Changing the Way Companies Communicate

At the heart of any innovation is change. The world is littered with the ruins of great ideas and technology that failed to capture the attention of people and communities. For anything to succeed, people must change. That’s especially true within companies: If an employee base can’t adopt new ideas and practices, it’ll utterly fail to move the markets it serves. But how does a leader successfully foster and shepherd internal change? How do we move from an environment in which 80 percent-plus of innovation fails to one in which change is more predictable and less costly?

ChangeEngine was founded in September 2021 by Andrew Higashi, Kes Thygesen, Gaurav Saini, and Rick Tank, specifically to ensure that organizations can reliably evolve to more successfully serve markets and stakeholders.

The company infuses behavioral psychology and economics into the workplace through continuous, fun, and natural interfaces to foster a more adaptive, growth-oriented, and empathetic workforce. It’s a worthy mission for a company, and it directly flows out of Andrew’s life story.

Q. You didn’t have a typical Silicon Valley upbringing. Tell us a little about your formative journey.

I was born in New Jersey and moved to Orlando, Florida. Growing up there was super fun. We were about a 10-minute drive from Walt Disney World. As you can imagine, those parks are inspiring to kids who are dreamers. To me, it wasn’t just Mickey Mouse but the whole vision around creating an entire park and world that families can enjoy. I’ll tell you, we had a lot of relatives visiting us. They would stay at our house, and we were more than happy to offer our “guided tour” services.

Then, I moved to Singapore with my family. We only lived there for a year in 2001, but it was the year of 9/11. It was my first time outside of the US, and it was a great multinational experience. I went to the Singapore American School and discovered that I love meeting new people with diverse backgrounds and learning from everybody. I’ve done that multiple times in my life. It’s a big part of why I’m doing what I’m doing.

After Singapore, we moved to California, which I still call home. Here, I began to build long-lasting connections with people after my fourth move. In high school, I wasn’t always the A-plus student sitting at the front of the class in math and physics and everything. I was more the social person who would be out building relationships and going out with friends. My dad was always teaching me math and physics, and I understood that, but I was always fascinated by the intersection of art and science to create great experiences. Like my first impressions of Disney World.

Q. It sounds like community has always been central to your experiences.

Oh, yeah. For me, I think community was one of the most important things in general.

Because I moved around so much as well. I was way more focused on understanding people way better and needed to constantly adapt to new surroundings. But, like I said, I always knew the importance of the numbers, too.

Because you can have the human element, and you could have the qualitative, like, how do you treat people? How do you communicate? How do you talk to people? But then you can also have the quantitative. It’s a bit more scientific when you are sending out communications internally. How are people responding to it? What kind of data can you understand so that you can continue improving your internal communication strategy?

You can see where ChangeEngine came from, can’t you?

Q. Yes, you sure can! What intellectual influences paved the way?

In college, I started to read a lot of books about different topics. Lots of multidisciplinary stuff. One of the first books I picked up as I was walking through the college campus at the University of California, Irvine - which is where I went to college - was A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle. What fascinated me in that book is that it asks how we would explain this amazing thing that we call life if we didn’t have letters and words. Things can be interpreted and perceived in so many ways. It suggests that communication becomes the strongest bond — almost a spiritual bond — that we can develop with one another. I ended up sharing that book with a lot of my friends.

And you know, I think the wonderful thing about finding new things is that you can share it with one another. And we’re trying to help organizations to do that. Employee communications can be a clearinghouse for sharing ideas and cultural goals. It’s a really good way to disseminate knowledge to employees so that everyone can feel included. Everyone can feel a sense of engagement and ownership.

Q. So, where did you land your first “real” job?

I tend to be more expansive in my thinking and less close-minded. That thinking spilled into my post-college job search. I’d done investment banking-type internships, but when it came time to get serious about a job, my strategy was to look at as many opportunities as possible and speak to the people surrounding that job to decide what I wanted to do. That’s what brought me into my first career. I just asked myself, ‘What, ultimately, is the role that I’d like to accept?’

I graduated in 2010, just after the 2008 recession. I was fortunate. A lot of my friends were struggling to find a role they wanted, but one of the jobs that I applied to was for a business development representative (BDR) role at a company called Gigya. I was one of the first BDRs they hired. Patrick Salyer was my direct boss. He went on to become CEO at Gigya, but he also became a mentor. And I think early on in your career, finding a mentor and someone to coach you is important. I was fortunate to find that early on at Gigya.

Q. That leads us to ChangeEngine. What business problems were you and your founders trying to solve?

There’s a really big connection from Gigya to ChangeEngine. Gigya was evangelizing the phenomenal business potential of the social graph. Ten years ago, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and others were showing the importance of social data and the opportunity to personalize marketing messages and branded experiences to prospects and customers. Using social graph data, Gigya created the customer identity and access management categories and ultimately was sold to SAP for hundreds of millions of dollars.

But Gigya was focused on the external social graph. That’s important, but when a company is trying to innovate or evolve — or, importantly, diffuse best practices and best principles — it needs to focus on what I call the people graph: the internal connections that create a company culture and facilitate execution. At Gigya, we learned a lot about a company’s employees, but we really weren’t set up to help a company personalize and improve employee experience.

ChangeEngine helps companies acculturate employees to a company’s priorities, principles, and patterns on day one. You can operationalize an entire campaign whereby a prospective employee signs their offer letter and subsequently receives a swag kit. Then, three days before they are on-boarded, their manager communicates exactly what’s going to happen on their first day on the job. The new employee comes in, and they are greeted with a welcome message that’s engaging and can be shared on social media. You see, it’s all about creating the moments that matter within the employee journey by taking best practices learned from the customer experience.

Of course, great employee experience must be sustained. By using ChangeEngine, a company can personalize employee celebrations and milestones during their company journey, like their work anniversary and giving each other kudos. Before ChangeEngine, companies were trying to track and operationalize employee milestones manually. They were downloading employee lists from human resources information systems and uploading them into the email marketing platform Mailchimp just to send a simple newsletter. And most often, a company’s efforts to execute crucial employee experiences fail. Because it was highly manual and administrative, they missed key dates. That makes the employee feel bad, and the company looks bad. As a result, companies abandon efforts to drastically improve employee experience because it’s near impossible to keep consistent without running into severe bandwidth issues. What a wasted opportunity! So, we built a platform that has become the home for all internal programs related to the company’s people graph.

Q. That’s a great idea. How does it work for the customer?

In virtually all companies, employee experience is this hot potato that’s tossed back and forth between marketing and human resources. It’s like, ‘Marketing, you diffuse the brand promise and work to get everybody aligned around our differentiating practices. HR, you take care of our manager coaching and employee communication programs. Oh, your efforts don’t line up?’

But what if the key aspects of the company’s people graph in marketing and human resources could be combined in one platform, where the branding that marketing has worked so hard on can be retained and consistent throughout every single communication? And human resources can have the subject matter expertise across all programs and be able to templatize and deploy best practices that we’ve learned from working with larger organizations. Those were the interesting elements that led us to build ChangeEngine. We’re program agnostic. We’re industry agnostic. And we’re serving a market where so many companies in the last three to five years have gone hybrid or remote. Of course, that means an employment candidate can be located just about anywhere with a fast, stable broadband connection; you don’t have to live or move to Kansas City to be part of a team that’s managed out of Kansas City. That puts an even greater premium on excellent employee communications and experience programs. The last thing anyone wants is an employee base that feels disconnected, marooned on their own island somewhere, or locked away in their own cultural bubble.

Q. That sounds excellent, but I must ask the obvious question: Do employees really want to log in to another people system?

That’s a great question, and the answer is a central piece of our strategy. I think everyone has what I call “log in fatigue.” We’ve spoken with companies that have 15 to 20 different tools that employees need to log into. In that environment, what’s the chance that employees would adopt a new employee experience platform, no matter how good? Minimal.

So, we started with the proposition that employees would not have to log into something new. Instead, we connect with HR’s existing communications infrastructure, like Slack, Teams, text, and email, so that employees can receive communications where they’re already spending their time. We architected an employee experience orchestration layer in ChangeEngine to be not only program and industry agnostic but also communications infrastructure agnostic, which is quite unique. Our goal isn’t to capture employee logins; it’s to capture and dramatically improve employee experiences and understand how they’re interacting with company-led initiatives.

Q. You’ve built a solid foundation. As a founder and CEO, what’s getting your special attention?

This is the third company my co-founders and I started together. We were friends, having worked together for a decade before starting ChangeEngine. We each fill each other’s gaps. I would not have gotten to where I am today without my co-founders to lean on. They’re like a support group to me. We operate across the US, UK, and Latin America, so it’s almost like the business is running 24/7. This has significantly helped with our time to market.

We run the company with an idea meritocracy, inspired by Ray Dalio’s book Principles. We believe in openly sharing ideas and feedback and working hard to ensure that the best ideas win. It leads to a more open culture that rewards diverse, innovative thinking and ideas. Actually, this is how we ideated on ChangeEngine. What is the next thing that we’re going to hop into? Let’s capture and rank all our ideas based on feasibility and impact and commit to the most impactful, most feasible options. We’re constantly asking, ‘What do we want to do with the next decade of our lives?’

One central thing that we learned at prior companies is that it’s important to harness the speed of trust. This is a concept I learned from business author Stephen Covey. He observed that when trust goes up, speed goes up, and costs go down. Conversely, however, when trust goes down, speed goes down, and costs go up. Speed of trust is foundational to ChangeEngine. We’re a startup. There are multiple hats to be worn, things needed to be done yesterday, and plans need to change fast with minimal disruption. But thinking beyond being a startup, the worst thing any company can do is cultivate internal blockers, right? We are constantly asking ourselves not, ‘Is this the right decision,’ but rather, ‘Can we collaborate to make this decision right?’

That’s how we’re truly going to grow a successful organization. I really am living in a virtuous cycle.