heyday – Building an equity, diversity and inclusion strategy in the midst of a pandemic

Client: heyday

Services

• Equity, diversity and inclusion strategy
• Creation of a 12-month return sheet
• Creation of training courses

Context

heyday is a technology startup, founded in 2017. It leverages conversational AI and messaging apps to help retailers improve their customer experience. The company has around 50 employees spread across technical and non-technical positions. The company’s values are teamwork, excellence, empathy, responsibility, integrity and love of the customer. Despite its efforts, heyday was finding it difficult to reach out to a diverse workforce and bring its values to life. It therefore called on URelles to help it build a strategy to attract highly qualified talent representing our diverse Montreal society.

Objectives

URelles needs to build a strategy for attracting, retaining and developing diverse talent to support heyday’s growth.

Challenges

A scarce and undiversified workforce – There are two aspects to consider: there has been a serious shortage of IT workers in Quebec for several years, and the workforce is usually very homogeneous, unlike our company. We understand this context very well, and are used to building strategies around these parameters.

In the midst of a pandemic – The mandate with heyday began in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Like any other company, the startup is focused on the essentials: employee health, ensuring the transition to teleworking and, of course, continuing to grow and recruit new people. Our expertise becomes crucial in the face of this major challenge. We therefore organized a series of working meetings, taking into account the new virtual reality and the time available to contact people. The recommendations we came up with can be implemented back at the office, just as in virtual reality.

Limited resources – heyday is a three-year-old startup, and although it has won the “startup of the year” award and achieved its business objectives, a startup doesn’t have the resources of a big company. And because we like to think of our customers as partners, we understand their needs and means. So we’ve taken their parameters into consideration and recommended actions tailored to their reality.

Solution

Building a strong employer brand – We collaborated to build a strong employer brand strategy so that heyday could increase its ability to recruit in a context of significant labor shortages, aligned with the values of equity, diversity and inclusion. We recommended three positioning axes around which heyday must focus to remain an attractive employer. We have drawn up a 12-month roadmap.

Take a stronger retention than attraction approach – Since we’re in a labour shortage context, we need to focus more on retaining employees rather than putting a lot of energy into attracting new ones. We explained best practices in equity, diversity and inclusion with this in mind, in order to foster a sense of belonging among current employees, especially as we live in uncertain and stressful times.

Looking to the future – We created a 12-month roadmap so that heyday could feel empowered and autonomous in the path ahead. We recommended actions to be taken, such as training, workshops and programs to be put in place, so that the tech startup could strive for as much equity, diversity and inclusion as possible. We also drew up recommendations in terms of impact measurements and contacts.

Customer testimonial

“URelles was extremely professional, attentive to our needs and able to quickly understand our prerogatives. All this, even though we were in a very difficult context: at the height of the pandemic. The strategy we drew up gave us a roadmap for the actions to be implemented over the next few months, which was concrete and adapted to the reality of a start-up like ours. The support and advice were judicious and timely. It was a pleasure to work with URelles.”