Betterworks Acquires Hyphen, Enabling Every Enterprise to Better Connect Employee Engagement to Business Impact

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., Feb. 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Betterworks^®, the enterprise software for Continuous Performance Management^®,, announced today that it has acquired Hyphen, a leading continuous employee listening and engagement platform based in San Francisco. This acquisition expands the capabilities of Betterworks' award-winning enterprise solution to significantly improve every enterprise's ability to continuously generate actionable insights from their workforce and create the goals to drive measurable improvements. Terms of the acquisition are not disclosed

A convergence of factors has led to an increased focus on listening to employees at all stages in their lifecycle and taking action on that feedback: a younger workforce that values more personalized engagement, an understanding that employee performance is the driver of  business performance and the need of both HR and leaders to have actionable insights about their workforce at their fingertips. SHRM recommends HR address this through "digitizing basic HR processes like performance management, goal setting and employee feedback." With this acquisition, Betterworks transforms historically separate business and HR processes into an integrated, data-driven continuous approach to both business and talent management.

"Listening to your employees is a critical capability to being a successful company," said Doug Dennerline, chief executive officer at Betterworks. "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 our acquisition of Hyphen, we complete 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)."

According to Josh Bersin, global industry analyst and a Betterworks Board Observer, "Feedback is one of the most important parts of performance management, so companies want and need these systems to work together. 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' solution has seen multiple updates following the company's Series B funding round in early 2019, including the launch of Calibration in early 2020. 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.

To best deliver business and employee growth for customers, Betterworks aims to be data-rich and process light. The employee listening, survey and polling capabilities acquired by Betterworks increase the data collected from and about the workforce. This data can be leveraged to inform, transform and simplify other critical business and talent processes. It also empowers managers and HR leaders to make data-driven decisions about employees,  people's careers and compensation, and address the bias that many of these processes are riddled with today. Betterworks Engage allows businesses to tie the measurement of employee engagement more tightly to the delivery of desired business outcomes.

"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," said Arnaud Grunwald, co-founder/CEO of Hyphen and now chief strategy officer, Engagement at Betterworks. "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."

Related Resources:

• Resources for Helping Managers be Better Managers
• Learn more about how to Align Your Workforce
• Learn more about Continuous Performance Management®
• Webinar: Cracking the Culture Code

About Betterworks
Betterworks helps enterprises achieve agility, align their organization and accelerate business and employee growth. Our 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.

For more information about the latest business and people management strategies and best practices visit our resources gallery.

SOURCE Betterworks