One of Peoplelogic Nova’s core guiding principles is that HR will need 24/7 access to agents, wherever they need them. Many of our customers use Slack and email, so we started there.
But customer feedback is our friend at this stage. It was clear that while HR leaders and teams love their “in-the-flow of work” tools (Slack, Teams, etc.), something was missing. Some users (especially management) asked for a dedicated space in their browser to leverage Nova’s task-handling abilities.
So, starting today, you can sign up, log in, and use a new Nova web interface like you have been in Slack or email!
The experience is the same—you start a new conversation and ask the agents to help you with the tedious admin work that has been consuming your time.
Nova Web Interface
Slack Interface
You can upload files—both to share with your whole organization and as part of a specific task.
Conversations in Slack will also show up inside the web interface (but not the other way around just yet!).
While we’re really proud of this first release, there are still many things we want to add moving forward. We’re focused on providing better insights into how your team is leveraging Nova, simplifying connections to other services, and a much better mobile version!
We know our friends in HR and People Ops are always rock solid reliable and we believe Nova is too. This release is packed with features focused on producing more consistent and reliable interactions between you and Nova. Let’s check it out!
Enhanced Confirmation Flows
Prior to this release, Nova would often play a little fast and loose with confirmation of what the user asked for. Sometimes it would choose to confirm once, sometimes endlessly and sometimes not at all! Now Nova will check that it actually needs to confirm what it needs and doesn’t need and will keep asking you for additional details until it has everything you need!
Scheduled Workflows Are Now…More Scheduled 🤦
Do you struggle with timezones? Apparently Nova does to. This release helps make sure that Nova won’t change the times of your scheduled tasks and let’s you schedule things in a particular timezone. ET, PT, UTC? Now Nova understands them all.
“What is my team struggling with?”
Have you ever struggled with capturing the themes of all the real-time interactions that your team has with you? Now Nova makes that as easy as asking “What have you been helping my team with?”. Private by definition and great for strategic planning, you will never have to guess where your team is struggling as they start to interact with Nova on a daily basis.
Ready made resources and templates to use with Nova
With the latest improvements to Nova’s accuracy and lookup capabilities, the team went all out and created a TON of great templates and guides as starting points for your own organization and to use with Nova. The first batch includes everything from a Meeting Norms template to a guide to AI prompts that you can use directly with Nova. Check it out at https://nova.peoplelogic.ai/resources and there’s more to come!
🪲 Bug Fixes
IDP and 9box generation sometimes outputs in markdown within Word
Agents sometimes confirm over and over again still (see the improvement above!)
When an agent that supports long operations, the transition message doesn't disappear (Slack)
Coming Soon!
We’re hard at work to drive even more improvements to Nova. Here’s what’s coming up in the next few releases:
A standalone Web Interface for Nova
One of our most common requests from early adopters - now you’ll be able to use Nova outside of Slack! 💪 Here’s a sneak peek:
Suggest additional workflows to start when users finish asking questions
Be able to have Nova send a monthly/quarterly “State of the People Function” report
Allow connections to file servers to support knowledge searching
This week’s release is all about making it easier to build culture and help you spend less time keeping hiring managers and your leadership team on the same page about the state of the talent pipeline. Let’s dive in!
📅 Support for generating a talent pipeline report
Time and time again we’ve seen HR leaders in growing startups need to keep everyone on the same page about the open roles and the candidates in the pipeline. Depending on your ATS (applicant tracking system) this information might be accessible to the HR leader, but not the rest of the team. Now Nova makes it easy to connect to any ATS and get an Excel file in a consistent format with all the details you need. Just tell Nova that you need a hiring pipeline report. You can even ask to get the pipeline every Monday morning.
🎂 Build culture, celebrate birthdays with the team
Based on early adopter feedback, we’ve added support for celebrating birthdays in addition to celebrating work anniversaries! Nova grabs this data from your HRIS (if connected) or Impact or even from an uploaded file - just ask Nova who has a birthday today. You can even ask Nova to share these on a regular schedule into common slack channels or email aliases. Customer feedback for the win! 💪
🗂️ Upload a file, get your birthdays and workiversaries
One thing that has become increasingly clear over the past two weeks of Nova’s launch is that HR leaders have a myriad of formats and myriad of data stores for the different things they’re keeping track of. We’re even seeing cases of multiple HRIS setups. To help make that just a little bit easier you can now share a list of birthdays or anniversaries in a CSV or Excel file.
To get started, create an Excel file with two worksheets (if you want to share both!) with the following format:
Employee
Start Date (or put Birthday here)
Name 1
3/1/2022
Name 2
6/14/1975
Save the file, then just tell Nova you want to share a file and provide the saved file. Once the file has been uploaded it’s easy to get Nova to use the file for workiversaries or birthdays - just ask:
who has a workiversary today? use file team_birthday_and_anniversaries.xlsx
Remember, you can always substitute workiversary for birthday. Happy celebrating!
🪲 Bug fixes and improvements
Sharing files often defaults to personal storage, not organization storage
The "this is taking too long" message doesn't get replaced
Thanks for all your interest in Nova - stay tuned for even more great enhancements.
Welcome to the first update to Nova after our public launch! This week has been about learning how you all want to use Nova and making improvements based on that usage. Let’s dive into what we added!
🙌 New and Improved
Employee Onboarding Notification
You can now automatically receive a daily update of new starters at the company directly from the HRIS. This feature integrates with your existing system to provide a list of people starting today, enhancing your ability to stay informed about new team members without manual tracking.
Expanded Knowledge For Difficult Conversations
Our expanded knowledge repository now encompasses additional resources on performance reviews and managing difficult conversations. You will find comprehensive guides and best practices tailored for handling these critical interactions within the workplace. This enriched content aids in preparing for and conducting performance evaluations effectively while offering strategies to address challenging dialogues with confidence.
Improved Personas of Agents
Conversations with the agents are now carried out in the more specific persona and tone of the individual agents. This helps make the different roles more engaging and relatable.
Grant Nova access to all Slack channel members
The newly added /nova-grant-access and /nova-revoke-access functionality provides you a seamless way to manage user permissions directly from the chat. By utilizing this feature, you can effortlessly grant or revoke access for team members either one at a time or in bulk across an entire Slack channel. Just reference the channel when you ask to grant access to someone or use the new /nova-grant-access slash command.
Enhanced Excel File Processing
We’ve added specific handling for excel files - especially for OKR management. Now you’ll be able to get deeper analysis and reporting on more complicated Excel files - including those with multiple worksheets.
Organizational Timezone for Task Scheduling
When scheduling tasks, Nova previously put all tasks in the UTC time zone. Now you can specify a timezone for your tasks and checking the scheduled tasks now tells you exactly when they’re going to run - timezone and all.
🪲 Bug Fixes
Nova-Specific HRIS and ATS Connections
We’ve refined how HRIS and ATS connections are made and stored to prevent potential collisions with the same connections in Impact.
Agents are referenced by their proper titles and names
Agents properly answer in the first person
Confirmation Bar in Slack Messaging
When you send or draft a message in Slack, the confirmation bar now appears prominently, allowing you to review before finalizing your action. This feature gives you more control over your interactions by providing options to confirm, edit, or restart the messaging process. It's conveniently located above the text input area, ensuring that you can make adjustments or confirm your message intent quickly and intuitively.
Improved agent memory handling to prevent disruptions when tools are used
Quite possibly the biggest release in Peoplelogic’s history, today we are excited to announce the culmination of years of experience and months of focused work to bring the world’s first AI-powered People Ops team. Meet Nova 👋 Nova is a team of AI workers that collaborate with you in Slack and email to streamline processes, automate repetitive tasks, surface insights, and more—so you can focus on what truly drives impact.
After a successful beta period, we gathered tons of valuable feedback that led to adding some great functionality to Nova for the public launch! Let’s dive in.
Performance Review Analysis Tools
You can now gain deep insights into performance reviews with enhanced analysis tools designed to dissect and understand trends. For organizational use, the tools offer breakdowns by scores and managers, cycle comparisons, sentiment, and keyword analysis, as well as score distributions. When evaluating individuals, comparisons to organizational benchmarks include textual sentiment and keyword insights.
Take it a step further, and have Nova suggest survey questions, potential OKRs, 9boxes, and individual development plans based on the analyses to guide improvement strategies. A massive time saver!
Generate an IDP from a Review Cycle Analysis
Introducing a streamlined way to generate an Individual Development Plan (IDP) directly from your review cycles. This feature enables you to automatically create personalized development paths for team members by analyzing review cycle feedback and performance data. Foster continuous development within your team by aligning growth with organizational goals. Just ask Nova to create an IDP for an individual after you analyze a review cycle. Bonus points for copying it into Impact afterwards!
Suggested OKRs for Survey Responses
With the introduction of Suggested OKRs, you can now leverage system-generated Objectives and Key Results to respond more effectively to survey inputs and review analysis. This feature analyzes survey or review data and recommends relevant OKRs to help align your team's goals with the insights gained from feedback.
Open Jobs Visibility
The latest update introduces the ability to share open job requisitions with ease, allowing you to collaborate seamlessly with your team. This feature makes it simple to distribute job details without navigating to your ATS or sharing results manually. You can view the specifics of a job, such as title, responsibilities, and qualifications. This streamlined sharing process empowers team members to access and understand job opportunities quickly and efficiently.
Multiple Simultaneous Conversations
A big improvement, you can now work with multiple Nova agents at once! This feature gives you the flexibility to switch contexts without losing track of your active discussions. Each conversation opens in a separate thread, allowing easy access and management of interactions, enhancing your ability to multitask seamlessly in your communication workflow.
Organizational Knowledge Search
Enhance your search capabilities by accessing a repository of organizational knowledge, including HR information like your handbook, directly from the platform. This feature allows you to quickly find relevant documents, policies, and procedures within your organization's knowledge base, streamlining the process of discovering vital information.
