Centering the employee with Mendix, a low-code leader

“I think I’m from a typical HR background,” Lara Pyko, chief people officer at Mendix, says from Berlin.

“I hold a Masters in business psychology. It always fascinated me to assess the signs of human behavior and combine it with a knowledge of the business world, to answer a question like, what kind of environment do employees need to learn and grow, and how do you set up incentive systems which affect culture and behavior in organizations.”

It’s a vital skillset for a HR leader in any organization. But especially so in one like Mendix, the low-code platform used by businesses to develop mobile and web apps at scale and which, when it was acquired by Siemens for €0.6bn ($730m) in 2018, was in a state of “hypergrowth” – that is, growing at 30% year-on-year.

Mendix’s now more than 4,000 customers come from a wide range of industries including banking, insurance, logistics, manufacturing and the public sector. They include Continental, Zürich Insurance, Rabobank, the City of Rotterdam and the PVH group (the European parent company of brands such as Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger).

Pyko was with Siemens prior to the purchase of Mendix. And when the acquisition happened, she had decisions to make about how much to integrate Mendix’s HR functions into the wider company.

“For us to stay ahead, not just our people but also the company must develop faster than the world is changing,” she says.

“And that puts a very special demand, of course, on the HR department, not just from the ‘hey, we need to create an environment where a diverse crowd of people can actually develop and grow’ but also how do we master all these growing pains which come from an environment which is on the hypergrowth?

Inside the Mendix tech stack

“Tech-wise, yes, we chip in to Siemens for some of the systems, and we are really lucky to do that because it offers full-scale, especially when we talk about the backbone systems. The other side of the coin is, of course, how do you nurture the company culture and the start-up culture you’ve built up so fast? And that’s very different.

“And what we do is we build experience layers on top of our backbone systems. And of course we use our own technology to build our experience layers. We do the onboarding and hiring. And then also we buy some off-the-shelf, for instance for people development, and always set that on top of the backbone systems.”

Mendix’s approach, Pyko says, is to “put the employee at the center of everything”

“How we do it is the same, I would guess, as a product – we’re looking at the employee as a customer and work from that point,” she says.

“So it’s a question of understanding their entire journey and that journey goes from exploring and considering, someone’s beginning their job, working, leaving, and of course reconnecting. And within these journeys you find different moments. And what we’re looking at is, how do you improve these individual moments?

“Last year we focused on three things, and that’s onboarding, hiring and employee development. Let me make an example of the pre-hiring, because that’s where we use our own tech.

“So, as a new employee you will be invited to register on our onboarding app called mPath once you accept an offer, and we develop that application to make sure that new Mendix hires are prepared for their first day.

“So you have access to interesting articles about Mendix, you get inspiring pre-stories, you get an overview of country benefits and our structure. We give them task lists, not just for the new hire but also for the manager, they have to accomplish before their first day, so we really ensure that they have a supersmooth start.”

On other areas, such as check-ins, Mendix partners with 15Five.

Post-pandemic, many firms are still struggling to attain and retain talent. Mendix is not immune to this – “I would be amazed if there’s a company out there which is not having an issue at the moment with attracting talent,” Pyko says.

But when she thinks about retention, she says, “it’s really an outcome of all the measures and initiatives you put in place to create an outstanding experience And I feel that’s, for us, the most important focus – to really understand the whole journey and contextualize it also”.

This, she says, is where data plays a vital role. “Typical moments are, hey, you just got promoted the first time, you just had the first call with an interviewer, you just had your first interview with your new manager, and always asking afterwards, how was your experience? How did you feel? What can we do better? And really to understand and gather this data. So what we are getting away from is these big engagement surveys and really looking at the journey stops.”

Employees also have unlimited access to coaching, “which is a huge benefit”.

Mendix and the future of work

Like everyone, Mendix has been thinking about the future of work post-pandemic and, inevitably, talk turns to perhaps the most tangible of changes COVID-19 has brought to the workplace – the issue of working from home.

“We have lengthy discussions like probably every other company on how we approach the topic,” Pyko says. “First of all, we believe that a job well done is not measured by the hours at the desk in the office but the results and the feedback of our customers.

She continues: “What we learned in the past two-and-a-half years in terms of giving flexibility is there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. Some of us work better in the office and some of us the coffee shop, and most of us find it most attractive when you do both.” The encouragement is “what’s best for the team rhythm and our customer focus”.

Mendix’s Netherlands office, indeed, allows employees to work from another country for 30 days a year, no doubt contributing to it being ranked among the country’s top-rated tech employers.

And what else? “We always say one of our big core values is to have fun.”

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