Jana Morrin is CEO and Co-founder of Speakfully, a platform to help employees and companies grow through the recording and sharing of uncomfortable experiences within the workplace. Speakfully is behind a movement to create psychologically safe environments through its documentation, reporting, and support resources.
After experiencing workplace-mistreatment herself, Morrin channeled her passion for changing workplace culture by leveraging design and technology to create a platform that decodes the gray areas while supporting individuals, human resources teams, and leadership to address and improve workplace issues, thus creating a safer work environment for us all.
Please tell us a little bit about your company – what is Speakfully all about?
Speakfully is an HR Tech platform providing real-time, pro-active data and analytics that reveal what an organization is experiencing so leadership may make educated and proactive decisions regarding conversations they need to be conducting internally to assure a healthy workplace culture. An organic approach for an employee to track, record, and report multiple incidents of uncomfortable work experiences provides an informational flow directly from the employee to HR with no mid-intervention. Personal experience of my own served to inspire the creation of the platform with a free version available.
Tell us a little bit about your background and how you started your company?
Majority of my career I’ve been in operational leadership within tech and/or IT and have always been very passionate about my career and providing value to the organization regardless of where I am, which is why I jumped at the opportunity when I was recruited to go to a new organization, role, and city, that reported to a C-level executive. It was an opportunity that could really progress me and my development.
That was the beginning of a rollercoaster of an experience that I never thought would happen to me. My unfortunate experience of workplace mistreatment led me to create Speakfully. After I left the company because of it, I reflected quite a bit on what I wish I would have had as an employee while going through it and on the same note, what I wish the organization would have done differently to make me feel comfortable to come forward sooner. Thinking through that and talking to my co-founder is how Speakfully came to fruition.
What are your plans, how do you plan to grow this company?
We launched our organizational product the end of 2019 and now are actively seeking to fundraise for our first seed round. In the meantime (and always), we will continue to sign on new customers, provide them with the best implementation and onboarding experience possible, and show them how much value Speakfully can offer their employees and organization.
Once we receive funding, we will continue to grow our customer base, add new features from feedback we’ve received from our customers, and try to get into as many organizations as possible. We’re very passionate about what we do and what we are offering and know that it can make a difference in so many workplaces!
What were the top mistakes you made starting your business and what did you learn from it?
I don’t really look at anything we’ve done as mistakes. Creating and running a start-up company is an ongoing learning process and that’s what it continues to be for us. If you don’t try, you’ll never know. It’s all about being able to pivot when needed based off of what you’re seeing. At times, those pivots take longer for you to execute than you’d like or than you wish they would have. However, you need to give the ideas you’ve implemented enough time to know whether its worked or not. Finding that happy balance is something that I’m not sure will ever be perfected but is something that we’re always striving for.
How do you separate yourself from your competitors?
There are a couple of differentiators that make us unique. First, is that we provide more than just a one incident reporting platform. Employees have the ability to have a voice and feel heard in multiple different ways. They can group together and input more than one experience and submit an official report to their organization when they are ready, answer pulse surveys anonymously sent from their organization, and give one-off feedback regardless of severity, positive or negative, as needed.
Second, we give real-time data and analytics to the organization prior to any of the employee reports being submitted, giving them a pulse of the trends that are being experienced as an organization in order to get in front of any issues before they become big problems.
What is one thing that you do daily to grow as an entrepreneur?
There isn’t just one same thing each day. I think that is the good and the bad (depending on how you look at it) of starting a business. You don’t know what you’re going to get each day. I will say, personally, in order to ensure my mind is clear, I do exercise daily. For me, that allows me to mentally be present throughout the day with all of the different things that can get thrown at me.
What are three books or courses you recommend for new entrepreneurs?
- The Founder’s Dilemmas by Noam Wasserman
- Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh
- Selling to Vito by Anthony Parinello
If you only had $100 dollars to start a new business, knowing everything you know now, how would you spend it?
Your customers need a way to find you. That being said, you need a web hosting service and a domain name which will give you the ability to have a website for your customers to find and contact you. Additionally, it will tell them what you’re all about and why they should become a customer.
How can we get in touch with you?
You can always go to our website www.speakfully.com to see what we’re all about and contact us through that. If you’re looking to get a hold of me personally, you can email me at jana @ speakfully.com.
