How Ethena trained a growing international team

Deputy is on a mission to Simplify Shift Work™ for millions of shift workers and businesses globally. The company streamlines scheduling, timesheets, tasks, and communication for business owners and their workers. More than 280,000 workplaces use Deputy to manage to schedule and effectively communicate with employees, providing millions of shift workers with more flexibility and control over their schedules. Deputy’s software helps businesses navigate workforce legislation including wages, overtime, entitlements, and penalties – providing businesses with tools to simplify compliance and build a thriving workplace. Visit www.deputy.com, or find us on Twitter, Facebook, the Xero App Store, the Apple App Store or Google Play for more information.

Kaisi Guo began working with Deputy in November of 2020 as the People Partner Manager of the US & EMEA. As Kaisi helped build out the US and UK teams for the Sydney-based Deputy team, she knew she needed to find compliance partners that could support a new and growing team of employees who would be onboarding from around the world.

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Challenge #1: Training that works for a quickly-growing, international team.

Kaisi joined the Deputy team at a time of growth during a surprising time in late 2020. In the middle of a major pandemic, Deputy had made significant cuts to their staff in reaction to the decimated retail and hospitality sectors, but, strangely, Deputy was growing far more than expected. “And that’s when they hired me,” Kaisi explains, “we were entering into hyper-growth mode again. We were like ‘We hit our numbers way better than expected. We can grow the team again.’”

Deputy, a service with significant brand-awareness in Australia (the company’s main workforce is based in Sydney), was looking to branch into the US marketplace. With Kaisi hired to cover hiring for the US and EMEA teams (initially, she’s now Global Director of People), a need immediately arose for a compliance solution that worked for every new team member, no matter where they were working from.

Challenge #2: Finding training that’s easy to access, for both the admin and the learner.

Administering a training program for a team split between hemispheres is difficult enough on its own. With a wave of growth on the horizon, Kaisi was not only worried about not only getting new hires compliant, but with Deputy’s current training solution, the admin experience itself was a headache to manage.

Our previous training was so confusing from an admin perspective. How do people log in and access their portal? How do I see who’s completed? What training are they outstanding on? I didn’t have the time to do that, especially as we scaled. Ethena has been much easier for us overall. –Kaisi Guo, Global Director of People at Deputy

As one of the first new hires in the US, Kaisi knew she needed a training solution that she could trust to be both easy and as automated as possible. “I needed something more user friendly, admin friendly, and easier to manage. Something that could ideally be compliance be on autopilot. That’s the best way that I would describe it: I wanted an automated compliance solution that could scale with a global team.”

The Solution: An automated course library with content that really sticks

“Ethena definitely was the first thing that came top of mind.“ Luckily, Kaisi had Ethena in mind since she previously trained with Ethena when she worked at Medium, “I think it was a pretty easy decision, really . . . At Deputy, we don’t have an L&D or a Compliance person at this point, so we use Ethena to automate our training to save admin time. With Ethena, we can always add more trainings and more courses that are more relevant, and we’ve also had good feedback from employees about it.” Since starting with Ethena’s Harassment Prevention, Deputy has enrolled employees in Ethena’s other courses like Hiring & Interviewing and Anti-Bribery & Corruption.

Deputy needed a compliance partner they could trust to make a consistent positive impact as they focused on scaling their team, and with best-in-class admin experience, new employee onboarding, and inclusive training content, Ethena was the best choice out there. “I was very confident about Ethena and how it would work for Deputy,” Kaisi said, “so I immediately proposed a longer partnership. I said to my CFO ‘This is gonna work for us. I guarantee it.’”

The Results:

Ethena scales with the team, automatically onboarding people when they join.

With a focus on growth, Deputy needed a training solution that supported the incoming waves of new hires automatically and seamlessly. “I think oftentimes when you’re setting up for hyper growth, your go-to-market teams are obviously the ones that you think about staffing up first,” Kaisi points out, “but I think it’s also just as critical to make sure that the employees that you’re bringing on, there’s that infrastructure in place to support them, because otherwise everything’s just going to start falling apart.” With new hires being enrolled and onboarded automatically in Ethena’s training courses in the background, Deputy’s teams had more time to focus on the future.

Ethena meets learners where they are while allowing admins to put annual training on autopilot.

Deputy’s previous compliance solution was difficult for a number of reasons: long, dry training content and confusing user accessibility were the biggest pain points. Delivered directly to employee inboxes with a one-click magic link, Ethena made getting to and navigating training a breeze. Ethena’s automated admin experience was a standout for Deputy’s admin teams as well. “The platform is very user-friendly to navigate for our learners,” Kaisi said, when asked about the user experience with Ethena, “And for our admins, the best part about Ethena is being able to set it and forget it.”

Ethena’s Inclusive training content inspires teams to have better conversations with one another.

With Deputy expanding its employee base into new countries around the world, building an inclusive company culture that encourages teams to support one another through all phases of growth is a challenging task. “I feel like, for such a lean team–and because we’re a startup–I just think that we have to have more of a global mindset,” said Kaisi, when describing her vision of a stronger, international team, “More of a ‘everyone pitches in where there’s gaps’ mindset.”

While Ethena’s training content automatically provides individual learners with location-specific training guidelines, the same core lessons, tools, and language give teams the foundational knowledge they need to have to bridge gaps with one another as the company grows.

With Ethena as a supporting partner in their growth, Deputy’s teams have become more informed and engaged as a result: “We’ve been able to get more of the team engaged with this training. When I started in 2020, we were sitting at something like 65% overall engagement, but in the past year, we ended at 82% engagement.” Today, 91% of Deputy’s team members complete their training within the first 90 days.

When it comes to employee feedback from training, according to Kaisi, “most of the time, no news is good news,” but Deputy’s employees have gone above and beyond to share positive feedback on their Ethena training: “The response has been really positive. Employees will Slack me to say, ‘This Ethena course was really helpful,’ or ‘It was really interesting that I learned this from my Ethena training.’ I love hearing things like that.” Deputy’s learners give Ethena an 86% positive feedback rating across all courses with over 280 pieces of feedback given.


Looking for a training solution that scales with your team, wherever they’re training from? Talk to a member of our team to learn how Ethena can solve your training needs and grow with your team.