Human Resources is commonly stereotyped as that giddy, grinning department that only appears when there is a new hire or a company issue.
In the startup world, culture is high priority and the responsibility of upholding it falls squarely on a company’s HR efforts. But unlike a company's sales and marketing counterparts, HR often lacks the software solutions and resources provided to other parts of the company.
“By far the most important thing in a software company or any company in the knowledge economy today is the people,” Damir Davidovic, CEO of
and
, said. “You’ll always hear CEOs say, ‘People are the most important asset of my company.’ But then you see the disconnect when most of the HR stuff they do is around legal, administration and regulation. HR really did not focus on what it really is — marketing to the employees.”
Davidovic’s philosophy rests in the idea that the level of company transparency brought on by social media has ushered in a new age of employee engagement. While companies utilize social media for customer engagement and support, they turn their backs on the workers and the culture within their walls.
“The CEOs know everything about the customer,” Davidovic said. “They know how they behave, why and what they buy, and they get the feedback to figure out what the next product should be. They got so good at it that, as a result, CEOs now know a lot more about their customers than they do about their own employees.“
After leaving Croatia during the country's conflict in the early 1990s, Davidovic worked his way through USC were he graduated with a degree in Computer Science. He then bootstrapped his first company, NEOGOV, in 2000. The site provides human resource software for the public sector that automates hiring, onboarding and the performance evaluation process.In 2012 he started HRCloud with the goal of creating an employee engagement platform that fostered a collaborative workplace while acknowledging successes and promoting idea sharing within the company.
HRCloud provides a communication platform that can best be described an internal Facebook for companies. The platform creates chat forums for all employees, while integrating company news like hirings, events, awards, polls and birthdays. Executives can view an employee's personal page to learn more about them, see what "kudos" they have received from their peers, and track their engagement with the rest of the company.
Davidovic's search to find what motivates a human being on a daily basis can be an existentially daunting task, but Davidovic has begun to formulate his own solutions:
“At a typical, good company you have 70 percent of people under-engaged. That means they are still good workers and are doing their job but are under-engaged. Then you have about 15percent that are semi engaged — they’re doing their job but if someone called them with a better offer, they would seriously consider leaving.
Then you have 15 percent who are super-engaged — thinking about what they can contribute to make the company and people around them better. They are in the zone and time flies because they are enjoying it. And you want to take those people and have them broadcast their enjoyment because it’s intoxicating. Other people will want to feel like that too and start mimicking their behavior. The goal is to take that number from 15 percent to 18 percent. That may not seem like much, but the company that has 20 percent of super-engaged employees is the company that is going to beat everyone in the marketplace. It affects how they treat customers, it affects how they treat other employees, and it affects the quality and creativity of products.”
When a company is at an early stage, culture plays a large part in motivating the small number of employees. They most likely sit in the same room and help one another solve a wide variety of problems but, as Davidovic argues, once that company grows, people lose accountability and interest.
He sees HRCloud as that same small, boisterous office in a digital space, creating an open forum for collaboration and celebration. And while employees contribute and interact, executives can monitor and recognize the key players who are making contributions to the product and culture.
“Why are people happy at work?” asked Davidovic. “They aren’t happy because the office looks good and they have free cappuccino and ping pong. Those things help but that's not important. What’s important is the zone you get in when you’re doing the work and that has to be a combination of intellectual challenge, your skills, and learning. If you can combine those three things and see the impact of your work then you’re going to be super engaged and super happy. If you’re in a startup that doesn’t have these things and they say ‘Yay! Here’s a star for participation!’ That’s nonsense. That’s not real and that is not going to keep someone in the flow and in the zone.”
As Terence Fletcher stated in the 2014 film Whiplash, “There are no two words in the English language more harmful than ‘good job.’” But where can you draw the line in a generation of millennials that have grown up with constant reassurance?
Perhaps Davidovic has built less of an accomplishment board and more of competitive arena for the cream to truly rise to the top.
“The visibility of the people who are really pulling the cart is now out in the open," he said. "At the end of the day it’s not about the salaries people make. They want to feel valued and contribute, but they also want to feel accomplished by learning and growing in an environment where people are challenging them and inspiring them to do better and be better."
Have a tip for us or know of a company that deserves coverage? Email us via [email protected]
