We've partnered with Dubai-based culture and change communications specialist Yulia Kurdina to bring a dedicated employee communications layer to HR technology deployments across the Middle East and North Africa.
There is a moment that every HR leader who has run a platform rollout will recognize. The system is live. Integration is clean. The launch email went out. And three months later, usage has settled somewhere well below what anyone projected.
The technology worked. Something else did not.
This is the problem we are addressing with our new partnership. Semos Cloud has partnered with Yulia Kurdina, co-founder of Culture Co and a Dubai-based culture and change communications specialist, to bring a dedicated employee communications layer to HR technology deployments across the MENA region.
Why go-live and adoption are two different projects
Enterprise HR teams invest heavily in the systems that run recognition, communication, listening, and rewards. Getting those systems live is a project with a clear finish line: scope, configure, integrate, test, launch.
Getting employees to use them every week is a different kind of work, and it runs on different mechanics. Relevance. Attention. Habit. None of those are delivered by a go-live date, and none of them show up on an implementation plan.
The research is consistent on this. McKinsey has found that around 70 percent of change programs fall short of their goals, with employee resistance and limited management support among the reasons. Separate McKinsey work on transformation puts a number on the other side of it: change is roughly 4.4 times more likely to succeed when employees understand how it affects their daily habits and tasks.
That second figure is the useful one. It points at a specific failure, not a vague one. Most rollout communication explains what is changing and when, from the organization's point of view. Employees decide differently. They want to know why it matters to them, what changes in their week, and what they should do on Monday.
The three stages that carry a launch into use
Yulia works where change management meets communications, designing the narrative and campaign layer that carries a deployment from launch day into sustained use. She is a Prosci certified change practitioner, and her client work spans recognition program activation, employee engagement survey campaigns, learning platform rollouts, and multi-tool HR service transformations.
Her framework has three stages.
- Reframe. Position the change around employee relevance rather than organizational logistics. A compliance platform becomes a personal development experience. A recognition framework becomes something employees own rather than something HR administers.
- Earn attention. Use narrative, messaging, and storytelling to create real engagement. Employees are an audience worth winning over, and internal communication competes with everything else in their day.
- Shift behavior. Sustain uptake past launch through reinforcement. Launch-week communication produces awareness. Habit takes longer and needs a campaign built for it.
"Most platforms get launched. Fewer get adopted," Yulia Kurdina says. "The technology is ready. The communications strategy doesn't always keep pace."
Where this fits with our platform
The primary fit is Employee Communication. We supply the channels that reach every employee, including deskless and frontline workers, through email, mobile, SMS, Microsoft Teams, Slack, intranet, and kiosk. Yulia supplies the strategy those channels carry: platform narrative, audience messaging, launch campaigns, manager activation, employee storytelling, and reinforcement journeys.
Recognition and Rewards is a strong second. In her consulting work, Yulia has run recognition framework activations that moved recognition from an HR-owned program to something employees drive themselves, built around participation rather than policy.
Employee listening is a third. Survey participation depends on whether employees believe their input goes somewhere, which is a communications question before it is a technology one.
And for clients deploying more than one module at once, communication fatigue is a genuine risk. Yulia has worked on exactly that pattern, repositioning a set of separately launched HR tools as one connected experience under a unified launch campaign.
"Our mission is helping organizations turn employee experiences into strategic advantages," said Ilija Kiroski, Head of Sales and Global Alliances at Semos Cloud. "That depends on employees engaging with what we deploy, which is exactly where Yulia works. For clients across the Gulf, it means the platform and the adoption strategy now come from one conversation instead of two separate sourcing exercises."
What this adds across MENA
Yulia is based in Dubai with a professional network across the Gulf and the wider region. Her focus on audience segmentation and employee relevance suits the varied workforce profiles common across GCC organizations, where a single message rarely lands the same way across a multinational, multilingual, and heavily frontline employee base.
"Culture works as infrastructure," said Filip Misovski, CEO of Semos Cloud. "We build the experience layer that puts recognition, communication, and listening in the flow of work. Yulia builds the communications strategy that gets employees to show up to it. Clients in this region have been asking for both in one engagement, and now they can get it."
To be precise about what this partnership is: it is a specialist consulting partnership. Yulia provides communications and adoption strategy alongside our deployments. She is not a reseller, distributor, or implementation resource, and her expertise sits entirely in the communications layer.
"Adoption happens one employee at a time," said Yulia. "Understanding a change is rarely enough. People need to know why it matters to them, what it means for their day-to-day, and what they should do differently. That is the layer I build, and pairing it with a platform this embedded in the employee experience helps carry that change from launch into everyday behavior."
Frequently asked questions
What is adoption communications?
Adoption communications is the practice of using narrative, messaging, and campaigns to get employees to use a newly launched platform. It sits between change management and internal communications, and it addresses behavior rather than awareness.
Why do employees not adopt new HR platforms?
Most rollout communication explains what is changing and when, from the organization's point of view. Employees adopt a platform when they understand why it matters to them, what it changes in their day-to-day work, and what they should do differently. McKinsey research indicates change is around 4.4 times more likely to succeed when employees understand how it affects their daily habits and tasks.
How do you drive user adoption of a new HR platform?
Three stages: reframe the change around employee relevance rather than organizational logistics, earn attention through narrative and storytelling rather than announcement emails, then sustain the behavior past launch through reinforcement.
How do you measure adoption of HR technology?
Adoption is measured by sustained usage rather than launch-week activity: active users over time, repeat usage, participation rates in programs such as recognition and surveys, and whether usage holds three to six months after go-live.
Is this partnership a reseller agreement?
No. This is a specialist consulting partnership. Yulia Kurdina provides communications and adoption strategy alongside Semos Cloud deployments. She is not a distributor, reseller, or implementation partner.
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