Introduction
“What are you doing to make sure you’re investing your money in the right tools that meet the objectives you have for your organization and, by extension, the people who are the driving force behind its success?”
For a member of the C-suite, this is a key question that comes to mind when looking to invest in an HCM.
Ronni Zehavi, CEO of HiBob, asks further: “Which tech will you use to maximize your objectives as a CEO or member of the C-suite?
“If you’re using tech that only functions as a system of record, you’ll only track records: name, ID, payroll, ERP, clock-in and clock-out, and performance reviews. These antiquated systems can help you automate the way you collect information, but this is not how you invest in your people.”
These questions are all the more important to ask in the wake of the current employee experience recession. Massive market shifts, rising inflation, declining buying power, return-to-office mandates, the demand to do more with less, and cutbacks to workforces and people programs are all contributing to this recession, according to Forrester analysts.
The result is that employers are reducing their commitment to employee experience—at perhaps the worst possible time.
This climate has brought on a wave of disengagement and dissatisfaction, which many refer to as the Great Gloom. But as Ronni reminds us, “Your people have always been critical for business success. What has changed?”
Nurturing your people and putting them first is becoming more complex in a rapidly changing world that brings with it new workforce challenges that impact our day-to-day:
- A multi-generational workforce
- The demand for flexibility
- An influx of revolutionary technologies
The way to overcome these challenges, succeed, and stand out is to embrace digital transformation—leveraging technology that puts your people and the employee experience first.
This guide discusses how an HCM like Bob empowers everyone in modern organizations, including the C-suite, to reach company goals and ensure long-term business success.
How Bob empowers your C-suite
What makes a company successful? What ensures it thrives in the long term?
These are the questions that consulting firm McKinsey answered in Organizing for the future: Nine keys to becoming a future-ready company.
The keys to success, according to McKinsey, are nine global organizational imperatives centered around three key themes, each of which interacts with HR:
- Identity: who we are
- Agility: how we operate
- Scalability: how we grow
While these key themes and the nine organizational imperatives constitute the foundations of long-term success, short-term business needs change constantly. The top four priorities for today’s C-suite leaders to achieve success and drive these imperatives forward are:
- Decision-making
- Team structure (reorganization)
- Skills and abilities
- Engagement and a sense of purpose
To implement these, organizations need the assistance of advanced HR technology solutions. HR tech for the C-suite, like Bob, provides essential tools for business decision-makers who want to move their organizations forward in any market climate.
Because when it comes to making the right decisions to steer your organization toward success, having access to accurate data is essential. “Data, analytics, numbers, stats—those things are so important because they help you to make data-driven decisions… [C-suite leaders] could look at things like how are they doing with their OKRs? How did their team perform in their performance reviews? What is the turnover like?” says Christine Song, CPO at Knix.
Using HR tech like Bob to harness the power of data in top-level decision-making can make all the difference.
“Bob is in everything we do,” says Nirit Peled-Muntz, CPO of HiBob. “Our entire C-suite and other managers use Bob in a democratic and holistic way.”
Bob drives the business to succeed with tools everyone in the organization can use, from the C-suite to middle managers and individual contributors.
Let’s take a closer look at how Bob supports data-driven decision-making, effective team organization, and skills development, and helps foster engagement and a sense of purpose.
1. Make better decisions with Bob
The essence of better decision-making is putting your people first.
By doing so, your organization will reap the rewards in terms of productivity, engagement, and profitability.
With the arrival of multi-generational workforces and differing expectations, it can be difficult to address engagement, prevent burnout, boost productivity, make space for flexibility, and promote DEI&B.
The answer to meeting these people-first goals lies in people-first HR tech.
After all, your people drive your business forward. The right tech will help you manage your workforce effectively and ensure your decisions bring out the best in everyone.
Bob’s robust people-first platform provides customizable decision-making tools and seamlessly integrates with your existing HR tools (or replaces them with built-in features). This allows businesses to reduce spending and increase workforce efficiency simultaneously.
And because different modules are all connected on one platform, it means you can easily draw insights from a module like Performance Management to another like Compensation Management.
It’s what gives you the bigger picture and access to deeper insights to inform your decision-making.
“[Bob’s] analytics features have also been amazing—this has been the most impactful in terms of how we draw insights from our people data to now be even more strategic and proactive in our decision-making,” says Christine Luo, People Experience Specialist at Airtasker.
People Analytics
Bob’s People Analytics allows you to uncover hidden insights about your people, their satisfaction, engagement, and productivity at every site across your global business. Examine trends and get a comprehensive understanding of what’s happening in your company—from the big picture to the finest details—to inform your strategy.
As Nirit Peled-Muntz says: “Bob can help us correlate issues that don’t look completely related—like retention rates combined with low survey participation rates.”
People Analytics gives you a wide range of data that can help you identify challenges and discover their solutions, all in one place—eliminating data silos from multiple point solutions. Anyone in the C-suite can capitalize on hard data to gain buy-in for initiatives they want to implement from other key stakeholders. This kind of data gives you clarity on how to address your people’s needs and helps you measure the business impact of doing so, giving you a strong case to influence the company’s direction.
Performance Management
Gain insights into how your people are performing and identify trends per site, per team, or throughout the organization with Bob’s Performance Management. It helps you measure workforce performance, identify top performers, assess where to invest next, or decide where to cut back.
Bob allows you to set goals for individuals, teams, departments, or the whole company. You can track progress toward these goals as part of the performance review process to ensure initiatives are steering your organization in the right direction.
Bob centralizes all of your people data and helps you draw connections between performance data and other relevant data points to extract insights that can help you make the most effective people-first decisions.
With these insights, you can understand how best to invest in things like learning and development programs and assess whether a reorganization is necessary—and get clarity on how to implement it.
Surveys
Listening to your people can give you invaluable insights to support your decision-making.
By running surveys, you can keep your finger on the pulse of your workforce, helping you pre-empt challenges like reduced engagement and assess the effectiveness of any people initiatives you put in place.
Get a clear indication of how your people are feeling with Bob Surveys. With them, you can track basic engagement and identify region-specific action items.
Create surveys in Bob using templates or make your own. Bob’s customizability also lets you include open-ended questions in your surveys that give your people space to voice concerns you may not have thought about.
People’s responses to open-ended questions can give you invaluable insights into employee sentiment as well as the most pressing issues. These insights can help you make data-driven business and policy decisions that resonate positively with your people.
“We realized that we need to speak to our people to get their insights, including running surveys,” says Glyn Blaize, Chief Operations Officer at Amdaris, “as people don’t always like to speak up. Bob has the tools that enable us to do that.”
Workforce Planning
Your people are your most important, and one of the most costly, investments. Get a clearer picture of your investment and assess the costs of reorganizing a team and scaling your organization with Bob’s Workforce Planning, so you can make the right decisions.
Bob’s Workforce Planning allows you to prepare for the future with the ability to plan an increase (or decrease) in headcount, manage budgets, and outline a blueprint for succession.
It connects with the platform’s Hiring module, too, giving you all the data and tools you need to plan and track your organization’s growth in one place.
“Having all that data in a centralized place helps the people team re-evaluate and actually work with the management team around what their true needs are, and then we have the ability to build that scope into the budget,” says Carol Fairlie, HRIS Analyst at Games Global.
Hiring
Having the right tech for hiring is paramount, especially in today’s world of talent and skills shortages. With the right tech, you’ll be able to forecast the needs of your organization and give yourself the time to find the right talent to fulfill those needs—and get an accurate view of the costs of your organization’s growth.
As an all-in-one HCM and recruiting platform, Bob unifies people data from acquisition to retirement, giving you a clearer picture of your hiring needs.
Bob Hiring provides businesses with all the tools they need to make informed hiring decisions, manage the recruitment process, market open positions, create an exceptional candidate experience, and build an effective recruitment strategy—so you can attract and retain the best talent.
It also connects with the Workforce Planning module, giving you greater clarity by unifying your people processes across the entire employee lifecycle—and beyond.
Compensation Management
Compensation management can be difficult to navigate, but with all your people data in Bob, it’s a lot easier to make the right decisions.
“There’s a strong consensus that in every modern business, employees are the number-one asset,” Ronni Zehavi says. “But even more than that, between 60 and 70 percent of most modern companies’ monthly spend is on salaries, compensation, and employee wellbeing.”
The amount of investment modern companies pour into their people highlights how important good compensation management really is. Because when you invest in your people and their wellbeing, you’re contributing to better outcomes for your business.
Bob’s Compensation Management gives you a suite of tools that help you make data-driven and intelligent compensation decisions: Compensation bands and setting internal benchmarks provide the foundation for building wider strategies and long-term compensation plans.
You can also easily assess performance data, tenure, flight risk, and compensation history. Even more importantly, Bob Compensation Management helps you stay compliant with local compensation laws and regulations. It gives you the data you need to track pay gaps so you can ensure pay parity and local compliance.
“I’m sure that we saved a week of work running compensation in Bob. This leaves us more time to focus on talent development and help our people managers grow and develop their teams,” says Roza Tapini, Head of People Operations at Skroutz.
Time and Attendance
Managing time and attendance can be a constant challenge, especially when navigating compliance and ensuring the productivity of your people.
With Bob Time and Attendance, you can track attendance rates and absenteeism—helping you assess the impact on your workforce’s productivity and allowing you to glean insights into potential organizational issues that could be behind the rates.
Time Off helps you stay compliant with regional time-off laws, protecting you from legal headaches, and it makes it easy to assign bulk time-off policies for different levels, sites, and teams.
2. Reorganize for success with Bob
C-suite leaders know that reorganizing businesses is often necessary, especially in today’s tumultuous economic climate. The prospect of a reorganization alone can be daunting, and successfully executing it becomes more difficult the larger your organization is.
Bob’s platform and suite of tools can make everything a lot easier.
The Org Chart in Bob visualizes the relationships between your people, teams, and departments. You can customize the chart using multiple layers of data, too, helping you understand when a reorg might be necessary and how to implement it.
Reorgs often require workforce planning and position management, which is where Bob’s Position Management feature comes in handy—it’s where you can add, view, or edit open positions within your company and create hiring plans for your recruitment team.
A successful reorg requires a solid understanding of people’s roles and how they connect to each other when it comes to executing tasks and delivering value to the organization. Bob’s People Directory can help you deepen this understanding by showing you who’s who and how they relate to other roles within the company.
You can also learn more about an individual with the Employee Timeline, which tells you about their journey within the company, last salary update, tenure, and flight risk.
These tools can give you a clearer idea of who to consider for a promotion or lateral move and what teams’ work overlaps, helping you put together a successful reorg strategy that addresses the needs of your organization.
3. Unlock your people’s skills and talent with Bob
Accelerating organizational learning is one key to preparing your business and its people for the future.
Bob excels at helping business decision-makers identify people’s skills and abilities—tapped and untapped—so you can make the most of their talents. Assess who you can upskill in your existing teams to meet the changing needs of your business, so your organization maintains an agile workforce.
Amanda Edwall, Chief People Officer at Anyfin, says, “You always need to be one step ahead of the rest of the business. Where do we need to be in a year from now? Are we developing the right skills today for tomorrow, or are we promoting the right behaviors today for tomorrow, not for a year ago? That’s not relevant anymore. That’s what it’s all about. Bob helps us to do that. It really helps.”
You can also create a solid plan for your people’s individual development by using Bob Talent to set actionable goals and track progress.
One-on-ones are also important in this kind of development. They nurture your workforce’s skills and talent and ensure continued engagement for better business performance. Managers who have regular meetings with their team members can ensure expectations align, set goals, and plan career development, empowering their people to grow and succeed in their roles.
Bob’s 1-on-1s feature allows managers to set recurring meetings that sync with their calendars, so they don’t have to worry about maintaining consistency. It also gives managers customizable templates to direct these meetings for greater ease.
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4. Boost engagement and instill a sense of purpose with Bob
Businesses now face the challenge of engaging four to five different generations in the workplace—each with different expectations.
Ensuring the engagement of all these generations within your organization and instilling a sense of purpose within them affects how they perform in their work—which has a direct impact on business outcomes.
The challenge is that each generation defines the border between work and life differently. Each has different attitudes, values, and beliefs about their life and work.
So how do you find the common denominator that fits them all?
The answer lies in flexibility.
When your organization is flexible, things become a lot easier. Give your people flexible working hours and the choice to work from home when they need to, for example.
Having that flexibility can make all the difference to your people’s happiness, leading to a more engaged and productive workforce with higher retention rates.
But to be flexible, it’s important to put systems and initiatives in place that ensure your people’s productivity, engagement, and wellbeing, however they prefer to work.
Integral to this is showing appreciation for an individual’s hard work. However, this can slip through the cracks in an organization that promotes hybrid work.
That’s where Bob’s Shoutouts and Kudos features come in handy.
With Shoutouts and Kudos, managers can share their appreciation for a person’s efforts and hard work with the rest of the company. A Kudos registers on an individual’s Employee Timeline which can help the HR team identify high performers to reward and promote. On the other hand, a lack of Kudos and Shoutouts on the timelines of members of specific teams or departments can help identify areas for improving employee recognition and manager empowerment.
Recognizing the efforts of your people with Kudos and Shoutouts boosts engagement and instills a sense of purpose around their work, making it much more likely that they’ll be more productive, stay with the organization for a longer time, and ultimately contribute to your company’s success.
To ensure organizations engage all the different generations in the workplace and meet their needs, it’s all the more important for managers to have regular one-on-ones with their team members.
This drives continuous improvement for organizational resilience and ensures managers are communicating effectively with their teams.
You can track how often managers share Kudos or do Shoutouts about their team members and communicate with them, so you can ensure that they are managing their teams proactively.
Building a sense of purpose, engagement, and trust in an organization requires strong relationships between teams and individuals. This is where Bob’s Clubs feature can prove useful, showcasing the personal interests of individuals within the organization.
This can help team members connect with others who share similar interests and break the ice at meetings, forging stronger relationships and greater engagement within the organization—reducing expensive turnover costs since there’ll be longer tenure and improving overall performance for better business outcomes.
“When we launched Bob, everyone went in and started filling out the About Me section. People started looking at each other’s profiles and going, ‘Oh, wow, this person is interested in cooking. I’m also interested in cooking.’ We now have a crochet club in the organization. And so this helped create that engagement we were looking for,” says Knix’s Chief People Officer, Christine Song.
The heart of organizational success
People are at the heart of long-term organizational success.
That means it’s important for organizations to set goals that put their people first in order to thrive in the future—and people-first tech is essential to meet those goals.
But this kind of change starts at the top, with the C-suite leading by example.
With people-first tech like Bob empowering them, C-suite executives can improve decision-making, optimize organizational structures, nurture talent, and promote engagement with a sense of purpose.
As we’ve seen, successfully implementing this kind of change, especially in larger organizations, requires the full participation of managers—since they are the agents of change.
Without convincing managers to promote a people-first vision and strategy, enacting change will prove more difficult—which is why it’s all the more important for the C-suite to back their vision with HR tech that tracks the benefits of people-first initiatives.
HR tech like Bob provides the hard data company leadership needs to intelligently set goals, track progress, and get everyone across the company on the same page, focused on the same goals, aligned to the same vision, and set up for long-term success.