hipages Group is on a mission to make home improvement effortless and efficient, simplifying the process of connecting people with tradespeople. The launch of a new product, Tradie Core, and the 2021 acquisition of a similar business in NZ, Builderscrack, have created three entities under the hipages Group brand, with its headquarters in Sydney. hipages believe that communication is essential for creating a thriving workplace. They wanted to find an HRIS to help further engage their people across sites, encourage collaboration and innovation company-wide, and provide accurate people data for reporting and analysis. They also wanted a single source of truth that could integrate with their tech stack, including Slack, Google Workplace, Confluence, and Greenhouse, to streamline their processes and avoid double data entry. After reviewing over 30 HR systems, Bob ticked all the boxes, and hipages couldn’t be happier.
Building culture and collaboration across global teams after a successful launch
When hipages was ready to launch Bob, they organized a company-wide town hall event to get everyone excited about their new HRIS. In the days before the event, they played a game where hipages’ people had to guess who ‘Bob’ was, and they told everyone that Bob would be attending the town hall. Following the launch event, 70 percent of the global team logged on and began using Bob within the first hour, and 90 percent connected within the first week. Since then, Bob has become the primary employee communication platform at hipages.
Bob’s Kudos and Shoutouts features have played a crucial role in enabling team members to share successes and positive customer experiences and get to know each other better. These features have contributed to 91 percent of hipages’ team members reporting feeling recognized and appreciated in their most recent engagement survey. The newsfeed page, work anniversaries, Kudos, and Shoutouts have become essential tools at hipages—making it easy for team members in different geographies to publicly celebrate and congratulate colleagues worldwide and stay up-to-date with the company’s latest developments. hipages even introduced the Kudos Maximus award, which recognizes the employee with the most and highest-quality Kudos every month.
Given the impact of the pandemic and subsequent increased work flexibility, hipages also required an HRIS that catered to the company’s hybrid working model. Not having everyone in the office regularly since COVID had impacted their ability to communicate across teams, and silos were developing in the business. Using Bob as a culture and engagement tool and utilizing its integration with Slack has helped hipages’ people connect wherever they are working, and this is particularly evident among the product and marketing teams, who frequently recognize their colleagues’ achievements.
Streamlining manual processes and enhancing the employee experience
hipages needed a comprehensive HR system that could automate manual processes without compromising quality, especially for onboarding new staff and producing reports for executives and the board. It also needed to serve as a single source of truth as data entry had become a significant pain point. This meant their HRIS needed to integrate with other core systems.
Providing new hires with a warm and welcoming onboarding experience was very important for hipages as this is their first impression of the company’s unique culture. Using Bob, hipages can automate many onboarding tasks, ensuring everyone receives a similar experience and that no detail is overlooked. Since they’ve started using Bob, 96 percent of new hires reported feeling welcome on their first day, with many attributing this to the warm and welcoming onboarding process.
Automating tasks such as onboarding has seen admin time cut by 30 percent. This has allowed the hipages people and culture team to focus on more strategic projects.
Another HR task that took time was creating reports for executives and the board. hipages is a data-driven business, and the people team needed to be able to turn data into insights quickly. They now use Bob to generate detailed reports for senior leaders and the board on metrics such as new hires, attrition, time to hire, quality of hire, and diversity.
These stats are essential to hipages as the company strives to be a leader in diversity in the tech space. hipages has achieved gender parity at the executive and board level, and the gender pay gap in late 2022 was only 1.9 percent, compared to the Australian average of 14 percent. The admin team used to track these metrics manually with Google Sheets, but they can now be pulled and turned into a report at the touch of a button.
Main Takeaways
- Within one hour of launching Bob, 70 percent of hipages’ global team logged on to the platform.
- Bob’s Shoutouts and Kudos features help hipages’ people feel recognized and appreciated.
- Automating HR tasks has reduced hipages’ admin time by 30 percent.
