Beyond the Numbers: Life and Leadership at Workhuman
by Zack Cutler
Last updated
3 min read
Today, I want to take you behind the scenes and share a bit about my life both inside and outside of Workhuman. Beyond the numbers and dashboards, there’s a whole person here! Let me start off with a few fun facts about me:
- I’m a proud girl-dad to two little rugrats. They’re my world and remind me daily of what’s truly important.
- When I’m not crunching numbers, you’ll often find me hitting the pavement for a run. I actually ran two half-marathons last year and have another one lined up for this fall. It’s a great way to clear my mind and stay fit.
- Music is another big part of my life. Whether I’m behind a piano, singing a tune, or strumming a guitar, playing music is my escape from the hustle and bustle of everyday life.
Now, let’s talk a bit about how life experiences have shaped my career journey. Becoming a parent was a game-changer for me. It completely shifted my perspective on work-life balance. Before kids, work was my main focus, but now I’ve got a whole new set of priorities. At Workhuman, I’m never questioned when I need to take the afternoon off to care for my sick daughter, or that I need to leave at 4:30 so I can beat the traffic and make it home in time for dinner with my family. It’s unusual to find a place that is simultaneously fast-paced & innovative, while also enabling a sustainable lifestyle for a young parent (or anyone with significant non-work responsibilities, or anyone who just doesn’t want to work around the clock!). I’m grateful to be part of a company like Workhuman that values flexibility and understands the importance of family time.
My career path has been quite the adventure. I started at Wayfair right out of college, not knowing exactly where it would lead. Over time, I discovered my passion for data and strategy, which eventually led me into the world of business analytics. Working closely with senior leaders to solve problems with data was intense but it was the highest rate of learning I've ever experienced. After eight years at Wayfair, I sought new challenges. I discovered Workhuman through former colleagues who had joined over the years. I seized the opportunity to lead pricing for the e-commerce experience. In my first year, I integrated this role with leading our broader business analytics team. Since then, we've been focused on making Workhuman the most data-driven company in the world!
One of the highlights of my career has been building, leading, and mentoring this team of talented analysts and managers. We are a small team who power data driven decision making for the entire organization. I have this amazing privilege of working with this awesome, energetic, passionate group of people. Seeing the team grow and succeed has been incredibly fulfilling and my favorite parts of my day are brainstorming with and working alongside the team. If you asked my team how they’d describe me, they’d probably say I’m a bit goofy, always curious, and full of energy.
Workhuman is on a mission to become a data-driven powerhouse – both internally and externally-facing:
I initially joined the business to mature and scale up the business analytics function. Internally, Workhuman is investing heavily to drive data-driven decision-making across the company. Our team is pivotal in this initiative, actively hiring, building data models, conducting analysis, and making strategic recommendations. The wealth of data at our disposal holds massive untapped value, and we're constantly uncovering new insights across all business areas. We’re just scratching the surface and there is tremendous whitespace to make an impact! Each of the analysts on our team is a thought partner working directly with one of the members of the executive leadership team on whatever initiative they’re focused on.
Externally, while our product is focused on employee recognition, a major value of our offering is the rich insights we can provide to our customers. All the recognition and employee interaction activity on our platform becomes data in our system. When modeled and analyzed, this becomes a massive source of intelligence of the customer’s employees’ experience. Our team plays a major role in this effort - transforming, managing, modeling, and dashboarding all data across the company to feed to customers via in-product reporting and also feed our upcoming AI assistant. Really the objective has been to centralise all of our data into a single place, make sure that we’re driving the source of truth for all decisions across the organisation and that we’ve got teams oriented around the various different departments across the company.
Really the objective has been to centralise all of our data into a single place, make sure that we’re driving the source of truth for all decisions across the organisation and then we’ve got teams oriented around the various different departments across the company. These people are closest to the data and therefore they’re closest to the strategy and can have a meaningful impact on the business outcomes.
Data is the future for Workhuman and we sit right in the center of it – it's a super exciting time to be on the team!
If you’re passionate about data & analytics and want to be part of a dynamic team that’s shaping the future of employee recognition and engagement, I encourage you to join us on this journey. Together, we’re making waves in the world of analytics.
