Top 5 Biggest Impacts of 1Huddle

Tara Thurber interviews Sam Caucci, CEO of 1Huddle, a technology company that uses gamification to enhance employee onboarding and continuous development. 

Caucci emphasizes that traditional LMS platforms are outdated and ineffective, leading to high forgetfulness rates. 1Huddle's games improve knowledge retention by 91% after 30 days, compared to 11% for traditional methods. 

A case study with Tao Hospitality showed a 45% faster onboarding process and $1.17 million in additional revenue from improved service. Caucci highlights the importance of lifelong learning, internal talent identification and empowering employees to own their skills, which can be leveraged for future job opportunities.

Top5 Biggest Impacts of 1Huddle

1. Faster Onboarding
2. Lifelong Learning
3. Upskilling & Cross-skilling
4. SkillScoring
5. Own Your Stuff

Transcript

Tara Thurber: 0:00

Hey everyone, welcome back to Top5 brought to you by DefinedTalent. We are a results driven partnership service working with clients to connect them with quality talent, as well as working to make an impact within the HR and recruiting industry. We talk straight about today's professional world with real world professionals, experts in recruitment, job seekers and business owners alike, have a question for us, send it in, and you might spur our next conversation. I'm Tara Thurber, Founder and Director of Partnerships at DefinedTalent. And joining me today is Sam Caucci, CEO of 1Huddle. Hey, Sam, how are you today?

Sam Caucci: 0:41

Hey, Tara, thanks for having me.

Tara Thurber: 0:42

Absolutely. So Sam, I just want to dive right in here. And why don't we just start giving the audience a little bit about your background and the why behind 1Huddle?

Sam Caucci: 0:54

Sure. Yeah. So you know 1Huddle we are on the surface as a technology company. We we try to make the process of getting employees on, boarded up-skilled, continuously developed. We try to make do that in a more engaging and more effective way. We do it using games. You know, the the kind of concept from this came from probably a little bit too much tequila along the way, but most definitely was contributed by I spent most of my career in business development roles in organizations where getting sales people up to speed quickly was of the utmost importance, and along the way my experiences when it came to the onboarding process and then the continuous development process, oftentimes working with HR and L & D teams that were, I think, very well intended, but the solutions that they were utilizing that were really kind of stuck in yesterday. I mean, it was manuals that we were printing out that sales reps wouldn't read. It was videos that they would just click through. I know none of your listeners have ever just clicked through a video and a compliance training before. I know nobody has ever done that, but our experiences were that happens way too much. So, that experience kind of spurred the journey of trying to think of, how do we do we do this better, and how do we do this in a way that employees look forward to? And, you know, 1Huddle was born.

Tara Thurber: 2:28

beautiful, beautiful. I actually, I found a statistic too, where 70% of employees prefer online or self paced courses, and then it's followed by online, instructor led training, in person, training and hybrid learning. But 80% of employees want personalized learning, and 68% they want non-work related training. So I think looking at these statistics and then bringing in 1Huddle, it's phenomenal. It's a phenomenal option for employees and individuals to train and upskill and have some fun while they're doing it.

Sam Caucci: 3:08

Yeah, I think what we've learned is that the medium is only part of the solution. I mean, for really, if the goal of an organization is to build the best workforce, you know that is the goal. The goal is to create. And I fundamentally believe your customer experience can never be better than your employee experience. It's like law of gravity here. So you wanted to create the best workforce. Then what it takes is not just developing some of those stats pop out at me, because it's not just developing people for the job they're in right now.

Tara Thurber: 3:42

Right.

Sam Caucci: 3:43

It's about developing them for the next job and or developing them before they clock in and after they clock out. And an interesting stat on 1Huddle today is nearly 28% of all games played from front line workers at Lowe's hotels to sales reps at Madison Square Garden. 28% of all gameplay is on something personal or professional development related, and that means workers are exploring games on things that you know aren't food safety train now they're exploring things that are they find a personal connection to they feel like it supports them or helps them, or is just edutainment in some ways even, and I think that's a really important part of the learning experience. It is totally different than the kind of old school academic watch module one, then watch module two, then watch module three, and then you're quote, box check trained. That stuff just doesn't doesn't work anymore.

Tara Thurber: 4:43

Yeah, absolutely doesn't work. And just talking to candidates, it's or employees, it's a struggle, like they Oh, I have to do it. And you're right with the click through. I know I've probably done some click throughs way back in my past. So completely understand that aspect. What would you say some of the key challenges 1Huddle is solving for companies that struggle with the traditional LMS platforms, and how is it redefining employee training in general?

Sam Caucci: 5:14

Yep, and it's important to note, Tara, that I think that when a brand is considering their technology stack for people development.

Tara Thurber: 5:25

Yeah.

Sam Caucci: 5:25

This is not either or, it's an and.

Tara Thurber: 5:27

It's an and.

Sam Caucci: 5:28

So we work with organizations that have an LMS, and we we sit on top of it. We have organizations who they think they need an LMS, and they probably need something smaller first to really get rolling. So it really just depends. For us, when we when we look at a brand, the big challenges that they're often faced with is, how do you get everything in one spot so everybody knows it? You know, so nthat's a big like benefit of 1Huddle. If we wanted to take everything and put it in a single place, make sure everybody has access to it. That's step one. Then step two is creating an environment where they don't need to access it because they know it. So they know it. If I'm the chef, I don't need to look at the recipe card, because I know the material. And that second piece for 1Huddle. It's all about accelerating onboarding. How do we get people from not knowing to knowing as fast as possible, and that transfer of knowledge some ways. Here's one data point back for you. 87% of what you learn in a classroom training, according to all the latest cognitive science research on learning, is forgotten within 30 days. 70% is forgotten within 72 hours of a live training session. So, for us, the second piece is transfer knowledge quickly, but in a way that it sticks, so that the employee can step back and access it when they need it most. So that's probably the second prong. And then, finally, is giving leadership insights into where their skills are right now, and this is a huge gap today that we see with organizations. Because, they look at training as a, you know, training is, is past tense, you know, it's, did you do it? Did you not? Pass/Fail participation, and that's it. It doesn'twhereas I, we think that we look at learning as more of like we're taking your pulse and right you know, you're not going to flat line. You always have, where are you right now at any moment in time? So giving leadership, we create a single metric, kind of like a net promoter score. We call it our skill score, on 1Huddle, every player, every department, every location, has it. And it's an it informs operations L and D people, HR on, where should we focus next? And it allows, allows the HR and L & D team to get closer to the P and L with the organization, which I think we would all agree. Talent Development, I'm sure all your listeners agree talent development does have an impact on revenue, but sometimes it's really hard for HR groups to, again, get a metric that can sit on a dashboard very early in a board deck for a CEO, and that's what we try to do.

Tara Thurber: 8:17

Awesome. It's amazing. The the advantages that can come from that too, when we're thinking about employee engagement and retention compared to the other training solutions. How is 1Huddle's gamified approach improved that. I mean, you just gave me some statistics as well, but tell me a little bit more on on how it's improved internally for employees.

Sam Caucci: 8:45

Sure. So we have two studies that we point to. Both were academic research studies conducted by the University of South Florida's Graduate School of Business. They came in and took 1Huddle and looked at its execution across a few different environments, and I'll give you the cliff notes here. They found that a group that learns on 1Huddle gets from not knowing to knowing 45% faster than a traditional learning management system. And they put us up against a small company you may have heard of called LinkedIn Learning.

Tara Thurber: 9:18

(laughs)

Sam Caucci: 9:19

So they said two different cohorts. One group learns just by playing games, and this is the key to the learning piece. Struggle and failure are critical to learning. They are uncomfortable. However, that process, which is called generative learning, leads to stickier, longer, lasting retention. So one group just played the games, didn't have any videos, didn't read any manuals. Second group, that's how they learned. They watched the video, they read content, and they spot tested that group over time again, they found that the group that learned by just playing games got there 45% faster. So we tell brands again if it takes you six weeks to onboard an employee. So, we can get there in as much as half that time, which is a big cost savings. The second part of your question is, once you learn it, can you retain it? And is it stickier long term, we find that players that learn on one huddle retain as much as 91% of the content learned after 30 days, by the way, LMS is a loss is 11% okay, it's an absolute flip when it comes to knowledge retention. And I think the magic ingredient in here is not, is low stakes quizzing, like method ish, low stakes quizzing and testing yield very positive outcomes, because from a cognitive behavioral perspective, the brain doesn't like to fail, and when it does, retains its failure and learns from that event. It's a survival instinct, whereas the alternative is, is not there's an absence of failure, which makes the content very shallow, called kind of shallow learning, right? And we just, all we did was we took that learning and we wrapped it in a game, because who wants to fail? I mean, by the way, like, Oh, this is all really good research that we were stumbling upon. And we said, well, what are we going to do, like, come out with the testing app like that? Nobody's going to really want to do that. And that was the key. It's got to be effective and engaging. And we said, well, the average worker today, everybody's a gamer. So one of the things we talk about every single everybody, whether it's your mom doing Wordle, you know, Grandma doing a crossword puzzle.

Tara Thurber: 11:41

Yeah.

Sam Caucci: 11:42

Someone that's even crazy about the reward points on their Chase account, like everybody understands gaming mechanics. So we knew that the gaming piece would drive engagement, which, is really the brings the whole platform together, because when people play games, when they're not supposed to or not don't have to, then we're doing something special.

Tara Thurber: 12:06

Wow. And then the data that comes from that, I mean, that's that's even the more magic. Diving into that is there any way you can share some specific examples how 1Huddle has transformed training outcomes for clients in key industries?

Sam Caucci: 12:23

Sure, yeah. Toa Hospitality is a client of ours, and they're fun to talk about because they are in dealing in a high stakes hospitality service environment. Also, 165 million US workers, 15 million of them are in hospitality. And I think 100% of them churn every like few minutes, unfortunately, given how chaotic hospitality is. So Toa Hospitality had a property in London that they were struggling with an initiative they called one more cocktail. Okay, so everybody here that's, you know, been a restaurant or been to a bar or been to a towel property knows that there's a special today. You know, you drink, you have one cocktail. The bartender is potentially, should you know, from a service perspective, you know, make the offer to you to consider an additional cocktail or another offering they were finding that one in every 22 cocktails resulted in an additional cocktail sold. They were not happy with that number, and their goal was to bring that down to one in 10. All they did was launch a two game series on 1Huddle. So their strategy was, let's take the steps of service that is supposed to be followed to confidently introduce theoffer of an additional cocktail, and then they'll do a second game on all the talking points around the cocktail. So covering kind of both bases. One is process, second is product knowledge. They rolled the games out to this single property in London, hockey and Mayfair, and they found that after six weeks of doing this, they went from one in 22 to one in six.

Tara Thurber: 14:12

Holy cow!

Sam Caucci: 14:13

So every six resulted in an additional cocktail. What's crazier is, Tara, that that equaled $1.17 million in additional revenue, top line revenue for Tao. And I think that speaks volumes again. We prefer to talk about what the performance outcome is of getting someone there faster, versus just completion rates. And that's probably one of the best ones we talk about.

Tara Thurber: 14:42

That's wild, and it just starts with playing a game for these individuals and going through and learning, and then the outcome for that, I mean that that amount is astronomical for just doing one property.

Sam Caucci: 15:00

Yeah. Totally and, you know it was also one of these things that I always ask, why do they play? You know, the bartenders and the servers that were playing, we had two really interesting spill out learnings from the games.

Tara Thurber: 15:12

Yeah.

Sam Caucci: 15:13

The first is, people were playing at all hours. So first five minutes of their shift, last five minutes of their shift, some were opting in on Wi Fi during break periods where they coulda ccess games and do additional learnings. Not even that game, but they were spilling over and doing games, or playing games on general spirit knowledge, or games on a culture topic that was relevant for the moment. So we saw that that game created this like spillover effect. And then second, we started to find that, because they didn't just turn this game on for front of house, they turned it on for everybody. And I think this is an important point for talking aboutnobody likes an unfair game. I say that a lot to brands.

Tara Thurber: 16:01

Yeah.

Sam Caucci: 16:01

And the problem with learning today is certain people get it and certain people don't. There's these theaters of access, and our product is mobile. First, it's 95% of our gameplay. You can play on any device, but mobile is like the primary use case. So the other thing Tao saw was they have people in the back of house that aren't even selling cocktails, playing that game and engaging with that topic. And if we're talking about how organizations identify talent, some of that talent might be right under your nose. You didn't even know it was there.

Tara Thurber: 16:39

And that kind of goes right into thinking about how one huddle measures the long term impact of the platform on workforce development and business performance. I know we've spoken multiple times, and it to me, it's amazing for the to be able to look at the back end, let's say, for somebody that's serving but to be doing games that are more focused around management, or around, maybe it's around marketing and having those data points then right to to maybe think about a shift in their role, or, um, upskilling and and promoting them differently.

Sam Caucci: 17:20

I mean, company spend Tara, they spend so much time trying to figure out the you know, mindset, sentiment, point of view of their guests and their customer. The amount of platforms that exist to figure that out is wild, from Google to Yelp to you name it. The the amount of time organizations spend trying to understand the skill level, the sentiment, the motivation levels, the interest levels of their people, if it was, if it was equal, I think that you know, that's where the best organizations thrive, is they, they are relentless about trying to understand their people with the same intensity that they understand their guests, and when they do that, and again, for one huddle, what we try to bring to the table there is not just knowing what skills you have and what skills you're short on. That's one piece. You may have, some things that you're missing, but also understanding the current engagement levels of an individual on your team. If you're playing 1Huddle, and you are on a 50 week streak, we talk about this every day here, here's somebody, they're on a 51 week streak, and they just stop playing. Something is happening, like, when, when you are on, I mean, if you're on some if you're played 1000 games, 2000 games, you're, you're a super user on 1Huddle, and then all of a sudden, you're two, three weeks out of playing. So we send like a flashing light to the to the manager on the front line to let them know, hey, Tara, we don't know if something's up with Sam here, but Sam is something's happening with Sam. Maybe you should go talk to Sam. And this has been the most fun we're having, because, again, talent data can, if it's surfaced the right way, can transform frontline managers into frontline leaders who can take that data and then do something with it to intervene and mentor and coach and develop, which I think is exciting, because we're living in a moment where you can't turn the TV on without hearing AI or robots or automation is going to take someone's job. This piece right here, is a human task that allows frontline managers to truly be transformative in the employee experience. But you need the data to look at, and you need to be an organization to be putting the money behind investments in technology like that.

Tara Thurber: 19:43

Yeah, and that's huge when we think about just mental health and the silence behind it. So case in point, somebody stops doing something that they've been doing for so many weeks in a row. Something is happening. So to empower those frontline managers, to empower employees to then help others. I mean, that's stuff that you you can't even train at times, for somebody to feel empathy or for somebody to learn those leadership skills, it's the option and the data behind it, for them to be able to feel empowered to step into that role. I think that's one of the key things about 1Huddle that I personally think is such an amazing part within employee development and within businesses that want to create career paths for individuals. I think that that's such a it's a key for keeping employees engaged, keeping employees happy. But also employees will then start to think, Oh, my employer does really care about me. You know, they're they. They're touching base with me. They I make a difference. I'm appreciated, and I think that that is what a lot of employees lack, that feeling they don't feel appreciated. So this is awesome stuff. Sam, my my last question that I'm going to bring to the table today is with all of the continuous advancements in workforce needs, what innovations is one huddle focusing on to remain ahead of the curve right now.

Sam Caucci: 21:32

Sure. The game never ends.

Tara Thurber: 21:37

(laughs) Right? What's next?

Sam Caucci: 21:41

And again, we're still, we're very much, and we're not in that very early startup stage anymore, but we still try, we pride ourselves in still trying to operate as a startup, you know, because it and we act that way. We just constantly trying new things, challenging, you know, we were taking shots at 10 things at a time that most people would say it's too many be disciplined. But every now and then, one kind of, you know, one or two takes off, and we learn a lot from it. No, for us, one of the things that we've learned is that frontline employees don't own their learning. And it's, it's one of these. Every day, on 1Huddle, I open up our platform, and I see how many employees were added and how many employees were subtracted, and the subtraction of employees that were let go, terminated for whatever reason, and that number is a big number, and it's, it's a shocking number when we look at a lot of the environments we're in, and what we've identified is that when that individual leaves, they really struggle to signal what skills they have to the next employer. And you've had guests talk about hiring and talent identification, you know before, and you're an expert on this as well. I think for us, we know that it's not so much a skill gap as a willingness gap from employers and employees have skills they just not maybe don't do a great job at presenting those in the fashion an employer may want. So we're working really hard every day on two fronts. One is we continue to sell into enterprises, and we're trying to build invest in class product to help organizations like tau be the best they can be. But the other side of it is we have to equally care a heck of a lot about our end user. And I talk to a lot of other founders that are in the HR space, and they have tech products, whether it's payroll or HRIS or ATS or LMS, and I say all the time, that we need to spend as much time focusing on how the end user uses our product as we do the champion employer who's mandating it. And you know, so for us, we're spending a lot of time using AI and helping our end users either get the skills they want quicker or be able to signal the skills they have faster. And you know, that's a lot of the innovation that was coming out of one huddle right now and over the next bunch of months, is we call it player first for us. So leading with a player first mindset every day.

Tara Thurber: 24:17

Player first. I love, I love that. And I really, I think it's super important too, because I a lot of players may not realize some of the skills that they actually have, and that is such a huge addition for either employees that might have been let go or, you know, went through it all, they now can walk away with knowing that they have other skills.

Sam Caucci: 24:48

Right on the money, it's one of those things we don't always think about. But I use this example internally when you use Netflix.

Tara Thurber: 24:55

Yeah.

Sam Caucci: 24:55

Netflix has never asked you or me, what type of shows do you like.

Tara Thurber: 25:00

Right.

Sam Caucci: 25:01

It just watched what you did, and it said, okay, Sam, you're watching, you're watching the 30 for 30 sports documentaries a lot here, like, here's the next thing you should probably watch. And I think it's the same thing for employees. And you know, I look at a lot of products that you come into you could pick on, like an Indeed, even, or some of these other applicant platforms, and they ask you, what do you want to do with your life?

Tara Thurber: 25:22

(laughs)

Sam Caucci: 25:22

I mean, I don't know anybody that can answer that question, whether they're like, 15, 18, 25, 55, and they ask you, like, what are you good at? I don't know. So to me, I think this is where technology can play a really powerful role is, and we do this with one whole we're not going to ask you what you want. We're just going to try to encourage, it's like a playground, like, here's a bunch of stuff. Let's see what you engage with and the stuff you're doing well at, guess what? We're going to show you more of that. And guess what the stuff you're not doing well at, we're not going to continue to badger you, like Duolingo will to tell you to keep playing this level until you somehow cram and learn it, because that doesn't make you feel good either as a frontline worker. So I think that, to your point, is a huge area let people explore, because I don't know, unless someone has a crystal ball, we don't know what the jobs are going to look like in a decade, five years, 20 years, there's a lot of ideas, but I don't think anybody could have, you know, there's a very, very, maybe small minority of people that predicted the moment we're in at this moment. And I think organizations and society and HR leaders should work every day to build great build well rounded people. The jobs will come next.

Tara Thurber: 26:33

Everything about this is amazing. Sam, I'm so excited that you joined us today. And thank you so much. One last thing to kick this off is, let's give the audience your top five biggest impacts of 1Huddle.

Sam Caucci: 26:51

Sure, yeah. I mean, I think the top five biggest impacts for H1uddle first is faster onboarding. For organizations, need to get people from zero to 60 quickly. How do we do that? I think the first one is faster onboarding. Second is lifelong learning. The game isn't over just because you got the job. How do we how do we transform the back of house worker to the front of house role to the management role, to the franchisee to maybe starting their own franchise? So I think upskilling and cross skilling people is another is another big 1/3. Is internal talent identification, like being able to quickly know what skills you have within your organization. So organizations being able to almost have X ray vision into the skill levels of their people. Fourth is skill scoring, which has to do with being able to identify gaps in knowledge before they become revenue gaps. The Tao story I used earlier. Along that way, they were able to identify what questions people were struggling with and then intervene. And also, everybody's struggling with a specific question. And there's a there's parallels. It empowers managers to do better better. And I think the fifth impact area is letting end users own their stuff on 1Huddle. One of the benefits is that when you leave a job, those users, I said you the next alert you get from one huddle gives you a full readout. We call it a skill wallet of all the things you've learned and earned while playing one huddle at that brand. It's your property, it's your data, and hopefully you can take that to the next job to help you better position yourself to win the job and win the right job and pay you the rate you deserve.

Tara Thurber: 28:35

That's fantastic. Sam, I'm loving all of these impacts. I think 1Huddle has so much to offer for the employee and the employers. So thank you again, so much for taking time out of your busy week, and I appreciate you, and I hope you have an amazing rest of your week.

Sam Caucci: 28:53

Thank you, Tara.

Tara Thurber: 28:56

We are to DefinedTalent coming to you at Top5 Make it a great day.