By Business & Finance 
Pictured: Eric Mosley, CEO and co-founder of Workhuman
The Business & Finance Business Person of the Month December 2020 is Eric Mosley, CEO and co-founder of Workhuman
Eric Mosley is the CEO and co-founder of Workhuman, the Irish HR technology company that last year achieved unicorn status with a new investment valuing it at $1.2 billion (€1.06 billion). Workhuman became the second Irish company to do so after messaging platform company Intercom.
Founded by Mosley and Eddie Reynolds in 1999, Workhuman surpassed revenues of $700 million last year.
Raised in Tallaght, Dublin, in the 1980s, Mosley set his sights early on becoming a businessperson. In an interview with The Irish Independent, he said: “People ask me whether I always wanted to start a company and it is true, from a very early age I wanted to be a businessman […] I didn’t necessarily know what that was. But I used to scrutinise the adverts on TV to look for the hidden strategies that they would have to gain market share. I wouldn’t have used any of those words, but that’s what I was doing.”
In 2005, he moved to Massachusetts to scale the business into the US market. Employee recognition is a key motivating factor in his business approach, and he feels that Europe lags behind the US in this regard. Speaking to the Irish Times, he explains: “If you go back five or six years, Europe was very much behind the US in [employee recognition] but we established a team of data scientists who were able to dig deep and demonstrate return on investment for businesses. The European market needed to see the science to believe it was credible.”
If you are running a small company you can take all your staff to the pub on a Thursday night for team building but when you are leading a business with say 100,000 employees spread out at over 100 locations, you have to do more to ensure cohesion and morale
He continues: “If you are running a small company you can take all your staff to the pub on a Thursday night for team building but when you are leading a business with say 100,000 employees spread out at over 100 locations, you have to do more to ensure cohesion and morale.”
“A social recognition platform such as Workhuman helps lead to a focused, energised employee base who are going to work more productively. In addition to rewarding a wide range of employees it also provides other insights on areas such as diversity and inclusion that goes even further to making people feel recognised and rewarded.”
Workhuman operates employee reward and incentive schemes on behalf of some of leading companies such as KPMG, Cisco, General Electric, LinkedIn, Procter & Gamble, Symantec. There are more than 5 million employees on the Workhuman platform across 160 countries.
The company currently employs 400 people in Dublin, where product development is currently based. The group recently announced that it is planning to double its Irish workforce to 800 people by 2023. “Workhuman’s office space capacity is currently 400, though we have surpassed that while working from home during COVID,” Mosley said.
“In the first half of 2021, we’ll be expanding to a second building which has four floors and will give us an additional 200 seats. And then we have plans for further expansion in the years to come for another 200 seats. Looking forward, we’ll be able to hold at least 800 humans in our Park West office space by 2023.”
Business & Finance, Business Person of the Month
Business & Finance, in association with KPMG, rewards excellence in business through the ‘Business Person of the Month’ award. This award seeks to recognise noteworthy achievements in business leadership, and, particularly, those that make a telling contribution to the wider business community in Ireland.
