I am delighted to announce that Hyphen has been acquired by Betterworks – an award-winning enterprise software for Continuous Performance Management. This acquisition expands the capabilities of Hyphen with an opportunity to branch out to a more diverse range of solutions and realize our vision of becoming one single employee-centric “System of Improvement” that shall include components of Performance Management, Employee Engagement, Wellness, Rewards & Recognition.
Listening to employees is a critical capability to being a successful company and it’s important to create benchmarks, identify and prioritize initiatives that improve results and then track progress of these key employee engagement metrics over time. With Betterworks and Hyphen coming together, it completes the loop of measuring engagement, then executing on the right areas using objectives and key results (OKRs), and then developing people with continuous conversations, feedback and recognition (CFRs).
We first met Doug, Betterworks’ CEO, to discuss a strategic partnership and integration, and very quickly we realized it made obvious sense to combine forces. Doug and we share the same market vision. Our products are complementary and built in the same programming stack. Our teams have good complementarity in skills and expertise. And – we hope you will agree – there is a wonderful culture fit, too. We strongly believe that there is a billion-dollar opportunity ahead, and there are clear market trends pointing towards consolidated, employee-centric “Systems of Employee & Management Improvement” that have the potential to become as big as Workday, Ultimate Software or Ceridian did in the previous wave of HR Tech innovation.
“Feedback is one of the most important parts of performance management, so companies want and need these systems to work together,” according to Josh Bersin, global industry analyst and a Betterworks Board Observer. “This acquisition is a good example of a big trend in the market – linking goal setting, conversations, surveys, and employee experience data into a single “action platform” for managers.”
Betterworks will integrate Hyphen’s survey, polling and recommendation capabilities into its enterprise offering as Betterworks Engage and customers adopting it will have the ability to continuously listen to employees from pre-hire to retire, turn these insights into goals and then seamlessly track improvement over time.
Hyphen joining forces with Betterworks simply and powerfully answers enterprises’ demand to seamlessly link listening to doing, and to shorten their ‘feedback to action’ cycle time. The best-run companies understand that they get a clear competitive advantage from building a culture of frequent, transparent feedback, and surfacing opportunities for people leaders to better retain their top performers and drive continuous data-driven business improvement. As Employee Experience continues to be the top focus for CHROs around the world today, by merging we become de facto one of the most serious contenders to capture the huge Employee Experience platform opportunity.
I am also thrilled that Hyphen’s extremely talented team will be integrated into the Betterworks family and I will be transitioning into the role of Chief Strategy Officer – Engagement at Betterworks. We are excited for the sea of opportunities that lie ahead for us and the unfathomable expertise that we will get to unlock together.
Betterworks helps enterprises achieve agility, align their organization and accelerate business and employee growth. Their award-winning OKR and Continuous Performance Management solution delivers the critical insights, conversations, feedback and recognition needed to align, engage and develop today’s complex workforce. With Betterworks, organizations can ensure alignment, transparency and accountability across the enterprise for sustained competitive advantage.
Based in Redwood City, CA Betterworks has received more than $65M in funding and is used daily by employees and managers from 119 countries in more than 20 languages.
