How Siena replaced scattered people ops with structured talent management with Deel

Siena builds AI agents that handle customer service for commerce brands. With around 50 people spread across 17 countries and multiple employment types, the team could no longer rely on informal processes to manage performance and engagement.

Engagement surveys were run through SurveyMonkey and Google Forms. After each one, Inga Aksamit, the team’s People Operations Manager, would export the raw data, drop it into a spreadsheet, and build the charts manually just to present findings to leadership. Performance reviews had no structured process at all. It worked while the team was small—but the moment Aksamit needed to track trends, compare cohorts, or run a repeatable cycle, it fell apart.

"Informality works when everyone's in the same room, and you can feel the real temperature of the team. It stops working the moment you can't. When a new hire's first week is chaos because no one owns that process, and you find out someone was unhappy only after they've resigned—that's the signal you need a tool to formalize your processes." — Inga Aksamit, People Operations Manager, Siena

Inga Aksamit started with the two most pressing gaps: engagement surveys and performance reviews. Both had a clear business case for leadership, and getting them working properly, through Deel HR's Engage module, built on top of HRIS, built confidence in the platform before anything else was added. With HRIS as the foundation, workforce data across 17 countries became visible in one place: headcount, time off, turnover, leavers—with dashboards rather than manual exports.

Onboarding and offboarding came next, built not as content libraries but as automated workflows. Siena now runs 20+ workflows covering the full employee lifecycle, from a new hire's first day through anniversaries, time off approvals, engagement survey reminders, and exits. The problem was never a lack of documentation, but accountability. Automation solved for that without adding overhead.

Hiring decisions got more rigorous, too. With EOR, contractor management, and PEO running on the same platform, Aksamit can model employment costs for any market and keep the operational model consistent as the team grows.

"With EOR, contractor management, and PEO now running alongside Engage in Deel, the operational overhead stays manageable as Siena scales—without adding complexity every time the team grows." — Inga Aksamit, People Operations Manager, Siena

The Engage implementation took four to five weeks. The biggest shift wasn't the reviews or the surveys—it was what happened after. Where Aksamit previously spent hours building charts in a spreadsheet, she now opens the analytics section, and data is already segmented, visualized, and ready to act on. AI-generated survey insights surface drivers and motivators immediately. Recurring survey results stack for comparison over time. Review templates carry over from the previous cycle, refined rather than rebuilt from scratch.

That speed changes what people operations can contribute at the leadership level. As Aksamit puts it: “the seat at the table gets earned when you stop asking leadership to trust your instincts and start showing them patterns.”

Adoption followed naturally. The Siena team embraced Deel because the value was visible before anyone was asked to change their behavior.