Employee Experts: An Employee's Best Friend
Every company talks about customer centricity, and how important it is for clients to have a great experience with the brand. There is abundant conversation on why it is critical for companies to provide seamless service to customers, ensuring that the experience a customer has with the brand is flawless, leading to retention. However, many organisations tend to forget who is vital to creating these customer experiences – the employees. And keeping this asset positively engaged and excited is no easy task.
Earlier, nobody cared about the employee experience as all of the power was in the hands of the employers. Companies have now begun to realise that employees, present and potential, are key assets – empowering them and motivating them has become mainstream conversation. The war for talent has placed importance in creating a workplace where employees want to work. And this led to the conceiving of Employee Experts.
We always knew we would be entrepreneurs one day; we were not made for the corporate rat race. And we knew our venture would be something to do with people. My husband and I have both worked with large organisations; and we understood employees’ challenges. There was a huge opportunity. My husband Srini was based in Mumbai and there came a time in 2010 where he was looking to move back to Bangalore. At this time, I had also decided to move on from my current engagement with Infosys.
It was just appropriate as we started doing what we do best – build a software platform for people to manage people and their work. We had worked on many HR products throughout our career and we knew that People Management is an under-served market. We started working on the first lines of code from the corner office in our bedroom. In a couple of years, we grew to occupy a whole floor in a commercial complex. We gradually progressed, intentionally moving at a slow pace. Being self-funded was a good enough reason, but we also wanted to take our time to build a scalable and complete product that will help companies globally to address employee challenges. More importantly we are tackling HR and employee operations in a different way that suits the modern, diverse and digitally advanced workforce much better than traditional ERPs. We wanted to ensure that this takes the right form and shape. So, after almost five years of building and refining, we are ready to go out and talk about what we have been brewing in our backyard.
Traditional HR ERP players focus on HR Admin function with little or no attention given to the employee usage and normally do not address any of the operation issues. This results in a fragmented IT eco system at organisations that create unfriendly digital experience for all Employees. At Employee Experts, we have redefined the way enterprise operations are centred on Employee – with complete focus on enhancing Employee Experience in all his/her enterprise touch points. It’s a singular platform that covers information, intelligence, operations, service, engagement, collaboration aspects of employees.
Our approach is centred on the Employee and how an employee sees the various processes he or she needs to be a part of, be it performance management, learning, attendance or managing a team. This view is often obliterated in the traditional department based view where an end to end process is split it into disparate parts lying with different teams. So organisations usually have employees following up with multiple teams to track and complete a process. Our approach is collaboration based and singular, delivering the entire process in a single touch to the employee thus making the experience seamless and simple.
It has been an inspiring journey, but definitely not an easy one. For starters, we are an enterprise product company and are not into e-commerce. We are self- funded, extremely cost conscious and strive to put every penny to good use. We have a high performing team we are immensely proud of who are from small towns but with big dreams.
Right now we are about 32 employee size company supporting clients including global Fortune 500 ones and also the new Internet technology companies. We are becoming the default people operations platform for the new generation organisations which have much younger employee base with average age less than 25.
We just took the big step of registering our company in US and stared operations in the Middle East, a move towards becoming truly global. We find that the world is finally understanding that ‘Future of Work’ is going to be very different and a platform like ours is well suited to manage digital operations.
As organisations start realising that providing positive and transparent workplace experience to their employees who are digital natives is important, critical for their sustenance and growth – our ‘Employee Centric’ concept and platform becomes more relevant.
About Employee Experts:
It focuses on creating employee-centric platforms that facilitates data management, payroll management, better interaction and collaboration for employees. Unlike traditional ERP solutions, it doesn’t have Functional/Departmental constraints. The platform puts the employee at the center, aligning employee actions and interactions with business operational processes, thus improving employee productivity, reducing inter-departmental friction and facilitating a learning and collaborative environment for employees.
