HeyPenny Case Study
Theory meets practical: Modernising the way we teach HR
Overview
Dr. Dan Henning Langerud from Victoria University took a new approach to his third-year Applied Human Resources course (HRER 305). Instead of asking students to analyse static case studies and learn only through theory, he introduced a live organisational simulation using the HeyPenny platform. The aim was simple: give students the chance to experience how HR decisions play out, rather than only talk about them.
Over the twelve-week trimester, students stepped into the world of Florena, a fictional bakery created to feel like a real workplace, complete with its own people challenges, cultural quirks and operational pressures. The students became HR advisors and in their groups, agreed how they would respond to a variety of scenarios over the course of the semester. After each decision, new data was uploaded to the platform showing shifts in employee sentiment, psychosocial risk patterns and organisational performance resulting from their decisions. Students could immediately see whether their choices helped, hindered or unintentionally made things worse.
The Challenge
Traditionally, HR classes rely on static resources and theory-based learning, offering limited opportunities for students to engage with real-world complexity or apply concepts in practice. While this approach supports foundational understanding, it falls short of capturing how dynamic, interconnected and fast-moving organisational life can be. As a result, several challenges became evident across cohorts.
Engagement was inconsistent (particularly in morning workshops)
Static resources did not reflect the complexity of people leadership
Learning outcomes showed minimal development over time
Many students lacked real work experience, making HR decisions feel abstract
Case materials didn’t show how decisions build on each other or influence different parts of an organisation over time.
These limitations highlighted the opportunity for a more immersive educational approach, one that could anchor theoretical learning in practical, hands-on experience and bring organisational dynamics to life.
The Opportunity
The lecturer saw an opportunity to modernise the course by giving students something they rarely experience in traditional HR education: responsibility for running an organisation. With HeyPenny’s platform, students could analyse real-time data, make informed decisions and then observe how those decisions shaped the organisation’s wellbeing and performance over the trimester.
HeyPenny is a platform that converts conversations into clear, meaningful insights about people and work. Each insight is linked to common psychosocial risk factors and categorised as protective, neutral or harmful. In organisational settings, this offers leaders a detailed view of how work conditions influence employee wellbeing, team dynamics and core business measures such as absenteeism, turnover and productivity. In the classroom, this capability allowed the lecturer to design a fictional organisation with realistic strengths, challenges and evolving storylines that aligned directly with the course content, including JD-R and SMART work design principles.
The simulation centred on Florena, a fictional bakery crafted to feel authentic in its operational, cultural and financial context. Students stepped into the role of HR consultants supporting Florena’s leaders. Every decision they made shaped what happened next, influencing the data generated through HeyPenny and altering future scenarios. This created a meaningful feedback loop that mirrored real organisational life, where decisions carry weight and consequences accumulate over time.
For students, this shifted HR from an abstract concept to a lived experience. For the lecturer, it provided a powerful way to teach judgment, decision making and systems thinking in context.
Implementation
Class Structure
40 students
Five groups with similar work-life experience
Each group received the same baseline dataset, including organisation, team and individual insights.
Weeks 1–2
Students began by analysing Florena’s organisational structure, narrative background and baseline data. This included insights into employee sentiment, leadership capability and early psychosocial risk indicators. Working in small groups, students assessed potential organisational strengths and risks and prepared to advise on emerging issues.
Week 3
The first major scenario, Blurred Bakers, required students to diagnose problems within a baking team at the organisation’s flagship store. Despite strong individual capability at the bakery, the team exhibited symptoms of unclear role boundaries, fragmented work, low autonomy and workload strain. Students were required to apply job-design principles, including JD-R and SMART work design, to identify root causes and recommend interventions.
After students submitted their decisions, the lecturer released a new set of simulated HeyPenny insights (based on their decisions) representing a three-month time jump. These new insights showed how employees responded to the interventions, whether psychosocial risks improved or intensified, and how organisational culture shifted.
This was the first moment in the trimester when students could directly see the impact and outcomes of their decisions.
Weeks 5–12
Throughout the trimester, students worked through a series of HR scenarios ranging from communication challenges to staffing decisions and KPI redesign. After each scenario, the lecturer updated the HeyPenny dataset to reflect the likely organisational effects. Students then analysed these changes, diagnosed emerging risks and prepared for the next set of decisions.
Several clear patterns emerged within the Bakery across the trimester:
Promotive voice increased in the bakery where students redesigned work and improved recognition.
Psychological safety within the bakery strengthened when transparency and follow-through improved.
Workload strain within the bakery decreased when routines and task allocation became clearer.
By the end of the trimester, the five student groups had created five distinct versions of Florena, each shaped by their cumulative decisions. Some strengthened culture and wellbeing. Some unintentionally created new risks. Others improved operational performance but weakened aspects of trust or fairness. The diversity of outcomes demonstrated how HR approaches and decisions can significantly impact organisations and affect their trajectory.
Educational Impact
Development of Analytical and Diagnostic Capability
The simulation prompted a clear shift in how students approached HR analysis. Early in the course they focused on surface-level symptoms, yet over time they began identifying underlying causes and applying theory with greater accuracy. By mid-trimester, students were using models to interpret evolving psychosocial data and connecting factors such as voice, fairness, workload design and trust to changes in employee sentiment and performance. This progression from noticing issues to explaining them marked a significant step in their analytical development.
Growth in Systems Thinking
Students increasingly recognised the interconnected nature of organisational dynamics. They moved beyond linear reasoning and began considering the wider system effects of their decisions, anticipating second- and third-order outcomes. They saw how a single intervention, such as a staffing adjustment, could influence morale, voice climate or capability gaps in unexpected ways. This growing ability to anticipate unintended consequences became a key marker of their developing analytical capability.
Increased Confidence and Engagement
Engagement was exceptionally high with 33 out of 34 students meeting the attendance requirement, and many attending every session. Workshops became more interactive, with students challenging each other’s interpretations and defending their decisions using evidence drawn from the HeyPenny data.
This confidence extended into the final assessment interviews, where students demonstrated strong ability to connect theory with practice. According to the lecturer, several students delivered the most comprehensive and well-reasoned explanations he had seen since developing the course.
Course-Level Outcomes
Formal student evaluations reinforced the qualitative observations. Among the students who responded:
100% Strongly Agreed the course developed their understanding
100% Strongly Agreed assessments helped them learn
100% reported the course stimulated their interest
92% Strongly Agreed what they learned was valuable
85% rated overall course quality as Excellent (15% rated it Very Good)
These results suggest that the simulation contributed meaningfully to both engagement and perceived learning quality.
Why This Matters
This pilot demonstrates the value of integrating dynamic, data-informed tools into HR education. By embedding HeyPenny into the course, students were able to experience how decisions influence organisational outcomes over time. They developed stronger diagnostic capability, applied theoretical models with greater confidence and gained insight into psychosocial risk factors that shape employee experience. The simulation created a bridge between academic learning and the realities of people leadership.
Future Opportunities
Based on the success of this pilot, HeyPenny presents opportunities for broader application across HR, management, leadership and organisational behaviour programmes. More broadly, this approach provides a template for how universities can modernise HR education by incorporating live simulations that reflect the complexity of real work environments. The model is scalable, adaptable and positioned to support the development of work-ready graduates with the analytical skills required in contemporary organisations.
Curious to know more?
If you have any questions, are interested in using HeyPenny within your own teachings or want to use HeyPenny within a business, please complete the contact form. We’d love to chat.