Managing human resources across borders
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Managing human resources across borders

Fast growth businesses are always ahead of their operations and managing human resources across borders requires next generation solutions and people analytics to manage.

As a fast-growing company, FOODICS had to build its technology stack along the way, which resulted in disparate systems.

FOODICS is a cloud-based restaurant management and payments platform in MENA, with an ecosystem supporting its end-to-end digitisation and making it a pioneer in the regional food and beverage industry. Formally licensed as a Fintech company by the Saudi Central Bank, the company’s vision is to build a complete restaurant management ecosystem that enables owners to run their operations seamlessly and grow their business.

Its mission is to empower restaurant and merchant owners with a comprehensive cloud-based POS system to enrich their operations. FOODICS caters to every segment of the food and beverage sector from traditional dine-in restaurants, cafés, quick service restaurants, bakeries, food trucks through to cloud kitchens and non-food micro-retailers.

Since its inception in 2014, it has successfully processed over 6 billion orders through the platform and raised US$ 170 million in Series-C round, making it one of the most promising SaaS companies to emerge from the MENA region.

People analytics can be defined as the method of collecting and analysing organisational and people data to solve people-related business challenges.

Pain points of growth

As a fast-growing company, FOODICS had to build its technology stack along the way, which resulted in disparate systems that created complexity and inefficiencies in its operations.

The FOODICS payments platform serves a range of food and beverage segments, from dine-in restaurants and cafes, quick service restaurants, bakeries, and food trucks to cloud kitchens across MENA. Given its multi-geography operation, the company was looking for a best-in-class human resource management system platform that delivers a unified employee management view in one platform.

It was also on the lookout for a platform that provides an intuitive experience for its employees and boosts their efficiency and workplace productivity.

With FOODICS’s multi-geography operation, it was important for them to be compliant with local human resource regulations, payment processes, data restrictions, and benefits discrepancies that come along when expanding and operating in a new country.

Says Jawaher Aldhafyan, Head of People Success, Foodics, “We have had to build our technology stack along the way, which resulted in disparate systems.”

The solution

FOODICS, chose Darwinbox’s Human Resource Management Software to unify its multi-geography HR function. This offers FOODICS a holistic way to manage its human resource function spread across MENA countries, including Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Jordan, and Kuwait, replacing several disparate apps.

Investing in technology to manage talent and realise superior business outcomes has become inevitable for organisational success.

Darwinbox’s end-to-end human resource suite offers an array of services to FOODICS, across the employee lifecycle. These include a flexible HR Core that enables FOODICS to adapt to new realities smarter and faster. Custom no-code workflows efficiently automate critical processes with necessary checks in place.

Darwinbox’s Recruitment modules help build a rich pipeline of top candidates, and the Onboarding module ensures a digitally seamless onboarding experience that significantly shortens the time to productivity.

Mobile-first employee experience empowers employees with self-service. Performance Management on Darwinbox equips people leaders at FOODICS to develop and engage top talent, make informed decisions, foster a growth culture, and build powerful teams that achieve results. FOODICS also leverages expense management, compensation, and payroll processing on Darwinbox across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordon, Egypt, and Kuwait.

Analytics and MIS reporting on Darwinbox contextualises data to support business outcomes so the FOODICS teams can identify risks, uncover trends, recognise opportunities, and gain clarity.

Darwinbox provides FOODICS with a unified and end-to-end HR management system that is highly localised to solve for local nuances. Through automation and AI-backed features, Darwinbox also helps free up valuable human resource bandwidth that can be focused on aligning human resource to business needs, thereby enabling deeper business impact.

With FOODICS’s multi-geography operation, it was important for operations to be compliant with local human resource regulations, payment processes, data restrictions, and benefits discrepancies that come along when expanding and operating in a new country.

People analytics

People analytics is an emerging discipline that is establishing itself as the go-to tool for business leaders to solve complex business problems. People analytics can be defined as the method of collecting and analysing organisational and people data to gain insights and solve people-related business challenges.

The use cases for people analytics include improving employee productivity, identifying, and closing skill gaps, recalibrating hiring strategies, and optimising the overall organisational strategy, among others.

It is no secret that replacing a skilled employee is a significantly difficult task. In such a scenario, employee turnover goes from being a human resource issue into a critical business issue. People analytics can predict and help avoid such crises.

With FOODICS’s multi-geography operation, it was important for operations to be compliant with local human resource regulations, payment processes, data restrictions.

The cost of replacing a skilled employee, estimated to be around 30% to 400% of their annual salary, added up to quite a significant expense for IBM. IBM turned to people analytics and artificial intelligence. The machine learning algorithm was updated with existing employee data, including job tenure, commute time, overtime, time taken between promotions, peer promotion, etc.

By 2019, IBM’s artificial intelligence algorithm could predict which of their workers were most likely to quit the organisation with a remarkable 95% accuracy. This data helped IBM revamp its talent management strategy, address its employee turnover rate, and put a well-thought-out hiring plan in place. IBM ended up saving approximately $300 million in retention costs, according to former CEO, Ginni Rometty.

HR analytics refers to the process of measuring metrics that fall exclusively within the domain of Human Resources. Unlike HR analytics, the scope of people analytics transcends the HR department to include data from teams such as marketing, sales, customer service, and finance, among others.

People analytics can help organisations identify recurring patterns in employee behaviour, determine areas of improvement, and make a coherent and sustainable evidence-backed plan of action to improve organisational performance. People analytics can also be invaluable during times of economic uncertainty. Whether it is hiring during a tight labour market or working through an organisational restructuring, people analytics can help you make the right decisions and help your business emerge stronger. Here are the early steps.

Step 1

If your organisation uses multiple systems to manage various functions, it is advisable to unify all the data including financial data, business data, people data, to create a single source of truth. While this may appear daunting, modern HCMs like Darwinbox can seamlessly integrate business and people data from disparate sources in a central data lab.

This data lab makes the collected data analysis-ready and creates an extensible data analytical model for your business. The data can be

integrated into the central data lab through pre-built connectors, open APls, or imported port options into a purpose-built central data lab.

Step 2

One of the most important steps in creating an effective people analytics strategy is asking the right questions and defining the objectives. Gather inputs from stakeholders to identify the pain points, set SMART, Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound goals and define the right metrics and proceed. It is advisable to focus on a single objective at a time for better results.

Step 3

Data democratisation is about expanding access to data and analytics beyond HR professionals and specialists. When everyone, including heads of departments, line managers and even employees themselves can access actionable data, they can make better business decisions every day, which, in turn, can be hugely beneficial for the organisation.

A good example of data democratisation can be seen in Darwinbox Atlas, which can not only enable you to generate contextual and easy-to­ understand reports through its Report Builder but also lets you view and act upon these actionable insights via Power Bl dashboards.

Step 4

Data contextualisation and personalisation is about providing the right data to the right person. Persona-based dashboards like the ones available in Darwinbox Atlas can be personalised as per the role and can provide scope-specific insights, adoption metrics, reminders, and smart suggestions which can empower managers to make the right decisions backed by analytics.

 

Step 5

While collecting and analysing the data is important, you will also want to make this data consumable and more importantly, actionable for the audience. For example, Darwinbox Atlas makes use of smart summaries that transform data into accessible insights with clear narratives written in everyday language. Meanwhile, the built in Al-based smart nudges ask you to take immediate action for relevant scenarios.

The discipline of people analytics continues to be in the spotlight. In fact a study by HR expert Josh Bersin indicates that as many as 69% of companies are in the process of building a people analytics database. Just to put this in perspective, in similar surveys conducted previously the number used to be around 10-15%. This is an almost 4-fold jump.

Benefits and gains

With Darwinbox’s intuitive system, FOODICS is now able to address these local intricacies with ease. As their human resource technology partner, Darwinbox provides their employees with an easy and optimised mobile-first experience in multiple languages, including Arabic.

“With Darwinbox’s intuitive system, we are now able to address these local intricacies,” adds Aldhafyan.

“Investing in technology to manage talent and realise superior business outcomes has become inevitable for organisational success. We continue to focus on building products that prioritise local compliance and context,” says Chaitanya Peddi, Co-founder of Darwinbox.

Darwinbox is focused on making digital transformation seamless for its customers and therefore offers modules such as employee lifecycle management, custom workflows, recruitment and onboarding, performance management, expense management, compensation as well as payroll processing across various geographies.

June 16, 2023

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