At Affirmity, we’re very proud to be celebrating our one-year “Affirmiversary”. It’s hard to believe it has been only one year since we launched the company. Despite over 40 years of being in business, we feel like a start-up. When LTG purchased PeopleFluent in May 2018, it generated excitement about the potential opportunities but also unknowns about what changes would occur. Suffice it to say the best of all possibilities has happened with our formation as a separate brand—bringing new energy, ideas, and empowerment to the organization.
Shortly after acquiring PeopleFluent, LTG decided to separate the Workforce Compliance and Diversity group into its own separate brand within the LTG portfolio. In addition to quickly transitioning and integrating into LTG systems, policies, and procedures, we also had the opportunity to quickly create and launch a new brand. Like ripping off a band-aid, there was some short-term pain. But, the pain was over quickly and the result was a more efficient and customer-focused organization.
Affirmity was chosen as the new brand name, a portmanteau of affirmative action plus diversity & inclusion. Our customers have overwhelmingly embraced the name, along with positive feedback on other changes, while appreciating the one element that did not change—their existing relationships and support from the Affirmity team.
Becoming Part of Learning Technologies Group
A fundamental tenet of LTG’s strategy is to buy good solid businesses, provide core support services, but allow the organization a high degree of autonomy to define their business model and manage their operations. The organizational structure put in place pushes decision-making down to people closest to the customer and market to accelerate the speed of business. In addition, LTG has provided Affirmity with many of the benefits of a larger company, such as a high-performing central services group and sharing of best practices. “The LTG acquisition has resulted in Affirmity gaining the scale of a large company paired with the nimbleness of a small company,” said Jeffery D. Lewis, co-managing director of Affirmity.
Jonathan Satchell, Chief Executive of LTG, commented, “Affirmity has been a real success story of the PeopleFluent acquisition. Our strategy is putting the best people in the right roles—those who know the market, clients, and how we need to develop our product and services. At a corporate level, we put decision-making into the hands of our Affirmity leaders allowing them to make the decisions that best support their clients and grow the business.”
Our Client-Focused Mission
The mission of Affirmity is to provide industry-leading software and service solutions that focus on diversity-specific metrics and analytics allowing clients to make actionable, data-driven decisions used to achieve affirmative action and diversity program initiatives. Combined with LTG’s array of workplace digital learning and talent management products, Affirmity’s software and services offer clients end-to-end talent and learning solutions.
For our staff, there has been a liberation because of the reduced organizational complexity, resulting in fewer bureaucratic tasks and more time to spend with customers and customer-focused activities. Operationally, we have become more agile and timely at taking action to support clients. These changes have resulted in improved client engagement and as Lewis explains, “Throughout our transition, we have focused on ensuring no disruption to customer service. With our streamlined organizational structure, we have removed many distractions and become even more responsive to customer’s needs. As a result, we have seen increased renewal rates and revenue. While we will continue to enhance our customer service, our staff has done a fantastic job throughout year one on concentrating first and foremost on their customers.”
The empowerment brought about by the new organization has also resulted in accelerated product updates to address clients’ needs. Most importantly, it has enabled the launch of our Unified Analytics Platform—providing a common, fully-hosted platform with software modules and data insights that optimize our clients’ affirmative action and diversity initiatives. With a ramped-up product development effort, we continue to grow the platform and push new functionality to market.
The Future of Affirmative Action and D&I
Aligning with LTG’s philosophy of ensuring the customer is placed at the forefront of every solution, Bruce Kile, co-managing director of Affirmity commented, “We have made significant strides in our Unified Analytics Platform and product offerings due to removal of bureaucratic constraints and a more efficient operating model. The result is software designed exclusively to meet our customers’ needs. The reactions from customers have been very positive on the benefits of our common platform, new user interface, and ‘industry-leading’ capabilities such as interactive dashboards. We have customers wanting to move quickly to the new platform.”
As Affirmity advances into 2020, the outlook is exciting with our Unified Analytics Platform coming to fruition and the launch of new software and service offerings. An exciting potential development is to leverage LTG’s global presence and footprint by further expanding our D&I offerings to global companies and organizations operating outside of the US.
Looking forward, Kile concluded, “The changes we are making will further differentiate our solutions from other providers in the market. There are still challenges and improvements to be made, but we are in control of our destiny. One certainty for the coming year is that we will continue to innovate, grow, and execute.”
Lastly and most importantly, a big thank you to all our clients for helping us make this such a special anniversary. The success of our “Affirmiversary” would not be possible without our fantastic customers and employees. In appreciation of our customers, please send us your comments on our anniversary, the new organization, or recognition of an Affirmity employee, and you will be entered into a drawing to win a Google Mini. Send your comments along with your name, title and company to info@affirmity.com.