A Chat With Tom Jozefacki, Co-Founder And CEO Of Nais

Tell Us About The Business; How Did It Come About?

Nais is an HR tech platform that merges SMART Appreciation with analytics that gives management a 360 understanding of their company culture, team performance dynamics, and employee engagement. The company was founded in early 2017 by Tom, Iwona, and Chris, who have broad expertise and complementing skills in technology, sales, and operations.

As a team, we share the common mission of using SaaS software to change how organisations create a culture of engagement based on the positive interaction between people and teams.  We want our clients to turn to Nais as a tool to build and boost their cultures to bring diversity, inclusion, and a new sense of purpose in the post-COVID era. We base our solutions on the science and power of physical psychology and apply our knowledge of UX for mobile Apps.

Today we work with over 150 clients such as Dentsu, COTY, Chipita, and Seris and help over 60, 000 individuals feel engaged and appreciated at their place of work, office, home, factory or store.

What Have You Learnt So Far?

People love to belong and feel appreciated. For example, one of our retail restaurant clients has over 4,000 employees and has recorded 25,000 appreciation kudos sent between employees in the first month from the Nais app launch, with 95% of all employees participated. Moreover, another client, with 3,000 office employees, improved employee satisfaction scores from 6.5 to 7.7 (on a scale of 1-10) after the first year of use. Here 98% of employees use Nais App.

Personally, we learnt that it feels great to help people feel better at work and have business with such a positive social impact.

What Challenges Have You Overcome? How Have You Responded During COVID?

Our early challenge was to find a product-market fit. Our test market was SME companies. We assumed that smaller enterprises would be interested in better tools to support their employees to improve engagement and consequently competitiveness versus their larger competitors. We were far away from the mark and needed to pivot quickly toward large, 500+ enterprises.

Our largest client has over 20, 000 employees. This focus on the large enterprises helped us respond to COVID with better solutions needed to support remote work. Our efforts paid off not only with old clients doubling down and implementing new functionalities, but word of mouth brought us a record number of new clients in the first half of 2021.

As a team of 22 people, we work remotely across multiple locations across Europe since March 2020. Despite the challenge of managing a growing business and overall business uncertainty during the COVID months, we retained everyone on the Nais team.

What Are Your Plans For Growth?

Our growth plans include further product development by implementing AI and Machine Learning to bring predictability to appreciation tools. A post-covid era with the remote work model and more diverse teams will make team management more challenging, yet there is no way back – there will be a need for tools that will enable managers/organisations to see and interpret the full picture only with online activities.

From the market perspective, we see opportunity across Europe with a focus on the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, and Scandinavian countries with the support of participation in the Global Entrepreneurship Program, Microsoft, and exclusive selection to the finalist of EIT Digital challenge 2021, Europe’s flagship competition for Deep Tech scaleups.