Glint launches with $15.5M and a goal of measuring whether employees are happy

It’s not just customers that companies want engaged.

Today, the cloud-based Glint is launching what it calls “the industry’s first real-time employee engagement platform.” It is also announcing it has raised $15.5 million over two rounds.

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Companies have Salesforce “to monitor our sales pipeline” and other tools to measure customer engagement and virtually everything else, CEO and cofounder Jim Barnett — also a cofounder of digital advertising firm Turn — told VentureBeat.

“But we had no solution to monitor the most important [resource] — people,” he said.

Employee engagement measures whether employees “have a positive level of satisfaction” that is aligned with the company’s direction, he said. Barnett described it as being essential to a firm’s overall performance, not to mention employee retention.

Founded in 2013, the Redwood City, California-based Glint set out to create something different from the annual survey that many companies use.

Instead, the platform offers monthly surveys of six questions that should take a minute-and-a-half to complete, and three-minute quarterly ones of 15 questions. A standard group of two dozen questions are available, which the individual firm can edit or customize, and workers can offer additional comments under the questions.

“I frequently receive recognition for my work” is one of the standard questions, with an accompanying slider ranging from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree.”

Employee answers can be measured against industry benchmarks or the company average. Analytics help pinpoint what dissatisfactions may exist and in what part of the company they might reside, with alerts to management signaling unusual levels in overall responses.

The surveys measure such employee engagement drivers as leadership, culture, attitudes toward managers, personal recognition, and similar factors.

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“Surveys are completely confidential,” Barnett said. You “can only slice and dice down to groups of five or more.”

After the results are in, the idea is that managers use the new insights as the basis for discussions with groups of employees about how to solve any perceived issues.

Early customers during the beta phase since included marketing automation platform Marketo, credit risk assessor FICO, and peer-to-peer car-sharing marketplace Relay Rider. Glint said that FICO, which has 2,600 employees worldwide, used the platform to reduce the time from employee measurement to analysis to action.

Other survey platforms exist, including SurveyMonkey or SurveyGizmo. “What’s fundamentally different is the fact that we provide the organization with a real-time interactive dashboard,” Barnett said.

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For large enterprises, Barnett said, the competition tends to be consulting services that create customized employee surveys. He also noted that Glint is “competing somewhat” with talent management platform Kenexa and online survey provider Qualtrics.

But “we’re a complete engagement solution, [with] data-tested questions,” analytics, insights, and alerts, he said.

Annual subscription to Glint is based on the number of employees, with a focus on companies of 250 or more employees.

The company raised $6.5 million in a series A and $9 million in a series B round, both of which were led by Norwest Venture Partners and Shasta Ventures, with participation from angel investors that included former Twitter CEO Ev Williams. The funding is being used to build out sales and marketing, and to expand the platform.

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