ZeroNorth is dedicated to making global trade green. A spin-off of the shipping company Maersk and based in Copenhagen, ZeroNorth is a global company with employees working from 11 countries, from Athens to Singapore. Founded in 2020, ZeroNorth has experienced exponential growth in three years—including several M&As and opening new legal entities—doubling its headcount in the past year. ZeroNorth was using a well-known European-based HCM to manage their people but found that it was neither customizable nor intuitive and couldn’t support their growing needs. Amalie Lange, ZeroNorth’s VP of People Operations, recognized these issues and advocated for replacing their HCM on her first day working at ZeroNorth. After mapping out her requirements, researching platforms for medium-sized companies, and participating in countless demos, she knew that Bob was the platform they needed. She learned everything she could about Bob and built a strong business case, which she presented to the company’s C-Suite. They haven’t looked back.
Preparing for a seamless implementation and problem-free launch
ZeroNorth wanted to get up and running with Bob within the fastest possible timeframe but had limited internal resources for overseeing the process. So, they chose one of HiBob’s strategic partners, VENZO_people, to manage their Bob implementation. Working with an implementation partner gave ZeroNorth an unparalleled implementation experience with a dedicated consultant who came to their Copenhagen office and a customized plan for implementing Bob. A close collaboration between ZeroNorth, VENZO_people, and HiBob led to a seamless implementation, and ZeroNorth continues to receive support as they roll out new features.
When ZeroNorth was ready to launch Bob to its global workforce, they set up demos and workshops and created lots of excitement around the launch. Even without training, they saw that people were using Bob independently, including organically viewing the Org Chart and employee directory.
As they’ve begun rolling out new processes, ZeroNorth has made good use of Bob’s Sandbox. Bob’s Sandbox enables ZeroNorth’s people team to build new processes in a testing environment and, only once they are happy that everything is working well, launch them company-wide. Amalie loves the Sandbox and uses it weekly. She said, “I’m a huge advocate and would never want to have an HR platform without Sandbox. Because for us, that means that we’re able to test functionality quite thoroughly before putting it into production so we can ensure that everything works correctly from day one.”
Providing a consistent global employee experience
As a global company with offices in 11 different countries, ZeroNorth must ensure that the people in all locations are well-supported. One of the biggest problems they had with their previous HCM was that it wasn’t customizable and, among other issues, couldn’t support time off for their Danish workers. This meant that using their previous platform, they couldn’t capture leave for any of their global employees.
As a global HCM, Bob is completely customizable, enabling ZeroNorth to support each of their regions, including localized time off, national holidays, and compliance. In addition to supporting their people from an operational standpoint, this also helps them to feel heard and acknowledged. Amalie explains, “The fact that we can streamline our processes globally means that people get that same experience, whether it’s one person sitting in Canada or one person in Sweden or we have three people in the Netherlands. So even though our headquarters are in Copenhagen and we have satellite offices around the world, we can support them from a regional compliance perspective and make them feel like they’re part of the culture.”
On top of this, Bob’s workflows help ZeroNorth provide their people with a consistent employee experience wherever they are. ZeroNorth has set up automated workflows for preboarding, onboarding, and offboarding that ensure no detail is overlooked and has plans to create additional workflows for employee milestones, such as birthdays, work anniversaries, and reaching the end of a probation period. This way, they can ensure that everyone, regardless of their manager or location, has the same experience, which is critical to ZeroNorth as a global company.
Main takeaways
- With limited internal resources available at ZeroNorth, HiBob’s implementation partner provided essential support.
- Using Bob’s Sandbox, ZeroNorth’s people team tests new processes before rolling them out company-wide.
- Bob’s automated workflows enable ZeroNorth to provide a consistent employee experience for their people everywhere.
- Bob’s flexibility enables ZeroNorth to support their global teams with everything they need, from time off to staying compliant.
