How Dermalogica Used Personalization to Build a Culture of Human Connection
Dermalogica is a global personal care company offering professional-grade skin care education, products, and services to skin therapists and customers.
Dermalogica's Results By the Numbers:
83%
Completion rates for new hires
90%
Of employees have a positive engagement with onboarding
35%
Increase in positive engagement since using Enboarder
⚙️ The Challenge: Connecting People to Culture
Dermalogica is a skincare company that’s rooted in three core values of education, personalization, and human touch, with a culture that fosters connectivity, personal well-being, and creativity. How can the Dermalogica team consistently bring these core values – and the culture – to life for their people?
For Sarah Beardsworth, HR director at Dermalogica, welcoming new starters into the Dermalogica culture proved especially challenging. “It can feel quite overwhelming to go to a new job, maybe you've had a bit of a crazy journey,” Sarah says as she recalls her own onboarding. “Up until my first day, I had no taste, no teaser, no feel for the culture.”
Beca Floyd, internal communications and engagement manager at Dermalogica tells us how new hires had quite an adjustment to make: “I think some of the language we use as a business can feel odd coming into it … Like the word tribe. I've never heard a company call their employees that before.”
There was a clear gap in communication during new hires’ pre-boarding. “Sometimes that makes you feel like you dreamt being offered that role, and there’s potential for disengagement,” says Beca. How could Dermalogica really bring its culture to life?
“We speak so much about culture,” Sarah says “but there was a big piece missing – where you start to get a sense of excitement about what you’re walking into on day one.”
Finding a solution that would give HR much-needed visibility into the whole process was also key. Sarah told us, “I had no overview or insight as to what was going on when a new starter joined,” outside of the typical HR induction. Each new hire would have a slightly different experience depending on the department they were joining.
That inconsistent onboarding process was also a huge challenge for managers bringing on new employees: “They didn’t know where to go to find documents and then they would follow a breadcrumb trail, asking 10 different people. So the workload then blows up,” says Beca.
What Dermalogica needed was a scalable, consistent way to provide a warm welcome into the tribe that immediately connects people to the company culture. A member of Sarah’s team signed up for an Enboarder demo after attending a webinar and pitched Enboarder to Sarah. “I said, ‘Oh my God, we need this in our life … [Enboarder] was that missing piece of the puzzle to get onboarding where it needed to be.”
💡 The Solution: Sparking Moments of Connection
The team started by building a pre-boarding and onboarding workflow that, to this day, still form the foundation of Dermalogica’s onboarding program. When the team launched Enboarder during a company town hall, there was a palpable buzz of excitement, especially from managers.
“A big thing for me was making sure every manager understood the value to them. We had sessions with managers who had vacancies and educated them on what the onboarding flows would look like,” says Sarah. So right from the start, new employees got a feel for the business and managers knew they were completely supported in onboarding their new hires.
Launching Enboarder was even a catalyst for Beca’s role being created. “I was previously an education experience manager, so I looked after all our front-of-house teams and their onboarding. I was also running some well-being programs during the pandemic,” Beca recalls. Sarah laughs: “I just looked at that role and thought why have we only got that in one department? Actually, there is a bigger picture here for the business.”
That’s when Beca stepped into a newly created employee experience role on Sarah’s team and really evolved the program. “Where we are now from where we started are very different places and it just continues to evolve,” Beca notes.
One Enboader feature Beca immediately latched onto was backend logic: “That was life-changing for me. There were so many light bulb moments.” At the time, Dermalogica had a lot of different workflows running for the different departments. But in working with the Enboarder team and leveraging the logic available, they were able to significantly strip the volume back. Now the platform takes care of the personalization piece without any manual interference necessary!
"I have been made to feel so welcome as a valuable member of the tribe. Having time to learn about the brand ahead of supporting my accounts has certainly helped my confidence." - Dermalogica employee
Here are some of the ways Enboarder has automated so many small, meaningful moments of connection in the employee journey – creating an amazing experience for new hires, but also saving critical time for HR:
- Dermalogica integrated Enboarder with Huggg, so new hires can grab a free drink at a local coffee shop during their first week. ☕
- A video from Jane, Dermalogica’s founder, made it into pre-boarding, “so you’ve heard some of her inspirational words and learned about our culture before you start,” says Beca. 🎥
- In a dedicated pregnancy flow, pregnant employees are connected with Dermalogica’s “mommy tribe,” who share advice, offer support, and answer questions. 🤰
“I love those small touches. I think that’s what makes it feel special,” says Beca. And the onboarding program? “It no longer feels robotic. It doesn't feel like the same old comms that someone turned on. It’s multiple smaller nudges that are woven throughout.”
The team also integrated Enboarder with Greenhouse, Dermalogica’s ATS. “That has been life-changing for me because I was putting everybody in manually. It’s all automated in the background and everything just falls into place,” says Beca.
Bringing Enboarder into Dermalogica has brought the focus on human connection to the forefront of the company: “It’s the silver thread that runs through all our programs,” says Beca. “It’s not about one key little notification or module.”
Now there is true personalization at every step. “It’s what makes you feel you've really been thought about, rather than just being the recipient of a mass email.”
👑 The Results: A More Human Approach to Employee Experience
The positive feedback from Dermalogica’s onboarding overhaul just keeps coming in. “We’ve had people who have left the business and come back in different roles and have all shared nobody else is doing anything like this, how it makes them feel connected right from the start,” says Beca.
"The onboarding process was fantastic, incredibly informative, which left me feeling set up and ready to start." - Dermalogica employee
Beyond anecdotal feedback, the numbers speak for themselves: Dermalogica has a 84% completion rate for new hires and saw a 35% increase in positive engagement since using Enboarder. “We use CultureAmp for our engagement survey and we always see that they ‘strongly agree’ that they got everything they need before starting and that they love the communication,” says Beca.
“Enboarder is creating those little moments of wow, intrigue, excitement. And I think for us, that's the biggest thing that we were missing. And it's nice that it technically does it itself. And when things change – if we have a new video we want to share – it’s so easy to update. It's totally filled that gap we were missing.”
Now the team is looking into other applications for Enboarder, including product launches. So the next time Dermalogica launches a new product, Beca will use Enboarder for those internal comms to get the team excited and make sure they have all the information they need to bring the product to market.
“Since we've launched, the U.S. team was very intrigued by Enboarder. So they now have their own flows. I think that's actually been really nice that we've launched a system and it's been taken up by our U.S. colleagues, because it's normally the other way around.”
“Our company pillars are personalization, human touch, and education, and I think that’s what Enboarder helps us bring is that human element. We talk about our culture, about being a tribe, and being a collectiveness, and that’s what Enboarder helps us bring to life,” says Sarah.