We interviewed the Director of People and Culture, Tiffany Fields, at Exyn Technologies: Industrial Drone Technology, an autonomous robotics and technology startup to learn more about their experience with Employee Cycle’s dashboard and HR solutions.
About Exyn Technologies and HR’s goals
At Exyn, as a small startup, Tiffany focuses on strategic HR. She notes that the company creates autonomous robots mainly for the mining industry but they have a product use case that can branch out far beyond and work in the construction industry, government, and many other uses.
In her role, she measures performance management, compensation, benefits, and workforce growth. She’s pioneered setting up new processes and procedures as they relate to people where the company didn’t have any in place. She’s focusing on maximizing engagement and productivity – all in line with keeping their existing employees happy.
She notes that a data-driven approach to workforce strategy with Employee Cycle will help in their plan for significant growth this year, beyond their current seventy valued employees.
Question: How did you get started with strategic HR and within this organization?
Tiffany explains that she took an HR class during her freshman year when she was in business school. She’d intended to pursue a law degree after her business degree, but she took the course and fell in love with HR, so changed her direction.
She began her career in talent and acquisitions, then moved into a more generalist HR role, working up to manager and then business partner. She has always worked for tech organizations, starting in RFID, then in security, hardware technology, eventually working for a staffing firm that focused on the recruitment of tech experts. She then moved to the SAAS organization that focused on personalization in marketing.
Finally, she landed her current director role, still in the tech industry, but what drew her to the organization was Exyn’s approach to people management. She said she knew she was joining a supportive leadership team that spearheaded the value of people-driven organizations.
Her role was to spearhead their aims of ensuring people in the organization were engaged and happy, especially during the pandemic.
Question: Speaking of your organization, what are your current HR goals?
Tiffany explains their main and current objective is workforce growth: talent and acquisition, data and onboarding, and having a structured program for onboarding.
She’s also focusing on performance management, objectives and key results (OKR), job leveling after job functions and job families are in place, 360-degree feedback tools, and performance evaluations that are holistic and diversified. She was clear to note that despite a focus on performance management, compensation is decoupled from each element for fairness.
Tiffany says she’s using several systems to ensure that compensation and total reward are competitive and that the benefits Exyn offers meet the needs of employees and families as well as that the stock options meet the needs of employees.
She also says they’ve, as a small organization, had to figure out how a smaller startup can compete with the Googles and Teslas for top talent – which they have so far. And that comes down to compensation and effective workforce planning.
She notes that they are working on future planning, ensuring that the structure, organization design, and operations meet the organization’s and employee’s needs and that all changes and innovations are effectively communicated.
Like with many organizations, DEI is a hot topic – and a very important one for organizational success – and Tiffany noted that diversity, equity, and inclusion was a huge focus for Exyn last year and they’ve successfully hired diverse and talented people – and their focus continues this year.
Question: With all of those goals, there will be a lot of data. How do you utilize Employee Cycle’s product right now?
Tiffany explains that she used Employee Cycle at a couple of organizations where she worked before and she wanted to bring that success to her new role.
She explains: “Employee Cycle really serves as a one-stop-shop to gather information. I use a lot of different systems so being able to go into Employee Cycle where everything is just there – as opposed to having to manipulate the data to get what I’m looking for – the output or the final number is already there.” That’s great praise indeed!
She notes that she uses the data for when she meets with investors, for audits, and for stakeholders. She notes that when she needs information, “I can give them an exact number by logging into our Employee Cycle dashboard and the information is there.”
Tiffany elucidates that she’s looking forward to Employee Cycle’s future updates and would like a roadmap of where the product is going as she cannot wait to have even more functionality in the product.
Question: What’s your impression of Employee Cycle and their customer success team?
Tiffany explains that she had an initial call where Employee Cycle gathered information to determine how she planned and wanted to use the dashboard and how the dashboard could meet her organization’s needs. She said EC coached her through enabling the systems she has to output data and feed into Employee Cycle’s dashboard.
She looks forward to further coaching calls as she remembers having coaching calls when she worked at other organizations so she is looking forward to seeing all of the extra things the dashboard can do for her that she’s yet to discover.
Question: How do you use and browse the product specifically?
Tiffany most values the dashboard’s ability to give her information as soon as she logs in. For example, she can easily see how many roles were filled in a set time by a single recruiter. That information can now be used to determine how many recruiters they’ll need to fill x amount more roles.
She explains: “I use the system when I need to pull data to present to the board.” She also said that she can embed the data graphs into Confluence, which is their Wiki, so the information can be shared organization-wide.
She says she uses the data to present to the DEI committee – to show that the diversity numbers are where they want them. She also notes that it’s great to be able to go and grab whichever information she needs be it employee numbers or compensation and growth data.
The takeaways
Overall, we (thankfully) have a happy customer so far with Exyn and Director of People and Culture, Tiffany Fields, and we look forward to ensuring that the Employee Cycle dashboard further meets Exyn’s needs (and other organizations’ needs) in more specific ways.
Find out how other organizations use our dashboard here with AcctTwo’s experience or schedule your free demo with us today.
