There’s one problem that virtually every company is guaranteed to run into over the course of its lifetime, and it’s one that can have serious knock-on implications for a business’ future if not addressed early on. The problem is, how do you maintain your company’s culture and values as you transition from a startup to a scale-up and beyond?

The importance of maintaining a good corporate culture can’t be overstated; it’s one of the main ways you can attract and retain talent, and neglecting it can result in reputational damage. In 2017, the tech industry was faced with a cautionary tale in the form of Uber. Of all the numerous scandals, gaffes and mishaps that befell the company over the course of the year, the vast majority could be traced back to issues with its culture and values.

If you want to avoid following the same path, it’s essential to ensure that your guiding principles don’t fall by the wayside when the money starts rolling in. One of the best ways to do that is by firmly establishing a mission statement and a code of conduct early on in your company’s life.

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The right ethos

A mission statement is essential for any business, but don’t fill it with nebulous, vaguely-worded pledges – get specific. Setting out detailed and focused guidelines provides a touchstone that you can continually refer back to to ensure you haven’t lost your way.

Maintaining a strong culture relies on collaboration and co-operation with everyone in the business playing their role, according to LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. “If your only culture is top-down hierarchy and messaging and communications that comes from the top, that culture won’t survive as you really balloon the organisation,” he said. “Instead, you want a horizontal accountability. You want it so that everybody is keeping everyone else accountable to the culture that we’re in.” (Source: https://blog.ycombinator.com/sam_reidhoffman_scaleupoffsite/)

He points to Netflix boss Reed Hastings’ ‘culture deck’, a series of slides that detail exactly what Netflix’s culture and values are.

Another crucial point to make regarding the transition from startup to scale-up is that you shouldn’t mistake aesthetic for culture. If your only commitment to maintaining your startup values is a couple of ping-pong tables and some bean bags, it’s going to be painfully obvious.

In fact, your working space should be the least important thing about your corporate culture. Instead, the foundation of your organisation should be the people within it. Staffing and recruitment are, naturally, very important when scaling a company, and you should welcome the ideas and fresh perspectives your new blood brings in – these keep a company agile and innovative.

“The most important thing isn’t how shiny and full their CV is,” Carl Reader, author of The Start Up Coach, says, “it’s in whether their attitude is going to fit in with – and hopefully enhance – your company culture.

“Without a team that’s on the same page as you, the coherent, growth-minded culture you have so carefully developed as a startup will simply dissolve.”

As Hoffman points out, however, your hiring will need to change as your company scales, and you’ll have to step back and trust your colleagues to hire well, something that will require you to systematise.

Cain Ullah, CEO of digital consultancy Red Badger, shares these views, saying: “As you scale you need to work out how to scale excellence throughout your company from culture to skills.

“It starts with alignment. To scale you need to be able to let go, empower others and give them autonomy to excel at what they do best.”

But Hoffman advises that keeping a small role in it can be an excellent way to maintain control over the culture, ensuring that potential new hires are a good fit.

People problems

Unfortunately, expansion can also cause senior leadership to lose touch with the staff at the coalface. As the number of employees increases, the amount of time you can spend getting to know individual teams and staff members decreases, but you should make an effort not to lose touch with the trenches. Town halls and all-hands meetings are great, but as a company scales, it becomes harder and harder to get a true sense of your staff’s opinions and values.

Tim Stone, COO for European IoT investor Breed Reply, says introducing more structured meetings, more sophisticated communication plans, CRM tools and clear roles and responsibilities for people can help keep that entrepreneurial spirit as your business grows.

Take time to meet with staff in smaller settings, and instruct all levels of leadership to do the same. Not only will this make employees feel like valued members of the team who can make positive contributions, but management can also keep its finger on the pulse of employee sentiment even as headcounts balloon.

David Levine, CEO of home interiors startup DigitalBridge, found success with a similar tactic. “To ensure that everyone continues to have a voice as we grow, we implemented regular company-wide vision and feedback sessions,” he says.

“These meetings are driven by an ethos of ‘creative friction’, in which everybody is actively encouraged to put forward their own ways of working, perspectives and experiences. We can all offer something different, and the key to collaborative growth lies in embracing everybody’s unique perspectives.”

Y Combinator founder Sam Altman points out that it’s worth taking the time to consider the place of early employees within a rapidly-growing company, to stop them leaving as their roles see them work less closely with the top brass.

“It’s people that have gone from being absolutely on the inside to not, that leads to a huge amount of turnover,” he says, “and I think it’s worth thinking proactively if someone is special enough that I’m going to somehow include them in the executive team.”

One tactic highlighted by Altman is that of Airbnb founder Brian Chesky, who spends around two-thirds of his nights taking early Airbnb staffers to dinner, talking about the state of the company, what issues they’re facing and other subjects, which can help them still feel connected, even if they’re not at the upper executive level.

The role of the cloud

Technology can also be an excellent way to stay connected. Cloud collaboration tools have obvious advantages in terms of connecting individuals and teams who are separated by distance, but they can also help foster a positive culture within your organisation. Using collaboration tools for discussing non-work topics can create a sense of community between employees outside of work, and ensuring that executives are both active and approachable on these platforms stops barriers forming between staff and management.

Adopting new ways of working, and tech that supports it, can mitigate some of the speed and responsiveness a larger company inevitably loses, too. Working agile in other ways, such as by using DevOps methodologies, as well as adopting cloud-based infrastructure and SaaS applications that unite and provide greater transparency across key functions such as finance, HR and marketing, helps.

Some chaos – both internal and external –  is an unavoidable side-effect of rapid scaling though, Altman notes, and it’s important that your business is flexible enough to cope with it. “ You know, people that run these perfectly non-chaotic organisations somehow never build great companies,” he says. “The trade-off is we’re going to accept a little bit of chaos in exchange for a shot at one of these massive, great companies, and founders just have to sell that to their teams. It’s hard.”

However, while all this rapid change is going on, companies need to make sure that they’re being careful with their money. Change can be good, but change for its own sake – particularly when accompanied by financial investment – can lead to companies burning through their cash reserves too quickly. Look at your existing resources and work out where you actually need to make investments, and where your existing operations will suffice.

Ultimately, culture is one of the trickiest things for any business to get right, but it’s also one of the most vital. A strong culture can carry a company through countless rough patches, but a weak culture can undermine a seemingly-successful business from within. The key is to establish a good culture early on in your company’s life, and to keep it front-of-mind as you grow.

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Scaling your business can be a tricky proposition for any startup. But once you reach a certain size, it can be easy to lose sight of your roots and forget the elements that made your company so dynamic when it was small.

There are many lessons that large enterprises can take from startups, which you can use to ensure your company is still agile and innovative even when it’s home to hundreds or even thousands of employees.

Lead by example

One of the most common shared attributes of successful tech firms that have gone from being small startups to major industry players is that they’re almost always helmed by a strong leadership team. Box, for example, is still headed up by its four co-founders, Aaron Levie, Sam Ghods, Dylan Smith and Jeff Queisser. Ghods and Queisser are focused more on the site’s architecture and technical development, as opposed to Levie and Smith’s C-level roles, but all four still have an active an integral role in the company.

Similarly, Dell Technologies is still led by original founder and namesake Michael Dell. Aside from a brief three-year period between 2004 and 2007, Dell has led the company for its entire lifetime. In both cases, the companies have benefited from the founders’ clear vision and deep commitment to the long-term well-being of the business.

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It’s not just the person at the top, though; successful startups also benefit from an executive team with a wide variety of backgrounds, skills and specialisations. This is easy when you’re a startup – the nature of startups is that they’re generally fairly diverse. When your company starts making money, however, you may find your board comprised of an increasing number of carbon copy individuals.

Aside from being undesirable from an equality standpoint, this replication also means that your board won’t bring the maximum potential experience to bear on problems. If you look at the companies who have successfully transitioned from startup to global powerhouse, they almost universally have board members with backgrounds in engineering, finance, planning, operations and more.

A strong leadership team also lessens the risk that the company will be subject to the whims of investors and other market forces, influences which can drive a company’s strategy away from long-term growth in favour of short-term profits and stability. One of the hallmarks of a startup is its willingness to take risks and explore untested waters, but when a company matures, this adventurous spirit is often abandoned as businesses prioritise safer tactics.

It’s important to remember, however, that increased risks can lead to vastly increased rewards. Google is an excellent example in this regard; the company has continually proven its commitment to invest in innovation, and fund the development not only of risky plays in its own market, but also wild moonshots into totally untested markets like self-driving vehicles.

Innovation can be risky, certainly – but Google provides an excellent blueprint for how to leverage the resources, talent and capital of a large enterprise to maintain the cutting-edge mindset that it had when it was still a startup. According to Dan White, CEO of insurance-focused digital transformation consultancy Ninety, adopting the concept of ‘innovation labs’ can help big companies recapture some of that startup magic.

“Some of these are failing, but those that are helping the whole employee base learn to innovate, and giving them a platform on which to do so, are succeeding in embedding startup practices and values in their day-to-day operations,” White says.

The same sentiment is echoed by Tim Stone, the COO of European IoT investor Breed Reply. “As well as the founder, successful businesses have many internal entrepreneurs,” he says. “Evangelists for new ideas that need to be empowered and not stifled by process. For bigger firms, allowing innovation and ownership of ideas outside their responsibilities, which startups do more naturally, is vital.”

Failure can be a good thing

One of the inevitable consequences of innovation is failure. No company will have a 100 percent success rate when it comes to new projects and ideas, and some of the products and initiatives you attempt will be disasters. The important thing is not to be put off by those failures. Apple is the best proof of this; despite being one of the biggest tech companies on the face of the planet and arguably the gold standard in hardware design, the history of Steve Jobs’ company is littered with bloopers.

Take the Apple III, for instance – a famously poorly-designed product which overheated so badly that chips would actually melt out of their sockets. Then there was Apple’s ill-fated games console, the Pippin, which had a $559 price tag and sold a measly 40,000 units. Neither of these failures (or the many, many others) succeeded in denting Apple’s passion for innovation, and Jobs’ dedication paid off when the iMac, iPhone, iPod and iPad all became the pinnacles of their fields. Incidentally, it’s worth noting that Apple is another company whose success is thanks in no small part to the work of a talented and visionary leader.

Carl Reader, author of The Start Up Coach, is a big proponent for allowing businesses to make mistakes. “As with any corporate culture, embracing failure positively has to come from the top and become part of the fabric of the organisation,” he says.

“The leader has to not only give permission for their teams to fail, but also admit failures of their own, and demonstrate how the learnings from any failure have been used.”

It’s no big surprise that tech companies aren’t shy about making use of the latest and greatest software tools in order to maximise their efficiency and productivity, but it’s nevertheless an example that all large enterprises can learn from. Startups are great at jumping on new, innovative tools and processes as soon as they’re available, which can pay dividends in terms of output.

Remember to think small as well as big

Larger businesses, on the other hand, can often fall foul of the ‘sunk cost fallacy’. This particular logical error means that the more you’ve invested in a particular thing – in terms of either time or money – the more unwilling you are to abandon it and move on. It’s the thing that convinces your brain that because you’ve put so much into it, leaving it behind would be a waste.

This fallacy frequently leads large businesses to stick with complex, unwieldy legacy IT tools, simply because they’ve spent so much money on them. In actual fact, however, moving to newer cloud-based SaaS tools can actually end up saving your business money. Not only are they often cheaper in the long run than the cost of maintaining legacy systems, the man-hours that can be saved with more intuitive and fully-featured tools add up quickly. According to a 2017 Forrester Research survey, cost reduction was a top factor for over half of organisations that are currently in the process of migrating to the cloud.

“Of course, stay true to your business and your clients,” advises Reader. “But don’t get stuck in the ‘this is how we do it’ mindset. A common word in the startup lexicon is ‘pivot’ – in other words, look at what isn’t working or isn’t serving your business best, and adjust accordingly. Listen to what your staff and clients are telling you. Inaccuracies and inefficiencies all impact the customer experience negatively, so take advantage of feedback, new ideas and advancing technology to improve your service and systems.”

Thinking like a startup also necessitates a change in which metrics you use to judge success, White says. “One way of driving startup behaviour within large corporates is to emulate some of the things that startups measure. For instance, a real focus on what are called ‘traction metrics’. These are a form of ‘leading indicator’, i.e. a metric that tells you what the future might contain, rather than what the past achieved. Examples of these are user sign-up rates, engagement time, attrition rates, et cetera.”

By taking these elements into consideration and tactically borrowing from the startup playbook, larger companies can re-integrate the energy and passion of a startup back into their business, which can fuel future growth and innovation. Becoming a large enterprise doesn’t mean that you need to become boring, predictable and risk-averse. Remember, when it comes to your company, it’s not the size the counts; it’s how you use it.

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The startup scene has become one of today’s most exciting and fluid industries to be a part of. The constant stream of innovative and disruptive ideas coming from east London, Manchester and Bristol – to name a just a few cities full of entrepreneurs – has transformed the way modern business is conducted, and there is scarcely an industry that hasn’t been revolutionised in some way by an upstart with a small team and a big idea.

There’s plenty that established enterprises can learn from what startups are doing, so let’s look at exactly what makes ‘the next big thing’ the next big thing.

A unique idea is an easy sell

Despite Uber’s chequered history, its success proves that a unique idea sells. Many startups today are almost guaranteed to succeed – at least initially – purely because the idea they have is so strong. While the concept of ride-hailing existed previously, Uber married it with an easy-to-use smartphone app, producing a multi-billion dollar product.

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Make it cheaper and simpler

Some startups aren’t able to rely on a unique idea – instead they focus on creating something that’s more marketable. The virtual and augmented reality industries were near non-existent a few years ago, yet today the likes of Microsoft, HTC, Sony and Samsung are all competing for control of a highly lucrative market. Instead of joining that fight, startup firm Mira has created an AR kit that’s cheap enough for the mass market, and simple enough to use with your smartphone, earning itself a place on many lists as a firm to watch.

Attract investment by attracting talent

A sure way to generate interest in a new idea is to showcase the talent that’s behind it. Startups such as self-driving car company Aurora, or analyst firm Periscope Data, may be categorised as ‘new companies’, but in reality their teams are a collection of former talent from some of the world’s largest companies, including Google, Box, Microsoft, Tesla and Uber.

It’s this careful selection of minds, brought together to achieve something brand new and innovative, that excites investors – and it forms a significant part of their sales pitch.

Be savvy about social media

Attracting investors to an idea is one thing, but building a loyal customer base is something else entirely. A great deal of startups to watch in 2018 aren’t necessarily doing anything particularly disruptive, nor do they have entirely unique ideas. What makes them stand out is their superb ability to speak the language of their audience.

The most backed project ever on Kickstarter remains a fairly simple card game known as ‘Exploding Kittens’ that managed to raise nearly $9 million across more than 200,000 backers. Aside from a sensational name, the game’s creators, which include former Xbox chief design officer Elan Lee, produced a superb marketing campaign, creating animations and videos that could be easily shared on social media, targeted at those who wanted something that was easy to play, but risque enough to be hit among groups of friends. It also appeared around the same time as the similarly successful Cards Against Humanity series, and was able to capitalise on customer appetite for the genre.

Refine your idea for the target audience

You don’t need to have a mass audience to be a disruptive force in the startup industry. In fact, some of the most exciting projects in 2018 are those that are highly specialised. One to watch this year is Shippo, a startup that aims to provide small to medium-sized businesses with Amazon-like shipping capabilities. It’s a partnership borne out of necessity, as many businesses have suffered as a result of Amazon’s Prime next day delivery service, which offers unrivalled convenience to customers.

Shippo’s platform allows customers to compare routes, times, and prices from private delivery companies, such as FedEx and UPS, and has even developed an API that can be integrated into a business’s network. It’s an example of a startup accurately identifying a precise problem, and working with the rest of the industry for the benefit of its customers.

Be imaginative with funding

No matter the company, and regardless of how great an idea is, every startup needs two things: funding and a guiding hand. One of the reasons why innovative British banking startup Revolut made many lists of companies to look out for was not only down to its superb product, but because of its diverse funding portfolio.

Revolut’s launch was bolstered by an initial $10 million investment as part of its association with European investment firm Seedcamp, later achieving a further $66 million in series B funding. Yet it also allowed customers to participate in its series A funding round, putting £1 million in equity up for grabs. Perhaps even more important than the money it generated was the buzz this created among potential customers.

Being quirky in a saturated market

It’s very easy for startups to drown in oversaturated markets. With so many new companies entering the field at once, you’re almost guaranteed to find more than one provider offering similar solutions to a single problem.

To thrive, startups need to stand out. For example, there are a number of startups within the cosmetics industry that alternative products to those offered in stores, yet Function of Beauty is a company allowing customers to create bespoke shampoos and conditioners based on the type of hair they have. Customers also receive their creations in personalised bottles, meaning each product is entirely unique. It’s this incredible attention to detail that has made it a startup success worth over $110 million today.

Be receptive to feedback

The startup industry can be as unforgiving as it is lucrative – there’s far greater pressure on companies getting products right early on than in traditional enterprise, and if something goes wrong, it’s near impossible to recover.

Successful startups therefore listen to their customers very carefully, and in some instances, invite them to participate in the design process. Airbnb, one of the industry’s biggest success stories, was able to triple its user base by simply hosting an afternoon session with early backers to listen to feedback on its platform. It’s a proactive style of customer interaction that investors admire, rather than asking for feedback once a product breaks.

Get creative with your business operations

A major advantage of brand new, relatively small companies is that you can be inventive with the way your business operates. Zapier, a workflow automation startup, is highly unusual in that it’s never established a company headquarters and its workforce operates entirely remotely. Not only does this mean it’s able to hire people easily from anywhere in the world, it also has none of the overhead costs of a traditional business.

Last year the company made an even bolder move by setting aside a $10,000 “de-location” package in order to incentivise employees to move away from the incredibly expensive Silicon Valley area.

Respond quickly to market trends

Perhaps the biggest edge startups have over traditional businesses is their ability to respond quickly to new market demands. In fact, the unprecedented growth of recent technology trends such as AI and the internet of things has been underpinned by the work of startups.

For example, Chicago-based IoT firm Uptake, which reached its $2 billion valuation faster than any other startup, is able to gather and analyse data from connected machinery and sensors. This means that traditional companies can take advantage of improved efficiency of smart hardware, without having to hire the expertise needed to interpret data.

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If you want to start a business, first you need a great idea. Once you’ve got that idea, though, you need to invest and in this technologically advanced age we live in, there’s a lot you need to invest in.

Similarly, if you want to grow your business, you’re going to need to invest in people and core resources, of course, but also IT.

In the fairly recent past, this would have meant significant capital expenditure in your IT estate and all the services and expertise to go along with that. Even if you were a small or micro-business, you would need at least one server if you wanted to share files and do email. If you had larger aspirations, you would be looking at a server room or data centre.

The truth is, not every business or would-be entrepreneur could afford this level of upfront investment. If you could convince your bank for a business loan, you could start down that road, but you would be saddled with that debt for a long time. If you weren’t able to raise those funds, at best growth stalled and at worst businesses died and ideas failed to even get off the ground.

About 10 years ago, however, all that began to change, thanks to the cloud.

The software buffet

For entrepreneurs of all stripes, cloud has removed many of the barriers to entry — you can host your own virtual storefront on somebody else’s infrastructure for a monthly fee and you probably don’t even need a website designer (or not at first, anyway). You can use other cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications to manage sales and customer relationships as well, rather than investing up-front for perpetual license software. Once you’re ready to bring onboard other people, you can also opt for cloud-based payroll management and other HR software.

The popularity of SaaS among SMBs is demonstrated by figures gathered by market research firm Techaisle in February 2018. These showed that in the US the number of SMBs using at least one SaaS application increased from 27 percent in 2011 to 73 percent in 2018.

A September 2017 study by the same organisation found that customer-focused cloud services were most important to SMBs, with 76 percent expecting to adopt at least one of these applications during 2018.

The beauty of this software buffet is it allows businesses of all sizes, not just startups or SMBs, to mix-and-match services, selecting what they need in the moment and adding to it as they go along. The subscription nature of the services also means that if a given service doesn’t fit the business’ needs, they can drop it and go elsewhere, without losing money or falling into contractual issues.

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Managed agility

For startups and small businesses, which face slim margins and greater vulnerability to market forces, the benefits of the flexibility offered by the SaaS model are fairly obvious. But larger businesses — all the way up to the very largest enterprises, in fact — can also benefit from it in the form of increased agility.

In a 2017 report called Cloud Strategy and Leadership, analyst house Gartner recommended: “As part of the cloud strategy, CIOs need to educate their CEOs and boards of directors about the need to invest in cloud as a style of computing that drives greater speed, agility and innovation.”

Large businesses and their CIOs are no stranger to the cloud, though. It was in some of these organisations where cloud first started to take off, albeit in the form of “shadow IT”, with the likes of Salesforce and Box making a name for themselves as companies that could deliver what the rank-and-file of an organisation needed faster and with less friction than their own IT departments.

Over time, such services have been legitimised as they have proven their value through greater productivity and ROI versus traditional software — assuming there even was a perpetual license equivalent of the service in question. Indeed, although productivity software for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations existed previously, the collaboration elements of cloud-based platforms like G Suite and Office 365 are completely novel. And it’s these types of features that can enhance agility, creativity and flexibility within a business and with external parties like partners and customers.

But the role of the CIO remains crucial when it comes to adopting cloud services, especially for agility.

As Gartner research vice president and distinguished analyst Janelle Hill pointed out in the same 2017 report: “Independent and uncoordinated journeys into cloud SaaS mean the goals, selection approach, initiation and ongoing implementation of services will be fragmented at best and siloed at worst.”

“A coordinated, value-optimised approach has the advantage of enabling multiple business units to benefit from joint decisions and shared end-user support for all of the various SaaS solutions,” she added.

Future trends

When it comes to running an agile business in the future, there are dozens of new trends gaining popularity that make use of the power of the cloud, with notable ones including DevOps and low-code/no-code (LCNC).

For these types of more technical trends, cloud is essential as it increases the speed of development and can also enable developers to offer a self-service catalogue of apps and code hosted on a cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform (IaaS). The flexible scale-up, scale-down consumption model of IaaS is also a benefit to DevOps teams, and their more traditional development counterparts, for trialling and testing new initiatives without anyone having to commit hundreds-of-thousands of pounds to building out new on-premise infrastructure.

This isn’t to say that on-premise IT is dead, though. As Gartner noted in spring 2017, the move among established, larger businesses is towards hybrid IT, which offers a more flexible solution to their needs. Indeed, the analysts predicted that by 2020 90 percent of all organisations will have adopted hybrid infrastructure management capabilities.

In short, cloud has levelled the playing field for organisations of all sizes, increasing opportunities for creativity, agility and innovation, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

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VMware is bringing data-driven intelligence to its Workspace ONE platform, enabling enhanced security monitoring across devices.

The cloud-based service, called Workspace One Intelligence, collates data from users, apps, networks and endpoints and turns the information into key insights, providing admins with actionable understandings to bolster the security within their organisation. It means IT departments and employees can identify risks before they become a problem, the vendor said, and take action to prevent them impacting productivity.

Having this information at their fingertips means IT admins can create automated tasks to deal with repeatable circumstances, such as fixing vulnerable Windows 10 endpoints with a critical patch or setting conditional controls to apps and services for certain levels of employees, VMware claimed.

“Empowered employees are at the heart of digital transformation. However, providing employees with the tools they need to improve productivity introduces operational complexity and increased cyber threats as apps, devices and networks proliferate and the security perimeter dissolves,” said Sumit Dhawan, senior vice president and general manager of end user computing at VMware.

The virtualisation giant has also announced the Workspace One Trust Network, which combines Workspace One data with third-party security solutions from firms such as Carbon Black, CrowdStrike, Cylance, Lookout, McAfee, Netskope and Symantec.

The integration of partners’ solutions means businesses will have more visibiity across their organisations, VMware said, rather than using mutiple, fragmented tools.

“Our new intelligence-driven digital workspace platform and partner ecosystem help customers leverage the power of insights, automation and predictive security to simplify operations and detect and remediate threats while delivering the best user experience,” Dhawan added.

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Workday and Slack have joined forces to offer users the ability to access Workday insights from within Slack.

With more integrations planned for the future, they will initially offer the ability to view contextual and actionable data to complete tasks from the collaboration platform.

Employees will now be able to engage with HR through Slack, asking questions about their benefits, reviews or annual leave, requesting time off, notifications of which will be sent to both managers and the employee. Workers can find out information about their co-workers, such as name, job title and department, as well as completing peer reviews from inside Slack. The changes are expected to be introduced in the first half of the year.

Future integrations will include the ability for IT staff to assign team members to the correct Slack channels according to department, so employees don’t have to ask to be set up across the right channels and these can be tweaked from an admin level.

Slack users will also be able to set up personalised notifications and Workday alerts, so they will know when anything changes in the channels they’re part of or if HR need them to address something in Workday.

“Innovation has always been one of our core values here at Workday, and embracing an open mindset and collaboration wherever it makes sense for the good of customers,” Joe Korngiebel, chief technology officer at Workday, said.

“We believe that the future belongs to the companies that focus on ‘we’ – and our partners like Slack are incredibly important in helping our customers maximise the value of their Workday investments.”

Korngiebel added that Slack is just the start of Workday’s push for integrations and the company will be working with other businesses, such as Microsoft Teams, Workplace by Facebook and Google Cloud to make the platform work for everyone.

“By opening up our platform, our goal is to trigger a new era of enterprise innovation and experiences, and to make it possible for customers to leverage Workday’s context and insight for any of their applications. We are incredibly excited as we forge ahead with our customers and partners,” he added.

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