Jahnavi– What are the foremost HR needs, which should be focused on the most by any of the companies in general?
Haresh– If I talk about current scenario, and which is like post pandemic, like a hybrid scenario today, where people have hired people across, you can say, different cities and stuff, One is adopting to the new hybrid way of working. That’s partially people from office and partially people being available, maybe in any different city. Because resources were hired based on what the skills were required irrespective of the city they were in So, that hybrid working is one thing which would involve a lot of policy changes when we talk about people in the company. That’s one. Second, during, you can say, COVID, because people were not present in office and stuff, so the other part which was missing was a lot of teamwork and gap in actually understanding the right skills are required for the solutions, depending on the business. It’s a product company, it’s a solution company, it’s a service company. Your online training and being physically around shadowing and getting help and being along with team, there’s always a big gap. So, that gap, which I feel in skill, is a very important thing which now companies would have to adopt where that gap needs to be fulfilled. That could be with a lot of personalized training, getting organized or maybe online platforms. But, yes, understanding the gaps. A lot of things were managed, but now when people are coming back to normal life, their expectations are the things that were pre -COVID. So, that gap in skill is a very big part, according to me. So, one is that training is another part.
Training is going to play a very, very important role. Training in terms of, you can even say, people have not got a chance to interact with people physically. So, soft skill trainings and stuff and how to deal with people. Those things, because everyone had accepted or adopted some other way of doing things. So, that part of training is also going to be equally important other than the technical training only if we talk about the business training that one is doing. Because of less of interaction with human interaction,
I could say, online has been a very different way. And hiring. Hiring were done based on what the requirements were, not always considering what were the pre -COVID policies of the company and the necessities to make sure that the hire are happening right. So, these top four areas are there. There are more areas also when you talk about this is, how do you engage in such kind of scenario in hybrid and stuff. But since you asked me, these are top four areas which come to my mind when you’re asking me these things.
Jahnavi– How has the adaptation of the various new -age technologies which are driven by artificial intelligence, big data and cloud technology been like for Beehive and which according to you has benefited the most for the company?
Haresh– The cloud has been a very big change. That gives you access to even the growing companies and the smaller companies, not only in the metro, but also in the tier -2, tier -3 cities where people are able to afford software because it’s on OPEC small.
That gives them enabling to the new -age platforms where first only the bigger companies used to you. Now today, in a smaller company, can get access in platform for the employees. They can have that kind of automation for the employees, transparency in the system. At the same time, the pockets are not pinched very high because cloud enables you to reach masses and at a very low cost.
So, that’s something which is there. Though there are advantages and disadvantages, but at least you can say people will get a chance to automate 70 % of their work completely on cloud rather than being into manual processes, manual data maintaining and all that stuff. So, once this is there, any other technology, the first two that you mentioned, AI and big data, are names only and they can work only if there is good amount of data to be churning out to give the right output.
So, if the technologies are adapted, if people are able to use the software and only if they use the software, they will have that data in the system which the AI and big data can help them churn out the reports for their business -wise or their employee -wise, anything that they want to do. Only then those things going to be helped. There is no data and you’re doing things manually; all other things go for a toss.
So, cloud is playing the utmost important role. It’s helping to reach into almost places where we wouldn’t have thought of tier 3 cities also, where people would adopt software, or we would be traveling there to sell them those web -based software and stuff. But yes, because you see a lot of startups and stuff coming out and business ideas coming out from these smaller cities, so they are also adapting these things to make sure that they are giving those kinds of culture to people.
So, because being in COVID, what happened is tier 2, tier 3, wherever you are, you’re getting opportunity to work in good companies. So, those things as an advantage were even taken by tier 2 and tier 3 cities for cloud. So, that’s one very important thing. AI -based, yes, AI and big data only helps you when you have data in the system. But AI -wise, if you say in few areas where employee, if you consider from our perspective from the pattern of employee behaviour, that will come in. Or the recruitment that you’re doing, your past recruitments, how they’ve fared with respect to that, churning out on that, based on how you should improve your hiring on that. So, AI could help you into those things, into understanding with the data that has happened in the past, you remove some data, how it could help you do that. And also helping you match your criteria for a hire. Similarly, if you have good data in your place, when you run performance management year on year, you know the people who are there, whom you can look at promoting them or escalating them at the next level and trying to do these things. So, those things help you a lot when actually you use these data for understanding into how your actual goals were and what people have performed over a period of years. And that data you can take and analyse when the coming year is coming, what kind of succession planning you could do for certain people, or you could do for people whom you want at senior level from your existing, how many people you could upgrade and take them to the next level. always thought that AI is the one which will be more beneficial than any other after obviously looking at chat.
So, if you talk about AI, AI requires a lot of data. Really a lot of data to give you the good… These are finally what AI is going to give you only a perception of based on the data collected. If your data is not correct or not accurate, those are probabilities that it will throw you. So, you really need a lot of data to turn the right AI information. Otherwise, being just having a buzzword, yes, it helps you.
And good reports that you can say that come out and yes, gives you some intelligence to try to do. But if you want to run the right AI and automation on that, yes, you need a lot of data. But cloud is enabling to make that happen.
Jahnavi– What are the major points which focuses on to the growth of the business and how do you manage to form this entire growth plan for Beehive?
Haresh– For the company, it’s growth strategies. Okay, so growth strategy now, I’ll tell you something that we keep done. Since we experienced tier 2, tier 3 experience and it was really good, so we have enabled and we are putting a trust on a strong partner network.
So, what is happening is we have a good network now which we just formed and we are going in through that channel where we are trying to reach out to customers of partners, like system integrators who would be selling any kind of an IT solution to their customers. We are channelizing our product through them, which is firstly giving us a chance to reach the level. We’ve gone to levels like Ranchi and all also inside and sold systems through partners. Being here directly was not possible. So, that is one area where we are trying to leverage that partner network and it’s really paying off for us where we are trying to make sure not only metros, tier 2, tier 3 cities, we are coming out with good schemes and most important is we are trying to make sure that we give them the entire back -end support, the entire support, whether it is pre -sale support, post -sale support and obviously after sales implementation is totally we take care because we don’t expect them to have the knowledge of the domain on that. So, we are investing hugely on that front at our end and the partners end. This is one area which is making us reach good geographies where we wouldn’t have directly been able to reach.
No matter today you talk about digital, all these things, everyone invests into all those kinds of social media and digital platforms. But finally when you reach out to tier 2 and tier 3 cities, there is a lot of personal touch they require over there when you talk about giving on cloud and stuff. So, enabling through partners is making us go and reach into those points to people where they are opening up things for us and then we showcase things and then gain their trust and that’s how it’s paying us.
And that’s one of the growth plans in which we are doing. Second, to make this successful further, investing in technology at our end so that this becomes more simpler even for partners to drive it at the stage number 1 and 2 and then take our help at stage maybe 2 or 3, not at the first beginning stage. Some partners would be able to manage only at stage 1 of the initial primary presence.
Some who have some good amount of technical people or they have good presence or some good team size, they might take one or two level further of showcasing the product and stuff and also enabling. So, we are also trying to build source of income for partners on that if they are trying to do that and again if they want to go forward and start implementing, we are investing in technology to make it kind of a model at lot of ends where they would be able to drive it and even support customers at the primary end so that they can be the first point of contact for the customers.
This also adds to their business income for which it was not there for them. So, that will help us also, that will help them also. That’s the major focus for this year.
Jahnavi– How does the VHRM software enable businesses to benefit from their power of human energy?
Haresh– So, what are we doing so that it can help others to do that? One is, the platform that we built today, what we are trying to do is having a single platform. Pre -COVID, there are very few companies who actually offer cross -platform with a lot of offerings together in that. So, previously, it was like for attendance, you would have one diamond machine kind of a system. In April, they used to run on another system. Maybe performance is happening on somewhere else and recruitment is happening in some other software. Depending on the size of company, that’s how it used to work. And like you can say, bigger companies would afford bigger software’s across platforms. They invested. Smaller SMEs, everyone could not afford. So, they used to take what is required for the need of HR and then have it enabled with the other guys. And then removing data, exchanging data that was happening.
So, when we started doing this itself, we kept this in mind that we are going to have an entire broad HRM platform, not a payroll platform. A single web -based platform which can make use from your hiring till your retiring. So, anything that has got to do with an employee within an organization, within a life cycle of an employee, we are going to make sure we give everything on a single platform. So, even if a person is wanting to use a time -attendance machine, the entire data from that would get pulled into this system out here.
All the other policies, everything at the front end. So, those people use the system for one is time -attendance, second is access control. So, we would want it to be like an access and this all data coming in that help to process the payroll accordingly. Your performance management happening within the company in the same platform. Your recruitment happening. So, everything is connected. The moment you are doing a recruitment process for a candidate, the entire onboarding process is online.
Then the candidate can do it post joining the entire offer letter, appointment letter, everything, the documentation that you want are maintained online. And then the… Then the payroll, the employee gets to get the pay slips up to the form 16 of taxation and calculations of what is there. And then the day -to -day talk of what they do on the other than their performances, which are managed grievances if they have it in the system to manage grievances within an organization, sort of an health test that one would want to do. So, considering all of these things, it’s a single unified platform where it can enable companies to manage all information for all different things and different departments at one place. Going forward this year, what we’ve invested and further investing this year is purely on employee engagement modules. So, when I talk about that like important recognition, you know, continuous feedback of an employee, generally what you do is you do it at the end of the year. So, instead of the end of the year, if you continuously have that feedback given whether it is a good thing or a memo or an appreciation or a badge given to an employee or a reward given, everything can be done during the time that is happening and that can get recorded in the system. And then the time comes in during performance, you can actually have a review of all that what was done during and actually do that thing. Then once the performance is done, finding the training need analysis of an employee where the employee is lacking, putting, pulling that data out and accordingly HR organizing trainings for that. So, it’s entirely integrated things and actually if you look at employee engagement activities, there is a clash to even privacy when you talk about some, you need to be very careful when you’re doing engagement activities, you’re trying to know about personal health, mental health, lot of things about employee. Some companies find it, you know, offending as personal information, some don’t depending on the culture of this thing, but based on this, but whatever can be avoided keeping the personal conflict aside. If you get that information can help you to know how much an employee would be committed towards your organization and how much he can help you or what is the level you could put invest into resources by training these employees to take them to the next level. So, these are alot of things which are going to be very useful and this is where our focus is and where we are trying to do is other than the day to day work, even like things like an employee going on travel and reimbursing those travel expenses, those are also online. So, everything you have mobile app also you can when you’re doing that, you can do all of things possible on that. You can talk about digitalization of an entire employee activity within an organization. So, obviously for employee also any kind of a turnaround transparency is just open. It’s completely transparent of what is happening. So, no more paperwork going here, there, room to go, where to go, employee knows where it’s going for approval, whom it’s going, where is it lying pending, whether it’s got approved, it’s not got. So, they don’t have to go back and ask write mails and all that stuff. So, all of this obviously is going to increase productivity of an employee also. We’re going to see a lot of paperwork and time wastage into processes and stuff. So, all these are going to really help companies. So, that’s where our USP and that’s where we are building and taking the platform ahead. That’s what we’re doing.
