With human resource management becoming more complicated each day, many organizations find it difficult to adapt and modernize their processes. Be it compliance, recruitment, attendance or time-tracking, there is always something new to learn for companies nowadays. The emergence of the Coronavirus pandemic made it further difficult for such organizations to keep up with the latest system.
Thankfully, organizations like Grove HR came to the rescue of such organizations, enabling them to centralize their processes, automate tasks and empower employees through technology. We are fortunate to have interviewed Mr Bao Nguyen, the General Manager of Grove HR, and learn about the company, its mission and road to success.
In Conversation with Mr. Bao Nguyen, the General Manager of Grove HR
Here’s an excerpt from the interview:
A warm welcome from SoftwareSuggest Mr. Bao Nguyen. What is your success mantra? Something you have followed personally that has helped you in your journey.
One mantra that always helped me is “Nobody is perfect – but a team can be.”
It’s a reminder for me that first of all, success – of all kinds – is always a team effort.
Second, having a team is not enough. It is about having people who are very self-aware of their strengths, blindspots, and willing to complement each other without letting their ego become a barrier to teamwork.
In general, this is very difficult to do. However, when everyone behaves based on that mantra, they achieve wonders.
That’s why I often use talk about it upfront with all my teams as well as do my best to create a culture where people live and breathe by that mantra.
How has Grove HR equipped itself to deal with the Covid-19 situation better?
Thanks to technology and software tools, collaboration was not a huge problem for us when working from home. However, the greatest concern was the team’s wellbeing, engagement, and sense of unity. So, we built a new HR model to tackle these problems.
To help everyone stay connected and engaged, we conducted various virtual bonding activities like daily morning inner peace/yoga session (also a wellness activity) + virtual break time every afternoon at 4, we sometimes shifted drinks for everybody to enjoy together at that time.
Plus, we tried our best to maintain special gatherings to the extent possible (depending on the COVID situation): company trip, year-end party, team-building, etc. For wellness activity, besides morning yoga like I said above, we also conduct a free wellness and work-life balance lesson for employee and we offered an extra allowance for employees to invest in their home office’s facilities v.
We also encouraged employees to take stress-free leave days – just to turn off their computer and spend time with their family, balancing back their work life. Lastly, and the most important thing was making sure everyone stayed empathetic to each other during these hard times. This required a lot of 1:1’s and our team leaders stayed on top of it.
Our readers are keen to know what prompted you to create Grove HR? Tell us about your journey so far.
From my experience, people are the main competitive advantage of any company. I also believe that it’s the company’s duty to take good care of its people – both in the professional and personal level.
Back in 2018, when looking at the HR technology landscape, it became clear that most software were geared towards productivity, tracking employees’ output or simply making existing procedures more digital. It is a good starting point but Grove HR was founded on the premise that it isn’t good enough anymore.
HR technology should enable the company – through its HR teams – to take good care of employees and make work more inspiring and fulfilling to them – not just digitize business processes.
Thus our vision statement: to make work inspiring and fulfilling.
Which features are most valuable in Grove HR?
Our approach is holistic – meaning that we cover the entire employee lifecycle from onboarding to offboarding. Being able to create a great employee experience from a single tool is actually where most of the value comes from, so it is difficult to single out any particular feature.
That being said, we consistently receive fantastic feedback about how easy it is to use our platform. As you can imagine, HR can become quite complex once you centralize everything in one place. We have managed to make it configurable yet easy to use.
“It’s a no brainer. If you are a small business and looking for an amazing platform to manage your employees – (Grove HR) is the best tool”
Aayush Chain – Chief Executive Officer at Greendeck
After our clients take the first step in truly digitizing their Core HR and make it available on mobile for all employees, one of the most sought after solutions is around employee engagement and employee development.
With Grove HR, our clients have a private social network that distributed employees can use to connect and engage in a peer-to-peer fashion, exchange recognition and feedback without the involvement of their direct reports and just share WFH moments that matter to them. This really helps bond people together when most employees are working remotely.
From an employee development perspective, we enable them to run 360 performance reviews that team leaders and managers can run by themselves – using their own sets of questions, timing and criteria. This is to ensure employees get the feedback they expect at a time and in the context that is the most relevant to them – not HR. HR teams can then take the role of advising and consulting on employee career development rather than focusing on the administration of the process.
Where do you see Grove HR to greater heights in the next 5 years?
By 2027 Grove HR will be the platform of choice for organizations who care about their employee experience and truly want to be an employee-centric organization. By doing so, our end goal is to make work more inspiring and fulfilling for every working professionals.
Are there any ideological principles that your organization follows to maintain the brand value?
Put employees’ wellbeing and development first and work towards alignment with your business goals.
Create a culture of openness and transparency where direct feedback is expected and valued.
Always improve.
What is your advice to young entrepreneurs?
I don’t know if I have earned the right to advise other entrepreneurs yet. But what I can share – rather than give advice on – is that making a tech startup successful in terms of developing the next generation of talents as well as achieving significant financial results is just plain hard.
Therefore, just make sure you are ready to grind day-in, day-out, improve each day and most importantly, never surrender to the pain of it all.
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