LivePerson
New York, NY
Grade: A+
| Summary: A special family, lots of hugs, established company with amazing benefits and start-up culture. Unrivaled longevity. |
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Intro: LivePerson is a tech company in a unique position in the market; we have the heart and soul of a start up with the experience of a 20 year old established company that boasts having its original Founder/CEO still at the helm. Candidates choose LivePerson when they love the innovation, ambition and nimbleness of a start up but are also seeking a secure company that is a proven market leader with global brand name customers. LivePerson is really the best of both worlds. We foster an environment of supported learning and information sharing built around our strong culture of “We Create Meaningful Connections.” This is especially apparent in our product and R&D teams, where a flat organization that promotes open learning and where every developer has an impact on the roadmap is a big differentiator for us. Every member of the team is encouraged to introduce new technologies and is supported to be a thought leader and own pieces of the project, not just be another cog in the wheel. We have a strong track record of promoting our tech talent into either leadership positions or technical leads, depending on their particular interests and career goals. On top of what it’s like to work here, our platform is an industry changer, and our tech team is fully engaged in changing how brands connect with their customers. That passion is contagious, and is something people want to be a part of. |
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Impact statements:
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Compensation:
Compensation is determined by roles and responsibilities, experience and performance, Industry benchmarks.
Advancement Opportunities:
Once a year, people leaders are asked to identify high performers on their team. Through these assessments, LivePerson invests in personalized development plans to ensure our most valued employees have the tools they need to advance in their career. We invest in 360 assessments for these key employees, and then review the feedback with each individual to create custom plans based on their roles, goals, strengths and areas for improvement.
Training opportunities:
We have a combination of self-led and organized training opportunities for our team. Through a program called iGrow, we offer various technical training on myriad topics. We provide an online training platform for team members to create or participate in interactive lessons. Our field teams experience immersive in-person foundation training to ensure they have the tools to position LivePerson technology and culture to the market. These in-person events are highly interactive with attention to group exercises and role plays, opposed to presentations.
Medical benefits:
LP covers a large percentage of the cost for medical benefits (75-85%) and employees receive benefits very soon after joining the company (1st of the month following or coinciding with DOH). Employees have freedom to choose from 4 different medical plan options. We offer your traditional benefits such as medical, dental, and vision as well as some unique offerings like accident, critical illness, legal, and pet insurance. The company also fully pays the cost of basic life and disability coverage and gym classes/wellness activities as well. We also extend our great benefits to domestic partners (same sex and opposite sex), which is something many companies do not offer. As a global company, we ensure that our benefits are top end for all of the respective markets.
LivePerson first offers a generous disability policy so that pregnant women receive 6-8 weeks of disability pay at 66.67% of their weekly earnings. Then, the company offers child care leave which ranges from 1-4 weeks (at full pay) depending on the employee’s tenure with the company and if they are the primary or secondary caregiver of the child.
Employees can take up to 12 weeks of unpaid time off for maternity leave. We work with employees on an individual basis though to make further accommodations when we can.
Special accommodations:
As a global company headquartered in New York with a tech center in Israel and field operations around the world, leadership opportunities can open up in any corner of the globe. LivePerson provides for international transfers in these special situations, including taking care of international working paperwork and relocation costs for them and their families.
Community service/charitable causes:
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Cause |
Action |
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FeedingNYC (http://feedingnyc.org/ |
Fed more than 40,000 hungry New Yorkers at Thanksgiving time |
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Dream Big Foundation |
Working to support, mentor and invest in local entrepreneurs from troubled neighborhoods |
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NFTE’s Gentech program |
Mentor high school students as they work to build apps and business plans over the course of 10 weeks |
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UK employees- “Dawn to Dusk” event |
Raise funds for a local children’s hospice |
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Israel office hosts volunteer days |
Employees can connect with a charity of their choosing that reflects their own passions that include working with the elderly, animal shelters and food banks |
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Atlanta employees supports “Open Hand |
N/A |
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San Franciscans works with the Larkin Street Youth Center |
N/A |
Measuring satisfaction:
We take the pulse of our team members throughout the employee lifecycle, starting with our interview process and encouraging candidates to review their experience on Glassdoor. We check in with new employees again at the end of their onboarding process to gauge how connected they feel to the company and its culture.
Annually, we poll the entire global employee base to better understand where we are excelling with employee engagement and where we need to focus. We have also implemented intensive, global in-person focus groups to get honest, authentic feedback and restructure our employee communications.
We participate in several “Best Place to Work” awards, which often give us survey-based anonymous insight into how our team members feel about the company on an office-by-office basis.
At LivePerson, we believe that our space should reflect who we are and our culture of meaningful connections at every turn! All of our global offices were designed with the help of local employees to ensure that they reflected their needs and personalities and more intimately connected the people with the space they work in. Building the space together also provides a unique opportunity for our employees to build relationships with one another and people who they might not normally work with. We have whiteboard surface EVERYWHERE, including our tables and walls, so that any space you are can be an opportunity to create. Our tables and chairs can be easily moved, and we have lots of nooks and crannys to support collaboration and impromptu meetings. Our flexible, beautiful space also allows us to proudly host events for the community, whether it be technical lunch and learns or industry panels that we open up to the community, or association meetings, allowing us to better connect with others outside of our company.
Our physical space is a true representation of our company culture. We know this because we enlist our team members to work with architects to ensure our offices are just “cool for cool’s sake,” but truly reflect our regional personalities, company culture and business needs.
When our corporate HQ moved its New York City office from hectic midtown to a pre-war loft style building in burgeoning Hudson Yards neighborhood, we created a design committee of employees from across the company to make our space. Accountants, programmers, designers, field team members and everyone in between worked together with architects to make a unique space that fit our needs and would help our employees be productive, inspired and create meaningful connections. The NY project was such a success that this design approach became a blueprint for any office to open since. As we build offices throughout the world, employees participate in the design process so that the space reflects what our people need and it ensures local flavor is injected. This results in all of our global spaces feeling definitively LivePerson, but representing their corner of the world.
We implemented a peer-recognition culture called our #cheers campaign. On Slack, we encourage team members to share examples big and small of how a colleague helped them or an achievement, assigning the hashtag #cheers.
On a more formal basis, we have our annual Outstanding Employee Awards, a peer nominated program by which anyone can nominate anyone to receive recognition in various categories aligned to our core values. The winners and finalists receive amazing prizes and trips which all align to our “meaningfully connected culture.”
Every quarter, we recognize LivePersons nominated by their leaders at our quarterly Town Hall. Winners are given money that they can spend on a connection activity with their team.
Work/life balance:
Work schedules for employees vary throughout our organization. Managers will advise employees of their individual work schedules. Staffing needs and operational demands may necessitate variations in starting and ending times, as well as variations in the total hours that may be scheduled each day and week. The official office hours of LivePerson are Monday to Friday, 9 am to 6pm. Employees may break one hour for lunch. Employees are expected to be in the office, or if remote, available for work during the core operating hours of 9am to 4pm.
Typically we support clients with our application on a 24-hour, 7 days per week basis. Flexible work arrangements may be available in some cases to allow employees to vary their starting and ending times each day within established limits. Issues such as staffing needs, the employee’s performance, and the nature of the job will be considered before approval of flextime. Employees should speak with their manager and the People Group to request participation in the program as it’s handled on a case-by-case situation.
Team members are given some flexibility with their schedules, but must be in agreement with their manager to ensure business needs are met. Employees are given time off for vacation, personal, sick, wellness, dependent care, etc and have a request/approval process when taking the time off in addition to the regular company holidays.
In our major offices we provide workout space and dedicated gyms to ensure that our employees stay physically healthy and have the opportunity to work out together in group classes (provided by LivePerson) both within and outside of standard business hours. In addition to our vacation policies, we launched a “Time 2 Connect” program in summer months, where employees are given bonus time off and are encouraged to share how they spend the time with their colleagues.
Creative meeting places:
We do not believe in windowless ballrooms for meetings and events– we look for blank canvases that inspire thinking and creativity! We’ve held events in everything from wine museums (Vinopolis, London) to concert halls (The Roundhouse, London), to big wide empty spaces accessed by ferry only (Duggal Greenhouse, Brooklyn) to industrial chic lofts (82 Mercer, Manhattan). We believe that meetings are an opportunity to connect, and encourage participants to create their own space. It’s not uncommon for us to start an event with an empty room, and ask everyone to grab a chair and create their own circles.
Whenever possible, we like to have events and meetings in our own offices, which are all designed on the principle of “creating meaningful connections,” an idea that is central to all of our events and meetings big or small.
Perks:
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We have in-house gym and workout classes held both during and after the work day we choose this over gym memberships as we’d like to have our team members connect with one another while getting healthy. |
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We have fully stocked kitchens and free lunch at least once/ week. |
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We also have a wealth of unique voluntary benefits like pet insurance, legal insurance, identity theft protection services, auto/home insurance, and critical illness and accident insurance. |
Fun:
Group workouts during the day allow employees to do some yoga or the like while catching the train home. We’ll have wellness days throughout the year when we bring in some snacks and messages, as well. Every new employee gets to experience our product in real life by being paired with a mentor who will take them to some of our customers’ stores with dedicated activities.
Every team has their own traditions and is given free rein to group activities to better connect.
Collaboration tools:
We use Slack as a collaboration tool across our company. We officially adopted Slack on a global basis after realizing that many of our most productive teams were already using it on their own to cut down on emails and more seamlessly share ideas.
We launch Sales drives complete with “war rooms” so the field organization can connect with one another and product experts at any time of day on a live call.
We have complete transparency of the product roadmap via an internal web site. At a glance, anyone in the company can see what features are live or when they are planned. This provides clarity as well as accountability.
Overall, the culture of “helping others” is a common thread through all of our global efforts.
How corporate vision is communicated:
Our Founder/ CEO has a strong vision, which is so paramount to our success as a company that we have it on every employee's’ desk and mounted and framed in each office worldwide. To ensure that these aren’t just words on the wall, we conduct periodic “training” on the vision with the entire company. Every team member has the opportunity to work in small groups to ask questions and role play explaining our vision and product. This not only ensures that everyone– from accountants to developers -truly understands the vision, but better connects employees as well.
We also have quarterly global “Town Hall” meetings to give the executive team an opportunity to address everyone and for questions to be asked about the business.
Empowering employees:
At LivePerson, one of our values is to Be An Owner. This value was established not by our leadership or C-suite, but by our employees. Each employee has their own interpretation of this value, but at the core of it, it means to truly make your work your own; to make your career your own; to have confidence in your ideas and not only to feel comfortable presenting them to colleagues and leaders. A great example is when one of our employees had an idea to differentiate our product from competitors. We’d been working hard to extract the potential goldmine of data and intelligence that exists in the chat transcripts. This employee was passionate about this and took it upon himself to search for companies with technologies that could extract that data "gold" from transcripts. When he found such a company, he put together a plan and presented his idea to the sales leaders. News spread quickly and he was soon presenting his business plan to leadership. The leadership team then approved a budget for him to build a business and formally become a product owner for what is now LP Insights.
Our core values are “Be an Owner” and “Help Others” and they direct every LivePerson’s actions and frame of mind. We aim to have as flat of an organization as possible — even down to stripping everyone, including the CEO — of their offices, which promotes a culture of collaboration within and across teams.
Within our technical teams, scrum meetings create an environment where anyone, regardless of position, can step up and own a piece of a project or experiment with a new technology that can change our platform.
Teamwork:
We have worked hard to have our field connect directly with our R&D and product teams, despite being all across the globe. By having a tight partnership, the field leaders can communicate customer needs to ensure that our product roadmap aligns with the goals of our customers. This is not always an easy task, but by reinforcing the corporate goals and vision, our leadership is all working toward the same goal.
Ensuring well-being:
We provide wellness days/ paid for group workout classes/ yoga/ mental health benefits, generous disability coverage, child care leave, dependent care FSA, EAP, and dependent care days.
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Longevity |
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LP Overall: |
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Average tenure as of 12/31/15 |
3.05 years |
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Voluntary turnover for 2015 |
18.8% |
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Involuntary turnover for 2015 |
9.0% |
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LP Product House: |
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Average tenure as of 12/31/15 |
3.14 years |
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Voluntary turnover for 2015 |
14.7% |
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Involuntary turnover for 2015 |
4.6% |
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LP Executive Team: |
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Average tenure as of 12/31/15 |
5.1 years |
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Closing company statements: We have a mindfully crafted culture of “we create meaningful connections” that drives not only how we engage with one another and with our customers, but it actually drives our industry-changing technology platform as well– our product literally changes how brands connect with their own customers. Meaningful connections means that every voice is heard and everyone is empowered to be an owner and to help others. You feel it in how people work together, how we run meetings with customers and what our spaces look like. People aren’t afraid to ask questions or present new ideas. There is not a developer stuffed in a room or a lawyer who can’t explain our product and vision. We are an evolving company with a deep history and an incredible vision, backed by a solid mission that drives how all of us work every day. LivePerson is a special family and we like to hug a lot and have great parties!! |
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