unhappy employees that are not engaged, unmotivated, not learning, that are not achieving their goals that actually trickles down into the customer experience. We have all felt that when calling a store, or support center—you can tell when employees are not happy and that makes a huge difference in the customer experience. So what we’re saying is, and companies are starting to realize this too, is  that culture is so important. There is a ton of research surrounding whether employees are unhappy  and how that reflects in the business’s profits and success.

Brian:

What does the future of work look like for companies of all sizes when it comes to their employees, technology, and their whole ecosystem?

April:

I think the employer and employee relationship is going to be completely redefined. The next generation, Millennials and Gen Z, has a way of working that is far more collaborative. That traditional hierarchy is going to be flipped, with the employees at the top, and then the company in the middle, and the managers at the bottom.

The younger generations are seeing work not as a submission to authority, but as a collaboration. It’s about having an open culture and dialogue, about what's important to employees, and I think these trends will continue. My bet would be that we're going to see more people working where, when, and how they need to because the research shows that it actually creates a better healthier employee culture, and that translates into revenues and company growth.

We're starting to look at it from an innovation perspective; through data and analytics, we can predict the factors that go into an employee leaving an organization or when engagement drops through Centrical. You can see when an employee starts to drop on their KPIs, where they're not checking in with their manager, where they might have filled in a wellbeing score that's low. These are all factors that are available through the data, analytics, and the insights that are available today.

I think as we look to the future of work, because the pandemic definitely brought this out, that work and life are commingled. So while it could feel like a Pandora's Box for some, I think the businesses that embrace it will build organizational durability. The whole self model builds employee engagement, a purpose, a sense of belonging, and it actually makes a company stronger.

Brian:

What about technology? Do you see technology playing a role in embracing the whole employee? And are there tech tools out there to support it?

April:

One thing that we often talk about is how important it is for technology to support learning. People feel a sense of accomplishment at work when they can learn. Learning should happen in the flow of work and should be personalized to the employee. At Centrical, we really personalize the learning journey for every employee. So you might have a learning curriculum that's different from mine. We shouldn't be going to the same blanket course, just because we work together. So the question becomes “how do we, through technology, serve up the right learning for employees?”

Brian:

Do you see gamification being critical to this microlearning and the holistic approach to keeping employees engaged?

April:

Absolutely. Centrical's roots are in gamification, because our CEO and founder knew that for people to continuously learn and engage at work, it has to be meaningful, and it has to be fun. So a big part of our roots and our solution is giving people rewards and recognition. I think it's really important that learning and the ability to know you can be better is done in an engaging way. Gamification makes it fun, and especially if you can get rewards and points like you can through our system, customers often tie-in rewards benefits like Amazon or other gift cards.

Brian:

What's one piece of advice that you would give to companies to help them for the rest of this year?

April:

More than ever before, as we've seen from the “Great Resignation,” attrition is a huge problem. If we (all companies of all sizes) wait too long to see things like potential flight risks, the company's bottom line will suffer.  We have to go back to what are the insights, data, and tools that we have in order to know about and prepare for these things. What would give someone meaning, belonging, and purpose at work?

Instead of focusing on the exit interview, what about a stay interview? A stay interview is like checking in and saying, you know, how are you doing? How can I help you? What can we do to make you feel like you can continue to grow here? I think we need to focus on the stay interview and really focus on understanding potential employee risk in an organization through engaging and thinking about what will actually make someone stay in an organization versus leave.

Interview transcribed by Ashley Gutierrez

Note: Questions and responses have been edited for brevity and clarity.