Involved will revolutionize work culture with a new way to include employees in key decisions

This post is also available in: Danish

Who doesn’t know about the annual employee health and safety assessment and the many discussions that follow. The boss who has a great idea which sounds fantastic, but then there’s the issue of implementation and does it have a hold in reality?

Management may have a lot of great ideas, but employees may not always be in tune with them. Then, how does management get the of in-depth understanding of the employee perspective?

Involved is a platform-solution where employees can define, answer and build on the big, small and difficult questions that arise in an organization. It’s a bottom-up approach where employees are in the driver’s seat and management is forced to listen.

“As a leader in an organization, you have to make a lot of decisions, and employees don’t always feel heard. With Involved, it’s easier than ever to involve all the relevant people in a decision. Through the platform, all participants can express themselves anonymously. In an anonymous forum, there is room for all points of view, where both introverts and extroverts can have their say and bias is avoided,” says Sara Høyer Kragelund, CEO and co-founder of Involved.

The platform works by hosting sessions that can last anywhere from ten minutes to an hour or more. It’s easy to access on both computer and phone, where participants engage in a discussion or dialog, depending on the purpose. Here they can assess, build on and respond to each other’s opinions, questions, standpoints and so on.

In addition, there is an underlying algorithm that helps ensure that the most important and decisive statements are expressed and disseminated as widely as possible to the participants. The math behind the platform is what makes it unique and makes it work, both for small businesses and large corporate companies with thousands of employees.

The leader who has started a session will quickly get an idea of which topics are highly supported, which are highly polarized, and which are perceived as controversial. Then a large data set is produced that can be acted upon, so you’re not just left with a bunch of utterances which you don’t know what to do with.

“The next big step is to develop a dashboard and make it visual so it’s easy for the session manager to share the insights within the organization,” says Tim Knorborg Jensen, CMO and Partner at Involved.

“We’ve already had several people interested in investing, but we’ve decided to turn them down. Companies of all sizes are already using our platform, including organizations with more than 1,000 employees. What keeps us from going all-in is that the sales and implementation process can be a bit lengthy for now. But once the processes are up and running, we can scale up and loosen the reins a little bit, and at that point it’s definitely something we’ll have to consider again. But we don’t have that need at the moment,” says Sara Høyer Kragelund, CEO and co-founder of Involved.

An international story playing out in Aarhus

Involved was founded by an international team; Sara from Aarhus, Lucas from Rotterdam and Geert Vendensteen from Brussels. They met through their international network, working on the idea behind the scenes for a while before founding the company. Since then, things have taken off, the team has only grown and even more talented people have joined the mission.

Tim Knorborg Jensen is the former CMO and co-founder of Aarhus-based TEXTA. He was introduced to the platform after his colleague, CEO and partner at TEXTA, Nicolai, had started using the platform to engage employees.

“After experiencing the platform first-hand, all of us owners at TEXTA fell in love with the platform, and when Involved needed help with marketing, a unique opportunity arose, which has ended up with us joining the ownership group, and today I am responsible for marketing at Involved. You can save your gut feeling because employees are actually part of the process – they get involved. The strength of the platform is that it’s not just a feeling of being in the plenary, but that they actually have a direct impact on the decision-making process,” Tim explains.

The dynamic group also has an experienced advisory board consisting of Aaren Ekelund, former CMO & COO at Microsoft Denmark and Annette Nørregaard who is also Relationship Director at Visma Dinero.

The main idea is the potential for employee involvement, and the big names that have joined the company have recognized the value that the Involved platform brings.

“Annette has a really good insight because she has contact with many different companies from Visma Dinero, and her experience with startups is incredibly important to us, while Aaren has a handle on the numbers. From Microsoft, he’s used to working a lot with KPIs, so he’s just a really sharp strategist.”

In addition, Sara says that there is another big profile on the way, which she can’t quite reveal just yet.

Focus on gamification and a great user experience

Since its inception, the platform has been available on mobile and desktop, but work is ongoing to optimize the user experience. Therefore, it has been important to hire a UX designer who has really made sure that the user experience is in focus.

“I’ve always worked with engagement in my own consultancy, Insightment, and found that it was often quite manual and that there must be huge potential if it could be made easier. Doing employee engagement manually was both too expensive and inefficient, so I thought it had to be done better, more efficiently and accessible to everyone. From there, I went full-time with Involved. It’s just really cool to not just walk around with an idea, but to actually build a product and see it become a reality,” says Sara Høyer Kragelund, CEO and co-founder of Involved.

The user experience is important if you want to successfully engage your employees, so it’s not just another experience of a questionnaire to be ticked off. That’s why they’ve taken inspiration from game universities and added a focus on gamification, so that while gaining valuable insights, you also get a fun experience.

“We’ve received really good feedback from several managers, who have mentioned that they have received much more data than expected. Also, several of the employees who have participated have said that it is the most dynamic employee feedback process they have participated in,” says Tim Knorborg Jensen.

Early on the journey

Although Involved is still early in its journey, its customers include a Dutch branch of the listed company SWECO. They use the platform to evaluate projects and learn what went well and what can be improved for the next project.

“We actually have several listed companies in the pipeline right now that are already full to the brim, and there’s a lot of fire in the boilers. Therefore, an investment wouldn’t do much for us at the moment. On the other hand, it has been shown that the platform can be used for both SMEs and huge organizations, which shows a huge market potential,” says Tim Knorborg Jensen.

One of the intentions of the platform is that it can also be used to keep an organization’s core values as a focal point or build a new, healthy culture.

Especially in a time of increased digitalization and the rise of the hybrid workplace, Involved is trying to focus on work culture and bring organizations together so they can still function as unified entities.

The platform is currently available in Danish, Dutch and English. The first focus is currently on the Danish and Dutch markets, but according to CEO Sara Høyer Kragelund, they are just taking off before flying out taking over rest of the world.