Joe Kim
Founder, Heardby · HR practitioner
- Planning call before your first round
- Report walk-through when it lands
They told me the real thing in the garage. It never made it into a survey.
I spent fourteen years in HR at a transit authority with a thousand employees and five bargaining units, and the relationship HR usually has with unions: cordial in the hallway and adversarial at the table, especially during negotiations or when a grievance was moving.
I watched drivers we'd spent six weeks training leave in week eight. They hadn't been lied to; they'd been told what a new driver's schedule looks like, in an interview, by someone they wanted to say yes to. The only people who could have told them in a way they'd believe were the drivers who stayed, and nobody ever asked those drivers anything.
What I noticed was that it didn’t stop people from talking to me. Drivers, mechanics, stewards, people on the other side of a grievance that week. They’d stop me on site, or sit down for twenty minutes in a break room, and tell me what was wrong and what they’d fix. I spent as much time out of the office as I could get away with, because that’s where the real information was. None of it ever made it into a survey.
That’s the gap Heardby fills. People on the floor already know why their coworkers are leaving. They’ll tell you, if they trust that it won’t come back with their name on it and that someone will actually read it. I built a tool that does the listening the way I used to do it, except it can talk to twenty-four people on a night shift in a week, and nobody has to find me first.
I believe the simplest thing about work: people who feel heard stay, and people who stay make a place run. You can’t get the first without asking.
Joe Kim
Founder