 Good morning, everyone. It's nice to see so many this early. We have an interesting topic today. It's about a company that has been through a lot of changes and how they kind of managed to change from challenge and making it opportunities. So we will hear Anastasia tell her story and she will have, she will do a presentation and then afterwards you can ask questions. So either you put them in the chat or you raise your hand and then we will address you. But then Anastasia, I will give the word to you. Thank you, Gal. Let me show my slide deck. Okay, can you see? Yep. Just one minute, I will pop up the chat so that I can see your reactions. Great, so let's start. Hi everyone. My name is Anastasia and I'm a gel people coach leading a software engineering department at iFansition. I am really passionate about working with people and helping them grow. At the same time, I may be terribly annoying when talking about root cause analysis and gathering data. So watch out. I hope I will not bore you anyway. I would like to start with a few words of kudos. Most of the initiatives that I will be talking about today are to a great extent made possible thanks to the gel people, Pia Maria and her team. Thank you for inspiration and support. Let me give you the context of our business. iFansition is the global provider of software engineering and consulting services with development and delivery centers across America and Europe. We have over 3000 employees on board working from all over the globe. So obviously people are the core of our business, our heart and soul. So one of our key business challenges is attracting and retaining a t-tant. Interesting fact number one in my story is that our annual survey from year to year demonstrates that specifically people are what our employees see as the main advantage of working at iFansition. And this guided me to a daring conclusion that we are pretty good at managing people. We managed to make the joy of collaboration within our teams a competitive advantage. And I think this is a treasure beyond measure. I will start my story five years back to 2018. But first let's warm up a little bit and I would like you to describe your five last five years in just one word, maybe emoji. Please share and chat. Yeah, what about you in the last five years? Yeah, Anastasia gave me this question early this morning. And I was speaking back and the word that really is top of my mind is change. I think it's been true. So many different, you know, the COVID-19 and a lot of other things have happened. So change, it would be for me. Interesting time. For me it would be unbelievable. I wouldn't believe that we would leave all these experiences over these five years, five years back. Yeah, rollercoaster. Thank you for your growth challenges. Very, very flexible. Change or die. Exactly, exactly. I guess someone has already seen my presentation because next slide is about that, so change or die. What was happening in the IT market in 2018? So I'll tell you what, it was a big butter boom. Digital transformation initiatives running all over the world and technology coming into almost every industry, multitude of startup, of IT startups, a robust growth in other words. There was a significant skill gap as well. Emerging technologies like machine learning, data science, I don't know, artificial intelligence, they created the skill gap. Emerging technologies created high demand for specialized skills. Moreover, employees were seeking for soft skills. So they gave more and more important to soft skills in order to create high performance teams and deliver value to the market as soon as possible. Clear communication, teamwork, problem solving, and profitability, where and remain must have skills. And at the same time, retaining 90 times was a real challenge. They even didn't need to do anything to find a job. It was a hunt which inevitably led to escalating salaries and increasing costs. And you can easily imagine my tricky task to motivate talents to attain new skill when they are literally attacked by dozens of headhunters by LinkedIn. And with growing pressure for technology development on one side and labor market attention from the other, we had to adapt and change the way we work with people. And otherwise, we could find ourselves far behind the competition in a short time. But where should we start? Okay, I have one famous life hack. If you want to do something in any uncertain situation, start where you are, use what you have and do what you can. Okay, Captain Oblias, and where are we? The good news was that at least we knew the direction we wanted to retain and engage the fans. So where are the expectations and how did we feed them? We had, including data in our HR management system and annual surveys, very traditionally like in many other companies. And certainly we had basic KPIs and our VI system were worried about that. But if this information answered these questions, not really, because KPIs are health metrics, they show symptoms, but they don't tell you what's happening, what the problem is and how to cure it. And what we needed was the gap between the expectations of our talents and the experience that they gained at that transition. Why did they join us? What made them say? What did they value most and what made them leave? Annual survey is a great tool, but it's way too rare to draw any conclusions. Somebody's journey may be even shorter than a year and then we'll lose our talents together with their insights. So we decided to develop the employee journey map as a pilot project. It started as a proof of concept in a spreadsheet with survey forms and routine new comprehensive functionality with insights and recommendation in our internal talent management system. But it was not that easy as it sounds. And I'm here to share our challenges with you. I'm just curious. I'd like to know if anybody has experience of implementing employee journey, please share in chat so that we can compare and discuss the challenges during the Q&A session. Please text the plus if you have such experience and minus if not yet. I'm very curious. So a plus if you have such experience and minus if not yet and you're interested in an insight. Okay. Thank you for the inputs. Okay, we have both groups here. Interest. I'm excited to discuss it during the Q&A session already. Okay. Let's switch to our challenges. The first challenge was data acquisition with survey design. What matters most? How do we turn rare data into insights and recommendations? We have no idea. You started with a team of stakeholders, not as stakeholder, but a team of people who work with our talents on different steps of their journey. The team included team leads of HR, office services, PR, mentoring community team, people management team, so and so on. Everybody who added value to our employees. I would gather business questions and they would and so I get the business questions which they wanted to get answers to and together we turned them into health metrics. Different metrics as you know require different types of data and some of them numerical, some represent liquor scale, but the main thing was to minimize text input because it's hard to interpret text on scale. Then we articulated which questions should be included into surveys to get this type of data. And the next challenge was to choose the right time and means to ask those questions. One of the main risks and concerns of our team was that our people would be sick of our endless surveys. To mitigate this, we double checked that we won't ask the same or similar questions in different surveys. And we found lots of duplicates and confusing logic. And when setting up a new process, I think it's crucial to remain a human. We did our best to explain why it is important and we asked for honest feedback. As soon as we discovered any insights, we shared them with our people and asked for their contribution to improve the situation. We reached an amazing result. More than 95% of our talents found the new feedback framework useful and we hardly see any signs of ignoring it until now. And last but not least, data management turned into nightmare when implementing PRC. It seemed that our team was buried under tons of data and we were constantly missing something. Luckily, we have a strong BI team, Hi, Sergey, who helped us to set up an optimized data pipeline. And here are a few tips for you in case you plan to implement employee journey in your company. So first, data management is the core of any insights and recommendation system. You need a data management team to support this initiative and a comprehensive tool to process data and not Excel spreadsheets for sure. If you are not ready to invest in data management, my advice is don't even start with employee journey because the worst thing that you can do is to invest in gathering data and do nothing about it. It took us more than a year to test and implement employee journey in my team. And we are still constantly enhancing it. But now we have a tool which highlights our weaknesses and guides us in the process of continuous improvement of employee journey and experience. We focus on what matters most for everyone, not for the one who shouts louder. I will continue my story based on the insights gathered with the help of this amazing tool. Okay, what happened next? COVID-19 and the rise of remote first cultures. But people were completely disoriented and frightened. What our plans were missing according to the data from employee journey was the feeling of relatedness, recognition and purpose that would motivate them. What helps to cope with the uncertainty and fear of change? It's information as much as possible, as soon as possible. And we did our best to create virtual environments for people to communicate remotely in the most effective way. Virtual kitchens, coffee breaks, regular things with management team, virtual boards to brainstorm and collaborate together, even internal block with our experts sharing their experience with teams all over the world. But all these practices, they really improved the situation and they still do work for us, but did not solve the problem with recognition and feeling as a part of the team, especially for those who joined our company remotely and have never seen their colleagues in real life. It was a call for another initiative, which grew to a recognition application. In the nutshell, we created an app called ORA with a chatbot which allows people to express gratitude to their workmates. Every week, every employee can share a certain amount of ORA points with teammates, otherwise her points burn out. Gratitude must describe appreciated behavior, not happy birthday, not your cool guy or something like that. It must be a certain action and building to company values. Accumulated points can be exchanged for rewards on an iTransition marketplace. Everybody in the team can see the virtual kudo world, just like on the slide, with gratitude, which not only motivates and improves engagement, but also helps new team members to easily absorb team culture and integrate as fast as possible. As we always do, we started this initiative as an experiment within a small team, then a bigger one, and only then we scale to the whole company. And here are some convincing figures from the experiment report. 75% of respondents believe that ORA is extremely efficient in many different ways. They mentioned that it improves the team atmosphere, cheers up, helps to celebrate small wins on daily basis, highlights values and motivates them to grow. Team happiness metric in the experiment team grew by 11% over six months. 90% of the team were involved in sharing positive feedback on a regular basis, and absolutely everyone received and shared appreciation during the experiment. But what surprised me most was the bug, which turned out to be a great feature. Initially, we used a list of values, which were defined by our top management, and sometimes, but not sometimes, always something goes wrong, and something went from this time, and people started adding their own values to the appreciation cards. We noticed that two values were especially popular, teamwork and positive mindset. And we thought, okay, why don't we extend our list of values? And we did with ORA, you can see how company values live in appreciated behavior of your people, not as beautiful marketing awards, but in action. I have a question to everybody. How do you like the idea of values in action? Do you think it's important for the business? I don't want to start a great discussion right now, but maybe you can share just your impression. How do you like it? Thumbs up? Thumbs down? I don't know. Okay, great. Thank you. Thank you. Going forward, so guess what happened in the IT market after COVID-19? Yeah, it was big, but bigger than ever before. Well, at least this time we had a couple of smart tools in our hands. But what comes next? One of my project teams grew from 15 to more than 100 people in just one year. And we managed to increase Gallup score, not on the Gallup score, but also the client's net promoter score over this time. How did we manage that? Sometimes I'm still shivering when thinking about this time. It was really tough, but here's what we did. To begin with, we noticed a warning trend. One of the main reasons for leaving the company was the lack of opportunities to grow. Although business grew likely before and miscommunication became obvious. This was another call for transparency. And we made all open positions visible to everyone. We created an internal marketplace of opportunities to enable fast and direct communication across the whole company. The marketplace became a virtual space where people could see opportunities to grow together with our transition. The opportunities included not only positions and projects, but many other types of opportunities. And the list is still expanding. I will touch upon that shortly. Okay, now everybody could see that there were plenty of opportunities in my team. And our next task was to retain our core team, select and import new team members, organize knowledge transfer, and repeat it multiple times. Sounds easy, but it was nearly impossible in such a short time. We made a decision which sounded desperate. We'll just let the team decide how to scale and supported their decisions. We helped people articulate their growth plans in a cultural manner and showed opportunities to explore new roles like leading, mentoring, owning a feature, owning a process, and so on. To switch to a new role, they had to find someone who would see their current role as an opportunity. And following this logic, we created the talent pipeline of people who explore new roles and navigators who guide them. Management supported their transition by filming the gaps, guiding and facilitating knowledge transfer, providing feedback and assisting when asked for help. A trigger for this process was defined with the help of employee journey. Once people mentioned that they are ready to move towards a new role or position, we initiated the discussion regarding the direction, open opportunities, and who could be the navigator for them. We also tracked the commitment to stay in their current role or position. And the whole setup took us six months. Now changing a role or a project is not a headache anymore. Not for the management, not for the team and definitely not for our clients. We have a vision and a plan of growing together. Along with talent flow, mentoring became another type of opportunity to grow. We switched from directive assignment mentoring payers to open communication between them. Using intrinsic motives to mentor, creating of mentoring community and cross-disciplinary mentoring. For example, project manager can enter team lead on soft skills and so on. After pandemic and these crazy years, like roller coaster, I thought I was prepared for everything. Nothing could be worse, I thought. And what came next? Russia-Ukraine conflict drastically affected our business and our people. We faced a massive forced relocation and economic crisis at the same time. Now I'm honestly thankful for all the troubles that COVID brought to us because it made us stronger. I won't finish this slide with a positive life hack or actionable advice, because we are still going through this and I have no idea where we'll end. But I can share a couple of important insights. According to the employee journal, people were 10 times more likely to say that they are satisfied with a rapid relocation if they had someone to support them to discuss their concerns and troubles, so not benefits, not the office, not the logistics, it's the psychological safety and feeling of support what made people feel better. Second, life goes on and new initiatives evolve. People come together to arrange team-building events, hackathons, charity and many many other stunning things together all without relying on corporate funds. The power of intrinsic motivation is truly extraordinary and management just needs to uncover it and see how the incredible growth and potential of their people. Third, what doesn't kill us makes us stronger. Our talents are actively using various internal opportunities to grow, although they experience dramatic stress right now. As a result of this unbelievable adventure, we have a comprehensive AI-driven and to end time management platform called Tenantier, enabling people to grow in the most transparent way. Tenantier suggests a wide range of opportunities for skills development and professional growth including open positions, mentoring, learning, a smooth transition between roles in the talent flow and based all these things are based on talent's goals, interests and skill set. When working with Tenantier, people managers see employee journey insights and recommendations allowing them to improve and play experience, make informed decisions and provide guidance for individual growth. We can they can easily manage talent flow and force a gap in advance and here comes my favorite feature. You know that everybody hates as an insincere plastic descriptions to CDs. They add absolutely no value and people don't trust this information. Meanwhile, Tenantier uses aura, crowd-funded feed of gratitude and AI capabilities to generate a list of employee superpowers and gives an overview of how their actions reflect company values on daily basis and all these features are not pushed from the top but driven by the intrinsic motives of our people. I'd like to finish my story with the lyrics of Sir Elton John. Sorry for that, it may sound silly when I love this song. I'm still standing better than I ever did looking like a true survivor and feeling like a little kid. I can proudly say that our company name speaks for itself. We transitioned to a skill-based organization where people and business can seek opportunities to grow together. I hope you enjoyed my story and found the insights useful. Like a little kid, I'm dying to know what comes next and invite you to join this journey. Let's discuss. Thank you. Yes. Thank you Anastasia for sharing your story. Yeah, we have discussed a little bit before but it's a strong story so thanks for sharing. So if we have any questions from the audience this is the opportunity. Kate. Okay. Hi Anastasia, thank you for the presentation. I'm happy to be here. The question I wanted to ask is to do with the team happiness metrics. Could you please give more information about what kind of metrics you were using, how you were evaluating whether the team got happier? Well, because happiness is quite difficult to measure so I'm really interested what metrics you were using. Thank you. Yeah, so it's an interesting question for a long discussion but I will try to make it shorter. So we focus not on just happiness as it is because we focus on team moral more. So if people are ready to, if people are engaged, if they are involved in their work on the project, working on the project, how long are they ready to stay on the project? Do they feel psychologically safe? So we use the questions suggested by Amy Edmondson, the expert in psychological safety and we shortened it a little bit not to make it exhaustive because we have a lot of different surveys on a regular basis but team happiness is something which is connected to the team performance. So we measure it within a project team. So we look into how long are they ready to stay on this project and do they feel psychologically safe? Are the tasks interesting for them? Do they feel supported by the team? And so on. So it's a complex metric and specifically when we talk about numbers, we use the number if a person mentions that they're satisfied with a project and they want to stay on the project or not. So these are the numbers and the licorice scale with questions is enhancing the whole picture so that we can see not only a number but what specifically is going on. Thank you, Nastia. Thank you very much. Thank you. More questions to Anastasia. I have one. Hello. Nastia, can you please describe me what the problem you tried to find out with the first research? You said that you have a lot of research inside the company, the whole company, but as I understand you didn't trust these researchers and you decided to do your own team project research for your team. Did you see some problem or did you receive some signal that you need a new research for your team? Can you describe the problem? How did you feel that you need one more tool for researching the mood, the condition, the behavior of your team? Okay, thank you, Fania, for the question. It's not that I didn't trust the information of our researchers. We had an annual survey, like many other companies. It's rather traditional and the questions in the survey, they are also typically confined to plenty of options when exploring the internet. But these data didn't give us answers for our questions, why people come, what is most valuable for them, what happens during adaptation period, what happens with how do people react on trends because everything is changing so fast. One year is a very long distance. If we are asking about onboarding, for example, only once a year, people can forget about this information and can leave. This was the problem that I was trying to solve. Together with the team, we investigated which questions should be added and when should we ask this question to get the data. We turned it into more comprehensive KPIs and health metrics so that we see real-time data. It brings us more information on every step of the journey, not once a year. That's it. Thank you. More questions, please, in the chat or by raising your hand. Fania, you are with us. Now we have one question before. Okay, let me step in a bit, please. So, long time no see, that's a pleasure to deal with you once again. My point is about this is a unique approach and you know most of companies don't work with the kind of scenario you describe like appreciations in our road map of employee journey map and so on. So, my question is about how long it takes and how much resources do we need to onboard employee in this stuff in case he wasn't working with this previously. I think it depends on company culture and the readiness of the management. We need managers who are ready to change because in case they are not ready to give power to the people and to be transparent, they will need years to change, first of all, inside. And then, if we have someone who is ready to change and they just need tools, I think it will take up to six months. So, from our experience, implementing an employee journey took more than a year because just to test all of the service that we included in the employee journey map, you need a long period of time and to change this something, adapt to the feedback that we received. So, it takes more time but what concerns appreciation, it's easy to implement. Just need to be ready. Okay, many thanks for this. Got it. Thank you. Thank you, Eugene. So, I have a question as well. So, Anastasia, it's fantastic to hear your story. You went through so many difficult things, first COVID and then the war and having people in Russia and Ukraine. I can just imagine the challenges that you had to go through here. So, I'm a bit curious. Now that you accomplished all that you did, what are the next steps on your journey ahead? Oh, we have so many plans. So, we're extending the functionality of Torninteo. We want to make it more complex. We are working on the mechanics of AI to make it smarter, especially I love this feature with appreciation because once we test it, we saw that it's amazing how we can use the feed of previous years of aura to generate information about our employees and see their superpowers. It's just amazing. We are making the application more user-friendly for not only for managers but for people to contribute. So, we want to increase the level of transparency and of input from everybody, not only for people who are responsible for their opportunities. I think that's crucial really that everybody can be transparent with each other and that everybody can contribute also to feed the system with information because then you get the real power out of it. So, that's really a good direction, I think, to open it up as much as possible so that everybody feels welcome and want and can contribute to the whole and that makes you feel like we are a community and we, you know, you get this feeling that we are connected all of us and we are all doing this together. We are all in this together. I'm not alone. So, really good. Another thing for those enhancements is Torninteo. So, right now we have the overall impression of what's going on but we want to separate it into personas. So, different personas within our company because we have more than 3,000 people and obviously they are all not the same. We have people who can be grouped into personas and through this enhancement we can improve and play experience in the company and skills assessment. It's the zone where we can always do something better and in order to make the process not painful for our people we are constantly working on it. And you also realize here that everybody's different, right? There is no one who is the same or wants the same exactly like somebody else. So, you need to really tailor the approach. You cannot standardize anymore. You know, we do it for every employee should have this or every employee should have that but it's very personal what you like, what your needs are and how you want to work and what is important for you and what your values are and so on. I think David wants to say something also. Sorry. No, no, it's fine. Hi. Good morning. Hi Anastasia, nice to meet you. Anastasia, so I am David Thompson. I host the Agile People podcast and what we've been doing in this series of stories from reality is to have a follow-up podcast episode with yourself. So, if anybody has any questions that they're not able to ask just now and would like to ask you in the podcast, then we can do that. But obviously, Anastasia, I need to ask you, are you willing to do the podcast episode as a follow-up? And what we generally do is we might use this as your presentation as a kind of framework but we can dig it deeper into some of the details of the you know, the wins and the challenges that you've faced along the way. Sure. Well, I'll be happy but I need to warn you, they have just one month's time because I'm pregnant. Okay. No, absolutely. It'll be within the next week or so and we can do that. Yeah. Congratulations. Congratulations. Yes. Thank you. We will talk to Ken near that time unless. Thank you David for doing that. That's great. The power of our young people. Thank you. More questions? I'm not sure that Pia and me have joined us in the beginning of our presentation. I just want to say thank you once again because most of the initiatives that I was talking about made possible thanks to your team and to hearing a young people's story. Well, thanks. Happy to hear that. I'm always happy when people tell me that it made a difference. The training that I went through it made a difference and I changed something in my real work. It's thrilling and I am really pleased to hear it. Thank you Anastasia. Thank you. Then I think we say thank you for today. As Bin mentioned, there is a lot of change coming for you as well. Anastasia, so I think there will be some turbulence in your life for the next year as well. But it was really, really interesting to hear your story. Thanks for today. Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. Thank you everybody. Welcome back to Agile people or to contact Anastasia directly if you're interested in her software as well.