Huntress is a fast-growing global organization of 400 fully remote teammates on a mission to make cybersecurity accessible and effective for companies of all sizes.

We were recently joined by two members of the Huntress team: Billy McMillan, Director, Learning and Development, and Veronica Werve, People Coordinator, for a fireside chat where they spoke to us about the strategies behind employee engagement at Huntress.

The Numbers

Over 30/60/90 days, the average onboarding score at Huntress throughout the last year is 94%.

“We have three onboarding surveys that get sent out at the 30-day, 60-day and 90-day milestone as a new hire ramps. That way, we get a good understanding of where they’re at and how they’re feeling throughout the entire onboarding experience,” Veronica explained.

Huntress’s Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) is also a key piece of data.

“It’s a metric used to measure how satisfied and loyal teammates are with their job and at a company. We calculate the eNPS by asking the question, ‘How likely are you to recommend Huntress as a place to work?’” Veronica continued. “From there, we take the percentage of our teammates that are promoters and subtract the percentage that are detractors.”

In 2024, the average tech industry eNPS is 26, with a score of 30-50 being considered excellent. Huntress has a score of 58 — an increase of 14 points from the previous year. With 85% of Huntress employees responding to the survey, the score is a meaningful reflection of how teammates are feeling.

“We are also 36 points higher than the benchmark of tech companies similar to our size and industry,” Veronica added.

Huntress’s engagement survey goes deeper than a single eNPS question, with the survey having 40 questions. In speaking with us, Billy and Veronica highlighted three particular statements and the associated results that employees are asked if they agree with.

• “There is at least one person at work with whom I feel a closer personal connection.” (85 points, an increase of 6 points from last year)
• “I can be myself at work.” (88 points, an increase of 5 points from last year)
• “My job feels important to me because it is aligned to the vision and mission of the company.” (91 points, an increase of 5 points from last year)

Three Pillars of Engagement

Billy shared three pillars of engagement that contribute to Huntress seeing increased scores:

Fostering Connections: Building strong human connections in a remote environment.

Smart Automation: Free up time for more strategic and engaged human connections.

Elevating Experiences: Elevating the employee experience for hyper personalization.

Let’s dive into what each of those mean at Huntress.

Fostering Connections

“How do we increase the amount of human connections that are real, deep, and meaningful, and not just topical?” Billy asked.

This question is asked at every point of the employee lifecycle, beginning with employee onboarding.

“Starting with that onboarding piece, we have new hire cohorts every two weeks. This way, the new hires can learn together and have that sense of community. We also have a new hire Slack channel and live onboarding sessions that all of the new hires in that cohort are all in together, building that community and learning and growing together as they figure out the Huntress way of doing things,” Veronica shared.

New hires are encouraged to get to know their manager. A minimum of 1-2 one-on-ones are expected throughout the organization per month between managers and their reports.

Huntress also has an Onboarding Buddy program for new hires to help them throughout the onboarding experience and learn about Huntress. “We also ask managers to set up Strategic Connections for the new hire,” said Veronica. “That way, they’re connecting with teammates they’re working with every day, teammates in different departments, or just someone at Huntress that’s a great ambassador for the culture here — anyone the manager thinks would be helpful for that new hire to connect with.”

In addition to Donut’s Strategic Connections feature, new hires are encouraged to join Huntress’s Donut Intros channel early in their onboarding experience to make even more connections.

“Our Donut onboarding journey that I mentioned earlier automates a lot of this,” Veronica said. “It automates the manager getting introduced to the new hire that first week. It automates setting up the onboarding buddy — also automates the manager setting up those strategic connections.”

Huntress’s culture of BElonging (the “BE” is capitalized) goes beyond onboarding and is another essential part of the team’s approach to fostering connections. 

“It’s really the foundation of our culture,” Veronica said. “We encourage our teammates to come as they are, share their stories, their learnings, engage in respectful and healthy dialogue so that we can all learn and grow in our humanity together.”

On “BElonging”: “That’s because we want it to be an action for teammates. We want it to be a responsibility for all of us to create this belonging culture — so be the ‘BE’ in belonging.”

“We are able to foster these connections in our BElonging culture in many different ways,” Veronica continued.

These include:

• Monthly BElonging sessions around different diversity and wellness topics
• A BElonging Slack channel for healthy conversations and team vulnerability
• Donut Intros in a Slack Channel called “The Shady Bakery”

Explaining the name, Veronica elaborated, “I know that name might seem strange to those that aren’t from Huntress, but it really aligns with our culture and our cyberpunk, cybersecurity shady hacker vibe we’ve got here. We actually had the company vote on the name of the channel, and Shady Bakery won the vote. So we’ve got that Slack channel where we have Intros every two weeks in groups of three.”

Teammates are randomly paired up and are able to meet on Zoom or chat via Slack. Afterwards, they post a selfie in the Shady Bakery Slack channel and the selfie with the most emoji reactions wins a free lunch via Grubhub from Huntress.

The last key aspect of how Huntress fosters connections is an emphasis on growth. Growth encompasses learning and development programming and training. We’ll revisit this last aspect as we take a look at Huntress’s plans for the future of their strategy.

Smart Automation

Moving on to Huntress’s second pillar, Veronica spoke about how the team prioritizes automation.

“When thinking about automations, we really try to think about what is a priority right now, what will help us as head count increases in the future, and will the setup actually make the process more efficient?”

Using an Onboarding Journeys set up via Donut as an example, she elaborated. “When thinking about what is the priority to automate, we try to start with the question, ‘What can be automated most effectively in the onboarding process?’ It was pretty clear to me that administrative tasks and messaging can be automations, and with the automations we can repurpose that time towards enhancing the actual onboarding experience and thinking more strategically as we scale and those onboarding groups get bigger and bigger.

“After implementing our Donut onboarding Journey, I did some rough math on time that was freed up for me by all these automations with administrative tasks and messaging,” she said. “We have about a total of 50 messages, tasks and polls that I had to send out per new hire. We have about five to 20 new hires a month. So you can imagine how much time that would take.”

In her estimates, Veronica found time saved via automating those messages for new hires totalled around 96 hours, or 12 days a year.

“By setting these automations up, it actually freed up some time to where I can be a strategic partner alongside Billy,” she shared.

Automations are also an important aspect of creating a holistic experience for employees, as Huntress is a global team and not all work may be synchronous within shared time zones. In automating points of the onboarding process, new hires are ensured a consistency of experience that simply wouldn’t be possible if two teammates had minimal overlap in their schedules.

With Huntress’s continued and anticipated growth, it’s important to think in the long-term about setting up automations.

“With the Donut Onboarding Journeys, we built a systematic approach to onboarding now to be in place for the future as we grow,” Veronica explained. “Yes, it was a little bit of lift in the beginning, but like I said, now it runs smoothly on its own and created that personalized experience for all new hires, that feels like the Huntress culture of belonging and brand for all teammates.”

Setup is the final important consideration of “Smart Automation.”

The team considered what tools and processes would make for the most efficient automations and onboarding experiences — the latter being where the team chose to start in considering their approach.

“‘What are we trying to accomplish with this automation?’” Veronica reflected. “Donut, of course, seemed like the perfect automation for onboarding pieces that foster connections, automating those messages, and once again creating that personalized experience over a length of time.”

“Internally, we have Monday.com in place, which helps more with the automation for project management type of work,” she said. “But overall, when setting up an automation, we really try to make sure it integrates with Slack. That’s a great way for us to promote engagement with automation.”

By prioritizing Slack integration when choosing tools for automation, teammates are better able to stay where their work happens.

Elevating Experiences

When it comes to approaching how to elevate the experiences of teammates at Huntress, it’s very important to the team that they lead with data.

“After we do launch a survey, like the engagement survey for instance, we spend a lot of time combing through the data, exporting the data, looking at details. We bucket it into themes and look for an overall story of what we’re seeing to put in perspective. We spend almost like a month or two just combing through this data,” Billy explained.

Survey data is compared against benchmarks, and results from departments are also compared against each other.

“We break it into teams — even managers specifically, how are they doing with their team?” Billy said. 

In doing so, the team is looking for what story the data tells, certain themes in scoring across the organization, and opportunities for elevation.

Change over time is also a meaningful point of perspective, as the team is fortunate to have surveys from as early as when they were 100 employees up to their current size of 400.

“It’s really interesting to look at those trends over time and see where we can continue to elevate engagement and find the areas that need to be enhanced,” Billy explained.

The team also uses a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis as they go deeper into the data. We’ll talk more about this when we dig into some challenges the team has identified in our next section.

Lastly, in the pillar of elevating experiences, providing a white-glove experience — one that is personalized with meticulous attention — remains important. Billy gave two examples of this at Huntress.

Firstly, an approach Huntress took to building better skills at giving feedback, particularly among managers at Huntress.

“We give our managers and actually all teammates a certain number of tokens. They’re tokens of appreciation,” he explained. “It’s to reward and acknowledge people within Huntress for doing things that are tied to our values and or belonging. Our values of ‘Own It,’ ‘Elevate It’ and ‘Send It’ in our overall culture of BElonging.”

Teammates are able to redeem the tokens they receive for things like gift cards or donations to charities of a preferred cause.

This approach allows people to get into the practice of acknowledging others. Constructive feedback may come easily to some team members, but it’s also important at Huntress that team members develop the ability to see the greatness in others, and the ways teammates uplift each other.

Secondly, BetterUp has been of great value.

“Everybody at Huntress gets access to one-on-one dedicated coaching from BetterUp,” he shared. “The beauty about this is that their ICF-certified coaches they get — [the coaches are] supporting people through challenges on any given topic, even specialty coaching around grief, nutrition, sleep, whatever it might be — communication. And the thought here is that not only are we helping hyper-personalize somebody’s personal growth, but it also gives them a team.”

It also provides managers with another resource to offer teammates in elevating their own performance.

On the backend, Huntress gets deep insight into data.

“We get to see what the trend is — what […] topics our teammates are talking about, so that we can actually deliver specially specialty experiences given on those topics,” Billy said. “If the month of November, we’re seeing stress is being talked about, or time management, we’re able to tell our managers ‘Hey, make sure you’re checking in with your people around — ’ As far as their workload, what types of things do they need help with? What types of tools, resources? And we can have group sessions around what is needed for time management skills.”

It provides Huntress with another way to listen without teammates having to say more and is another powerful input in offering hyper-personalized experiences.

Challenges

Being a distributed team that has quadrupled in size is not without growing pains and as a startup, Huntress moves quickly. Thankfully, their dedication to introspection and data increases their insight into potential opportunities for improvement and creates the opportunity to respond sooner rather than later.

In doing SWOT analysis as mentioned above, Billy spoke to some discoveries.

“When it comes to a strength, I’m claiming that our approach and having conversations between managers and teammates is going great because before, we used to have performance reviews. They were every six months. However, not many people were talking outside of that.”

In response, Huntress set expectations for twice a month one-on-ones between managers and their teammates, with managers capturing the information in Lattice, the performance platform Huntress uses.

In doing so, they were aiming for two things. “We say ‘compliant’ and ‘compelling,’” Billy explained. From the compliance angle, Huntress is in the 86% area. They know managers and teammates are having conversations and there have been improvements on the manager-related scores in the surveys Huntress utilizes.

For the weakness category of the SWOT analysis, Billy reflected on another angle of the issue. “That’s from the ‘compelling’ side of the feedback that we’re getting,” he said. “Everybody’s doing it and we’re seeing improvements, but there’s still work to be done in being very specific in the feedback that our managers are giving, both constructive and positive. So how do we actually enhance the quality of conversations that our managers and teammates are having?”

At present, Huntress has plans to leverage some tooling in the future that will increase those conversations and improve the quality of them via further practice.

“Opportunities” in the analysis appear in the form of planned programs, making sure Donut is being leveraged within them, and keeping momentum throughout both current and upcoming resources available to the team — such as the BElonging channel mentioned earlier in the case study.

“Over time, it seemed to maybe die down in the number of personal sharings and the number of emojis, reactions and threads. How can we reengage this channel with very intentional questioning? Using the Watercooler topics and or even just diving in there and having more of a cadence of people sharing in there so that we keep that channel alive and well?”

Lastly, Billy addressed threats.

“This company’s success has been built on the grind — the culture that was created as a startup,” he explained. “As we grow, the thought is how do we continue to provide this feeling of ownership in everything that we do? How do we keep the pace of wanting to elevate everything that we put our hands on, both internally and externally when it comes to products, [and our] own internal processes, so that we can keep iterating and making things better.”

The team plans to leverage some new opportunities with onboarding, and to continue to reflect on how questions are asked within various programs at Huntress, such as in Watercooler channels.

This reflection on how questions are asked has also played out over time, particularly in surveys at Huntress.

“Every now and then, we’ll have a question that after launching the survey, we realized maybe wasn’t worded correctly or didn’t make sense,” Veronica explained.

“The main part about that is just getting the feedback of ‘Hey, this isn’t landing.’ and yet still being able to get the same spirit of the question,” Billy said, before providing an example. “‘I have a close connection with somebody in my workplace.’ vs. ‘I have a best friend.’”

After rewording that question on Huntress’s survey, participation feedback on the question improved over prior years with the old wording.

“So we could still get the same spirit, but ask it in a different way,” Billy explained. “If we were not listening to our people and actually considering them in the process of iteration, that change wouldn’t have happened. And probably you would see results of people completing the survey go down, which is another piece here.”

Huntress regularly has over 80% completion in the surveys they send out, with each being full of useful insights. “Every time we send out a survey,” Billy continued. “We’re getting that type of feedback, no matter how much we’re growing. So that’s great. As far as when it comes to completion of a survey, most people, it’s around 30, 40, maybe a 50% every now and then. But getting in the 80s+ is really good for participation in these things.”

Looking Ahead 

The team will be kicking off a new manager training program in October.

“It’s four weeks long, followed by a three month kind of a break where there’s continued learning. And then in that fourth month, there’s going to be a manager intensive,” Billy said, speaking to the intended timing. “The goal here is to leverage Donut throughout to keep that momentum going and keep the reflections, keep the connection between the manager talking about the things that they’ve learned — talking about what things are they implementing.

As the team looks ahead to 2025, better equipping managers at Huntress will remain a priority. Billy described four focus areas within that.

“Performance management, onboarding your teammates when they come on board, hiring the right teammates and making sure that experience is great,” he said.

The team will also continue to think about clarity of message and momentum across their programs.

“How do we constantly lean into being clear, specific, and know where everybody is so that we’re always aligned and heading all of our energy and momentum in the same direction?” Billy said.

And lastly, Huntress will be prioritizing “continual onboarding.”

“I mentioned culture being a potential threat,” Billy said, referencing the SWOT analysis. “We need to keep this thing alive so we are able to continue to grow at the pace that we are. So what we’re doing is not looking at onboarding as just being those first 30, 60, 90 days—type situation, but, how do we continually check in? Re-engage every single teammate at Huntress around who we are, how we got here, what we’re up to? So that everyone is constantly involved in creating the culture of BElonging moving forward.”

In 2025, the team will be implementing a new onboarding process using their own training platform, which will be very exciting and something that they’re looking forward to.

Conclusion

Now that we’ve explored some of the thorough strategy that has led to the survey results shared at the beginning of this case study, it’s clear that Huntress’s success is the result of a detailed, intentional, and thoughtful approach to their people programming.

With their three pillars of employee engagement, the team is set up for even more growth in the coming years.

Start building great programming for employee engagement with Donut’s Prebuilt Journeys, featuring suggested activities, structure, and feedback collection.