The Challenge

Heather Weidekamp

Senior Manager of People & Culture @ Verana Health

Sure. Verana Health is a data company within the healthcare space, and we are working onbuilding platforms that take de-identified patient data, and then make it into a database that'ssearchable by physicians and life science companies.

Heather Weidekamp

Senior Manager of People & Culture @ Verana Health

Yes. I am a manager on the People and Culture side of things. So my role consists of really anything once somebody starts with the organization and on. So I have a team of three people that work on culture plans, they work on employee engagement. They work with learning and development, training our managers, and then the whole operations side of things; trying to make sure all of our tools are working correctly. And we work really closely with my peer who's on the recruiting side.

Heather Weidekamp

Senior Manager of People & Culture @ Verana Health

We are at 211 now.

Heather Weidekamp

Senior Manager of People & Culture @ Verana Health

Oh, I love this story because it was really such a timely find. As the company has grown and as our team has grown, people like me, who's been here the longest, or my boss really become synonymous with just, "Oh, I need to reach out to People and Culture, I'll reach out to this one person." So we were getting bogged down, or somebody would reach out to my boss, and it would get lost in her Slack messages and not get back to her.

So we started thinking about how can we better organize these things? And our partners insecurity and IT have a ticketing system through Jira that they use. So that was our first thought; maybe we could just utilize their ticketing system. In my opinion, that platform is for engineers and IT and security. We did a bunch of research, and it really wouldn't do what we wanted. Plus we are a very data-driven People and Culture team, and we really weren't able to get data from what was going on within that platform itself.

So I had done some research trying to find other platforms that might be out there. I looked at afew, but nothing really met what we were really looking for. And so I went to HR Transform for the first time last year where I heard you get up and speak about your platform. And I was sitting next to my boss, and it was so funny; I was hitting her on the leg, and I was like, "This is exactly what we want. This is exactly what we want." She's like, "I know, I know." So I chased you down like a fangirl, and I was like, "Oh my God, I'm so excited about your product." And it's been great.

Heather Weidekamp

Senior Manager of People & Culture @ Verana Health

Amazingly, it really wasn't that long. It was just one of those off-the-cuff, "It'd be great if we could have this." And then we thought, we've already got Jira, so let's try to utilize that and then spent time pulling our hair out, trying to learn Jira and realizing it really wouldn't work for us. But it was really... Let's see, HR Transform was in March last year. I want to say it was the beginning of the year we started looking. So it really wasn't super long. It was just a godsend to have run into you and heard about your platform because I was like, "I'm just never going to find anything. We're just going to have to make something and hope it works."

Heather Weidekamp

Senior Manager of People & Culture @ Verana Health

Yes

Heather Weidekamp

Senior Manager of People & Culture @ Verana Health

There were no companies, honestly, that I got past just researching on the internet. And even when I was at HR Transform, I was considering companies and hoping that maybe I would find some that maybe I hadn't found, or maybe I'd passed up in a cursory Google search. I did look at somebody else that I met at HR Transform. We met with him, and his was a for, platform. So it would've worked for part of it, but it wouldn't have worked fully. And I cannot think of the name of it. So in my initial searches I didn't really get past just searching and being like, "Yeah, this isn't going to work for us." And then as far as conversations, you're the only company that we got anywhere past an initial conversation.

Heather Weidekamp

Senior Manager of People & Culture @ Verana Health

It just was obvious that it was the perfect fit for us.

Heather Weidekamp

Senior Manager of People & Culture @ Verana Health

Ooh, that's a good one. I wish I had some stats on that, honestly. But just in general, for me, thisis a little bit off-topic from productivity, but this is where my mind is going to. For me, as the leader of the team, it's really helpful to be able to see all the tickets and see what's going on, but know that it's being taken care of. Or be able to check in, like, "Oh, I know so-and-so was working with somebody on this issue with our learning platform. I wonder how that's going."

And then I don't have to be like, "Hey, what's going on here?" 'Cause we do use Asana as wellfor all of our projects and tasks. So it's very similar in that way where I can just always knowwhat's going on. And that's really, really super helpful. So I think just in general, that cuts down on follow up time.

And then also I think it took a little bit of getting used to for our employees, like, "Don't just Slack Heather; open a ticket in Ariglad." But there really wasn't a bunch of resistance. And people are really good. If they do Slack me, I'll just say, "Hey, would you mind please putting this into Ariglad? I don't want it to get lost in Slack." And they're really good about that. And then I know that it's not going to get lost. I love the reminders and stuff in Slack to remind myself, but that can still get lost. So I know it's not getting lost. We know it's there. Then we know it's trackable what our employees are looking for.

So I think eventually we're, what, April, May will be a year with it, so then we'll be able to do more of that "Okay, what's most important to our employees?" That type of thing. So I'm really looking forward to that. And I think I could measure use cases and maybe productivity from there too. It was a long answer that didn't really answer your question.

Heather Weidekamp

Senior Manager of People & Culture @ Verana Health

I was actually looking at the stats this morning, and Jessica and I are all in there pretty much about the same amount of time.

Heather Weidekamp

Senior Manager of People & Culture @ Verana Health

'Cause we all have different things that we're taking care of. And I do check in on each of thetickets. Even if they're closed and I don't know what happened, I'll go back and take a look atthem and just see how they were resolved, if there's anything we want to add, provide feedback,maybe on team communication. And I just thought of something else, and I forgot it already. Oh,what helped a lot was we did have a Slack channel where people could go and say, "Peopleand Culture, I'm having an issue accessing this platform" or whatever. And then I would be like,"Oh, Jess owns that platform, so I guess she'll take care of it."

And then maybe she missed that, and so then it would just get lost. And then three days later,Anne would say, "What happened with that? I didn't see anything." And I'll be like, "Oh no,nothing happened with that." Or it would be two different people who would contact that person,and then we'd be tag- teaming. And so that probably has been the most time-saver andproductivity-saver and also just, I think, makes us look more professional to our organization.Looks like we have our shit together.

Heather Weidekamp

Senior Manager of People & Culture @ Verana Health

Absolutely, because we had an email, we had all of our individual Slacks. We had a People and Culture Slack channel. We had a private People and Culture Slack channel, a private People and Culture email. And now we're able to just say, "Put it all here." And so we're not chasing it down. Two people aren't working on the same thing at the same time.

Maybe even more productivity, like 30 to 40%.

Heather Weidekamp

Senior Manager of People & Culture @ Verana Health

I think I would say the forms. And I haven't done as much with the forms as I want to. I literally have a list of forms that I want to sit down and make in there. But it just has opened our eyes to different things. One of the things I was just talking about earlier today, with our lead on the recruiting team, is we're going to set up a form for people to open a rec, where typically they just send him a Slack message and that kicks off the process. But it's something we want to start tracking. And so we're going to use forms in Ariglad. Where we've used Google Forms for a lot of things in the organization, but I don't think we would've ever got to use a Google form for that. It just puts us in a different mindset to think about, what can we utilize this for?

And then again, it's trackable, we can communicate back and forth. I used it for all of our H-1BCap lottery applications this year. And it was great. I could see as the managers were filling them out, I could respond with them if I had questions or needed more information. And yeah, it's been really great.

Heather Weidekamp

Senior Manager of People & Culture @ Verana Health

Yeah, absolutely. And I've been doing that so far, pulling existing Google Forms in, but I'm really excited that it's starting to make us think about different ways we can use it.

Heather Weidekamp

Senior Manager of People & Culture @ Verana Health

Yeah, we started with an all-hands announcement where we did an introduction to what the platform is, we talked about ease of use. We used the comparison to "Just like Security and IT are already used to opening tickets, people and Culture is going to ask you to do that. And these are the reasons why. We're data-driven, so it's better tracking. It's a better way for us to serve you because you're getting to the person that can help you the first time instead of coming to me and me having to ask Jess to reach out to you and all of that." So that's how we did it first.

And we had lots of early adopters. And then we unfortunately hit that little hiccup where we had to put it on hold. But even though we had put it on hold, we still had people opening tickets. So that tells me that it's a good platform, and it's easy to use because people were like, "I'm just going to go this route."

And then opened it back up officially. And then maybe once or twice a week I get a message from someone, and I say, "Could you put this in Ariglad?" But I even had somebody last week send me a Slack message and then say, "Oh, you know what? I'm going to open a ticket in Ariglad. Sorry about that." So it's happening. People are understanding the value of it.

Heather Weidekamp

Senior Manager of People & Culture @ Verana Health

Pleasant surprise... You were talking about, when we got on this call, how great it is to be afounder and still be involved and hearing the feedback. And it is just amazing to me that we canreach out to you and say, "Hey, this would be great if..." Oh, so I'll think last week, I had createdfolders for the H-1B Cap lottery. And Charles was helping me get those entered into ourimmigration platform. So I was like, "Oh, I'll just share the folder with you." And then I was like,"Oh, I can't figure out how to do it." So I asked the chat bot, and Allie was like, "Oh, that's notsomething we have right now. Would you want that?" And I was like, "Yeah, that would be greatin the future." And then two days later he was like, "Great, I'll get this done by the end of theweek, and then you'll be able to do that."

You guys are just on it, and we feel super valued. You value what we have to say, you value the feedback that we give you. And it's really, really fun. It makes us feel like we have a part in your success and growth. And that's really fun. It's a fun partnership.

Heather Weidekamp

Senior Manager of People & Culture @ Verana Health

It's such a breath of fresh air. Our payroll vendor sent all of our W2s out without addingapartment numbers that were part of addresses. And so we've been getting them back. And so Isent them a message, and I was like, "Hey, just so you know this happened. How do we makesure this doesn't happen in the future?" And they were just like, "Yeah, that's a glitch in thesystem, and it'll probably happen every time." And I was like, "That's not an acceptable answer."I can't have this happen every year.

So to have that and then you guys like, "Oh, that's a great idea. We'll just do it," it's so great. This is why we love startups and working with other startups and yeah.