Business Info - issue 141

businessinfomag.uk magazine 38 HR Q&A With Pete Eyre, Managing Director, Vevox Business Info : Does Vevox do the same things it used to or has it become more sophisticated in terms of functionality? Pete Eyre: The fundamentals are the same. The two use cases are answering live polls to measure learning, understanding or feedback and submitting text-based questions, which people couldn’t do with clicker devices. That’s where we see the real power of it, particularly in corporates – the ability to log in and ask a question during a meeting and for others to ‘like’ it, so that the most relevant questions rise to the top. In company meetings, the voice that shouts loudest isn’t always representative of how people feel. Vevox gives people the opportunity to say ‘I don’t think this view is representative of everyone in the business’. It’s become a good leveller in that respect and brought management and employees closer. Another difference is that in the old days everyone had to be in the same room, but today Vevox is cloud-based so anyone can join in. We have arranged a global ‘town hall’ for a pharmaceutical company where 100,000 people were invited to attend. It meant that everyone, from one person at home to a whole team Business Info : What is Vevox for and who is it aimed at? Pete Eyre: Vevox is a cloud-based software platform that creates a channel for employees to communicate with employers on a level playing field. Employees can log into an app (a web app or smartphone app) with complete anonymity and answer live polls or ask questions. Anonymity increases feedback by removing fear of judgement by colleagues/bosses or the fear of looking stupid for not knowing something. Business Info : What is Vevox’s background? Pete Eyre: Our background was in live polling for events and occasionally TV. People were given a clicker device when they entered a conference, which they would use to vote when polled. In the pre-smartphone era, that was the only way to do it. Now, of course, everyone has a device in their pocket that is way more advanced and able to interact with cloud-based applications. The arrival of the smartphone was the technology trigger. in Singapore, could contribute to the meeting. Business Info : Is Vevox limited to meetings or could someone submit a question at other times? Pete Eyre: You could use it in that way, but there are other channels that allow people to do that – Slack, Teams et cetera. Vevox is generally for ‘in the moment’, live meetings. Business Info : What’s the maximum capacity you can support? Pete Eyre: We can support any size meeting. The largest we have done had 100,000 invitations, but most are between 50 and 500 people. Business Info : Are there many providers offering similar solutions? Pete Eyre: There are a few, and in terms of functionality we are reasonably similar. That said, we have really focused on answering the needs of internal corporate communications. We take security very seriously and have enterprise-wide installs so anyone in an organisation can make their meetings interactive. For us, the existence of other suppliers is confirmation that this is a tool organisations need.We attend a lot of conferences for HR and comms directors and when they talk about the stack of software platforms they need to function, they always include a live polling and Q&A solution, as well as a system like Slack or Workplace by Facebook or Microsoft Teams. Business Info : Do you mainly target large corporates or do you also address the needs of smaller businesses? Pete Eyre: We cover the whole range, but we are focused on medium to large corporates. That is our sweet spot because they make great use of Vevox and because their security standards are very high. There are other products that might do the same thing as us ad hoc for a conference where security Business Info learns how a smartphone-based live polling and Q&A tool can help improve employee engagement Pete Eyre