The way that we work has transformed over the past several years.
The so-called ‘9-to-5’ hasn’t vanished all together, but it’s certainly shifted and changed. Demand has risen for flexibility, with more and more people working in hours and locations that better suit their lifestyles and their wellbeing. This fits into broader shifts around the way people view work, or specifically, what they’re looking to get out of a job that is not only their livelihood but also constitutes a third (or more) of their day.
And yet, while jobs and career patterns have changed, workplace learning and development has not. Companies looking to invest in their employees’ growth find it harder than ever to make a real impact, and even harder to measure it.
That’s the problem Romain Etay and Nazim Chibane set out to solve: after all, it’s something they witnessed first hand, having worked together in large corporations and having struggled to access the tools they wanted to grow professionally. Together, they founded Klara HR—a new type of learning and development platform that offers bespoke training and, more importantly, deeper insights into the growth of your employees over the course of their career with you.
Here’s how they’re taking on the bold task of transforming HR learning and development.
Tracking employee development—and why it's so hard
When surveyed, millennials and GenZs have considerably different expectations when it comes to the world of work. While salaries, work-life balance, and other generous benefits are important, even more popular are opportunities to learn, develop, and grow as individuals. 4 out of 5 GenZ employees said they would prefer a job that allows them to use and hone numerous different skills, while 91% of millennials consider career progression as a key criteria when choosing a new job.
What does this mean? Human resources (HR) is more important than it's ever been. The problem is outdated, largely undigitalised processes are hampering these opportunities, rather than facilitating them.
This is a problem that Klara is trying to solve. That said, while their website describes the company as ‘Klara HR’, UK country director Matt McColley is quick to emphasise that Klara is not actually an HR platform.
“Klara is a SaaS platform to track and support employee development at every stage of their professional journey,” Matt explains.
Tracking is the key emphasis here. While processes have existed for years, what many companies fail to do is actually find reliable and consistent ways of measuring the impact of what they’re doing. All too often progress is unrecorded, and even when it is, it’s done through clunky spreadsheets and manual questionnaires, making it hard to measure across organisations (particularly those with more than 1000 employees).
This has become particularly prominent in the last few years, with remote working becoming much more commonplace in large organisations. When you’re not all sitting in the same office five days a week, every piece of data is valuable.
Streamlining employee development through technology
At its heart, Klara aspires to be an employee-centric organisation—”Designed to empower employees to drive their own progression,” Matt says. They have set out to address three key problems, where they believe they can make a tangible difference for individuals and the organisations they work for.
Firstly, talent management, which Matt describes as “nurturing and retaining the level of talent [you] want within a business”. This is typically one of the biggest challenges for large organisations, and yet something that is instrumental to their success and longevity.
“We want to give businesses the tools needed to develop their talent to ensure the success of that business in the future,” Matt adds.
Training is central to this. For numerous organisations, from financial services to manufacturers, training is a key component of employee growth. The challenge, however, is tailoring training to be more specific to employees’ needs: the result of this, Matt says, is lower engagement and much lower completion rates.
Klara’s platform offers simplified access to on-the-job training. It allows organisations to easily create bespoke training material, automate the distribution and delivery of this material to various teams, and collect results all in one place. For employees, training is delivered digitally and asynchronously, allowing for completion in their own time.
Finally, managerial one-to-ones. These are crucial in most organisations for keeping track of employee progress and challenges, whether that’s in a sales environment or a more manual, manufacturing organisation. But it's a time-consuming process—for employees, manually completing questionnaires, and for managers, constantly updating complex spreadsheets. Klara looks to streamline this whole process, automating the distribution of questionnaires and integrating directly with CRMs (as well as other systems for alternative use cases). For large organisations, standardising this process across numerous teams and locations, creates a strong and consistent data set that can be shared across an organisation.
“We are simplifying an otherwise complex operational process and providing clear visibility to those who need it,” Matt stresses.
Klara’s expansion to the UK
Since launching in France in 2019, Klara has seen tremendous traction and real impact from the organisations it has worked with. Carrefour, the French retailer with over 300K employees, has successfully implemented Klara as a talent management tool for over 500 individuals; Banque Populaire, part of one of France’s biggest banking groups, has seen 250K consolidated responses from 2.5K employees on Klara.
The natural next step was UK expansion. The size of the market was an absolute no-brainer, with a considerable number of large enterprise organisations (including some of Klara’s existing clients) who call the UK home. Proximity to Paris also made knowledge sharing and travel particularly convenient.
Matt, who was brought in to lead operations in the UK, points to the strong foundations of the French business as paving the way for UK success. “We certainly had a slight advantage. They started from zero,” he says. That said, it’s not been a simple switch. The platform and the wide range of training materials needs to be translated and regionalised, to reflect the new market. There’s also been interesting differences between French and English ways of working to navigate—although largely Matt acknowledges a great deal of synergy between the two.
Looking ahead, the opportunities are evident—not just in the UK but increasingly across Europe. “A company’s greatest asset is its people, and we’re helping organisations unlock their full potential,” Matt emphasises.
Want to boost your employees' growth? Check Klara's website.
