Novatti is a modern fintech company with three offices in Australia—Melbourne, Adelaide, and Sydney—and global offices in Cyprus, Malaysia, and the UK. They also have people working remotely from China, Germany, Greece, Israel, and the US.
Back when they were a smaller company with 130 employees, Novatti ran HR manually using spreadsheets, Word docs, and email. But as they grew, this was no longer sustainable, and it became clear that they needed an HR platform to help them streamline their processes, provide a central source for people data, and increase engagement across their sites.
After reviewing several HR platforms, Novatti chose Bob for its ease of use and social media-like feel. Their people love it, too.
Creating a fully hybrid working model
While Novatti had always supported remote work, the pandemic drove several of its people to move overseas and work from different locations where Novatti didn’t have an office. Seeing how well this worked and wanting to empower their people, the company decided to create an official hybrid working policy that also allowed their people to work from anywhere. However, this brought some challenges. How could they create a sense of community and belonging with their people dispersed across the globe?
Fostering a community feel with Bob
Novatti makes every effort to accommodate their people wherever they work and has created an environment where everyone feels included. For example, whenever they run a training session, they make sure to offer several time slots that cover all time zones so that all of their people can attend.
Bob has also helped Novatti create a sense of community for their people near and far. Novatti’s HR has stopped using emails to communicate with their people and instead posts all communications, such as company announcements and general interest posts, on Bob’s homepage. They can also easily control each post’s visibility, so if an announcement is not relevant to a specific site or group, it won’t appear on their feed.
Using Bob as a central communication hub is also much more engaging than email—Novatti’s people can react to posts with emojis and comments, which has helped create a friendly company atmosphere. Having all comms in one place is also more convenient, as everyone knows where to go to read the latest company news.
It’s not just HR posting on Bob—employees across the company now use Bob’s homepage as a way to interact with each other. Managers post Shoutouts to introduce new starters and celebrate employee birthdays and work anniversaries. The company also uses Kudos to publicly recognize their people’s accomplishments. Novatti has even branded Bob in their company colors, making it an integral part of the company experience.
Staying compliant as a publicly-traded company
Novatti is a publicly-traded Australian company that is required to prepare regular reports for their Board and other agencies. However, in order to collect the data they needed, they had to involve several stakeholders, such as their payroll provider and Finance team, which was challenging and time-consuming. Novatti’s HR needed to find a better way.
Creating detailed reports using Bob
Novatti now uses Bob to create reports for their Board that show real-time people data such as headcount, turnover, growth, and different employee types: full-time, part-time, and temporary workers. This information is easily accessible in Bob’s customizable KPI dashboards, and Novatti’s HR team can use this data to seamlessly prepare custom reports.
As an Australian company with over 100 employees, Novatti also needs to submit an annual report to the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) showing that they comply with gender equality in the workplace. This involves providing data on their gender strategy, including pay equity, women in leadership roles, and options for flexible work. Now, Novatti’s HR can go straight to Bob and find the data they need in a few clicks, saving them time and effort.
As part of their preparation for WGEA, Novatti also added a custom field in Bob where their people can choose their preferred gender: male, female, non-binary, or prefer not to disclose. They decided to provide four options for their people, but they know that with Bob they can add more options in the future if they choose. Novatti is also in the process of adding additional fields to Bob that will help to ease their reporting for next year.
Onboarding was manual and impersonal
Before implementing Bob, Novatti onboarded their new hires manually by sending them a series of emails with forms to fill out, which was inefficient and impersonal. They wanted to find a way to automate onboarding, save time, and add a special Novatti touch.
Building a more engaging onboarding process
Using Bob, Novatti has streamlined onboarding and created a more engaging experience for their new hires. They created an onboarding workflow that includes all of the tasks for HR, such as sending out new starter docs for their Australian and international employees, any relevant police checks, and sending a personalized email to the new starter welcoming them to the team.
The onboarding workflow also includes tasks for other relevant stakeholders, such as the regional office and IT managers, and links to subscriptions specified per site.
Novatti’s HR loves to add fun memes to lighten the mood and help create a more personalized and enjoyable experience for their new starters.
The HR team also schedules all onboarding meetings for new starters as part of a task list or flow ahead of time, including 1-on-1 meetings with their manager, meeting their onboarding buddy, their 30-60-100 day plan, and reminders for probation end dates. This automation ensures that no detail is forgotten and saves heaps of time for the recruitment manager who previously had to schedule all of these meetings manually.
As part of their onboarding, Novatti also invites all new joiners to fill out their employee profile, including their address, bank details, hybrid work preferences, and emergency contact details. To get to know their people better, they’ve also included some additional fields such as their favorite holiday destination and favorite hot drink. This means that their manager can order them the coffee they like on their first day, adding a personal and thoughtful touch.
Main takeaways
- Bob’s homepage increases engagement and creates a sense of community for Novatti’s people across sites.
- Using Bob’s customizable KPI dashboards, Novatti pulls the data they need to present to their Board and prepare detailed reports.
- Novatti adds custom fields to Bob to collect additional data about their people, which they use to get to know them better, and for compliance purposes.
- Novatti uses Bob’s workflows to save time and create an engaging, fun, and personalized onboarding experience for all their new joiners.
- With HiBob’s agile implementation, Novatti went live with Core HR in just 35 days.
