Betterworks, an enterprise software for performance management, said on Thursday that it has acquired Hyphen, a San Francisco-based company that provides an employee listening and engagement platform.
Hyphen’s employees and brand will fold into the Betterworks brand, which will sell the product as Betterworks Engage. Hyphen helps employers collect feedback from employees through surveys and polls, and its AI analytics tool converts unstructured feedback into data and provides recommendations.
“Listening to your employees is a critical capability to being a successful company,” says 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.”
Employers adopting Betterworks Engage will be able to continuously get employee feedback from pre-hiring to retirement, and turn those insights into goals and track improvement.
“Feedback is one of the most important parts of performance management, so companies want and need these systems to work together,” says Josh Bersin, global industry analyst and a Betterworks board observer.
He said that the acquisition follows a market trend of “linking goal setting, conversations, surveys and employee experience data into a single action platform for managers.”
Hyphen’s employee listening, survey and polling capabilities improve Betterwork’s workforce data. The data can be used 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, careers and compensation, and address bias that may occur.
Building a culture of frequent, transparent feedback can help employers to better retain top talent and drive continuous data-driven business improvement, says Arnaud Grunwald, co-founder and CEO of Hyphen and now chief strategy officer of engagement at Betterworks.
The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
