Supporting a global workforce: How HiBob uses Bob

At HiBob, one of our core company values is, “we do what we say.” This means that we deliver on the promises we made yesterday, we’re intentional and take pride in aligning our actions with our words, and, of course, we actively use and develop best practices for our own product, Bob.

We use Bob for the day-to-day management of our international teams throughout the employee lifecycle, from preboarding to offboarding and everything in between. As Nirit Peled Muntz, our CPO, explains, “We start from the fact that Bob is the heart of the org. Everything starts and ends with Bob. Whether it’s creating an engaging and localized onboarding experience for new hires, introducing a new policy to our global teams, coordinating volunteer days, or measuring employee insights, everything is recorded and tracked in Bob as our single source of truth.” This keeps our data accurate, increases transparency, and helps us create a consistent, collaborative, and welcoming company culture for our people everywhere.

Like most of our over 3,000 customers, we’re a multi-national organization. We have offices in New York, London, Amsterdam, Sydney, Tel Aviv, Berlin, and Lisbon. We currently employ 700+ Bobbers who work according to a hybrid working model, combining working from the office and home or fully remote from other areas around the globe. 

We may be a little biased, but we think Bob is the best platform for keeping our Bobbers engaged, simplifying the complexity of managing people, and remaining flexible and agile. With that in mind, let’s look at some ways we use Bob to support our global workforce.

Building a unified culture across a global organization

As a modern company passionate about providing our people with the best employee experience, we have a strong people and culture team made up of 30 HR professionals. Each is dedicated to a specific region and department, ensuring that everyone, wherever they are working, is well looked after and touched by the company’s warm and welcoming company culture. 

Our people and culture team creates a global strategy for the company and then tailors it to each specific market. This applies to everything—creating ways for our people to have a better work-life balance, introducing a new performance management process, and boosting engagement among our Bobbers. 

As we’ve grown—doubling our headcount over the past year—our people and culture team has refined and adjusted policies and conventions to continuously improve the people experience and build the exceptional. An excellent example of this is how we use the Bob newsfeed. This is our main communication channel for posting company announcements, new hires, celebrating employee achievements, and more. 

At HiBob, anyone can post on Bob. It is wholly democratized, which was a strategic decision for encouraging peer recognition and driving global connections. However, with our growth came more new hires starting every week, more successful projects completed, and more activities celebrated across our global sites. There was a noticeable increase in posts on Bob daily, which was becoming a little overwhelming to read through. Our people and culture team didn’t want to limit the number of people posting or who could post, so they created guidelines designed to encourage sensitivity around posting. 

These guidelines provide a framework people should consider, including whether their post is relevant for the entire company. If not, they can restrict the audience to a specific group—site, department, or another group of their choosing. This way, everyone can continue to post, which is integral to our collaborative and warm culture, while being mindful and allowing Bobbers to only see the Shoutouts and Kudos relevant to them—a win-win situation.

Automating and localizing lifecycle processes 

We love Bob’s workflows and task lists that ensure no detail is forgotten—whether it’s a birthday, filling out legal forms, or ordering equipment for a new hire. Our people and culture team has created numerous workflows that automate tasks across the employee lifecycle, easing their day-to-day responsibilities. These include workflows for onboarding, employee changes, promotions, and offboarding. Tasks differ slightly according to site to align with local procedures and requirements. 

When it comes to onboarding, we use a single strategy for creating an engaging onboarding process for our new hires. While everyone receives a similar experience, the tasks for both the new hire and the people and culture team vary slightly between sites in line with local requirements and cultural norms. 

So, while all new hires are connected to Bob and receive preboarding tasks before their starting date, the fields in their employee profile, the paperwork they have to provide, and the tasks that HR has to complete, differ slightly according to location.

In the US, for example, new hires are asked for their social security number and receive a task to submit their I-9 form, authorizing their eligibility to work. Rather than sending this sensitive doc via email, they can upload it directly to Bob, where it is saved in the employee’s docs section. US-based employees are also asked to select their ethnicity from a drop-down box in their employee profile. This information provides the data needed for reporting to the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission (EEOC) and for internal tracking of DE&I data to measure trends. 

Bobbers in the UK, on the other hand, are asked for their national insurance number. Once entered into Bob, their local HR manager receives a task to add them to Perkbox so that they can receive their benefits. 

Similarly, employees from each of our sites receive tasks that align with the requirements in their specific locales, making it easy to provide a relevant and streamlined onboarding experience.  

Introducing global policies and localizing docs

At HiBob, everything starts and ends with Bob. This also extends to introducing new global policies. Rather than using emails to announce new initiatives, we prefer to use Bob, keeping everything open, transparent, and easily tracked. 

As part of the company’s flexible working program and focus on wellbeing, our people and culture team introduced a Work from Anywhere (WFA) policy where employees can work remotely for up to two months a year from anywhere worldwide. After announcing the program on Bob, the people and culture team drew up guidelines that they made available for all in the Docs section of Bob. 

The people and culture team also created a WFA workflow that simplifies the process. Employees make the request directly from their personal profile, filling out fields regarding the dates of travel, proposed location, and other details. Once they submit the form, there are tasks for all relevant stakeholders, including the manager and people partner, for approvals and organizing a desk in a specific site when relevant. With everything tracked in Bob, the people and culture team has full visibility and receives a weekly report where they can see how many people are using the policy and who’s working from where. Having this information in Bob means they don’t need to use emails and spreadsheets, which are difficult to track and prone to error.   

We don’t just use Bob to store globally relevant docs. We use Bob to store all company docs so that they are easily accessible to our people, but we use different folders so that people only see those docs that are relevant to them. So, for example, our global docs, such as the Code of Conduct, WFA policy, and Diversity and Inclusion policy, are saved in the Company Docs section of Bob and available for all. We have also added localized folders for each site that include docs specific to them. So for the UK site, for example, there’s a dedicated folder that includes the UK Handbook, Health and Safety guidelines, and the Disciplinary and Harassment policy specific to the UK. 

Bob is our single source of truth; interacting with transparency and openness is one of our core values. However, we also want to avoid unnecessary confusion, so we manage the visibility of Bob’s docs to keep things relevant for our people.

Viewing people data on a global and local level 

In the modern world, access to real-time people data has become necessary for companies, and HiBob is no exception. Our people and culture team uses Bob’s dashboards for internal tracking and official reporting. They can view the metrics for the entire company or by site, department, or other chosen groups. 

Annie Rosencrans, our People and Culture Director for the US, has created a dashboard specific to the US, giving her the data she needs, such as headcount, growth rate, turnover rate, attrition, and headcount by ethnicity. When she needs to run reports, Bob’s flexibility allows her to easily add additional metrics to dig even deeper. She said, “the ability for me to create my own dashboard for North America means I see what I need to see and am not overwhelmed by data that isn’t relevant.”

And, if the people and culture team wants to view data concerning diversity and inclusion either globally, by site, or by department, they use Bob’s new dedicated DE&I dashboard, giving them a breakdown of the different metrics by age, ethnicity, gender, pronouns, or other groups.

Gali Cohen Nissan, People and Culture Director in the Tel Aviv office, explains how she uses data from Bob for reporting to the CEO. She said, “I provide data for the CEO on KPIs such as new hires, turnover, attrition, by site, department, and gender. We watch our DE&I metrics closely, including the number of women in managerial positions and ensuring that there’s no pay gap. Bob gives us the data we need, which is used for board meetings and other initiatives.” 

Managing working hours and time off across geographies

As a company with global offices, we tailor our policies, benefits, and processes to each location in line with local laws and requirements. Some of our sites legally require employees to record their daily working hours, such as in Germany and Israel—but this isn’t a requirement on our other sites. 

Using Bob’s Time and Attendance feature, Bobbers working from sites that need to clock in or out can do so, while those working from other locations don’t have visibility of this feature. When a manager on a site that doesn’t record working hours has to approve the hours of an employee on a site that does, our people team simply provides them with access to this feature—everything is flexible and easily configured. 

Similarly, for time off, Bobbers working from each of our sites receive different allocations as dictated by local norms and varying public and religious holidays. Using Bob’s Time Off, time off allowances are seamlessly calculated for each employee based on their site and allocation, ensuring that everything runs smoothly—no spreadsheets required. 

In addition to regular holiday allowances, each Bobber also receives four Bob Balance Days per year—a designated day at the beginning of each quarter for true R&R—no Slack or emails allowed. These extra days off are blocked off on everyone’s calendars—ensuring that no one sets any meetings—and contributes to employee wellbeing so that everyone can rest and recharge after a busy and productive period. HiBob also gives each employee two days a year to volunteer for a cause of their choice using “Bobbers supporting the community” days and an extra day off during their birthday month. We have designated these additional days as policies in Bob’s Time Off, making it easy for Bobbers to submit a request and receive full pay. 

To keep everyone in the loop regarding who’s in and who’s out, a daily digest is sent through Bob’s integration with Slack that lists who’s on holiday, sick, volunteering, or taking their birthday off. It also includes Bobbers’ birthdays and work anniversaries so everyone can celebrate. 

Doing what we say at HiBob

At HiBob, we are dedicated to creating an HCM for our customers that simplifies the complexity of managing a multi-national workforce throughout the employee lifecycle. As believers in our product, we use Bob as the heart of our company, with all HR processes starting and ending with Bob. 

Bob automates our core HR processes, increasing efficiency and providing real-time quantifiable data that informs our decisions and impacts our bottom line. Bob’s engaging and collaborative tools help us, like other global companies, build a warm and welcoming culture for our people. 

Bob helps dynamic companies bring out the best in their people—and that goes for the people at HiBob too.