HiBob’s Damien Andreasen on technology for HR challenges

HiBob Australia and New Zealand’s country manager, Damien Andreasen, joined the HR Leader, outlining how the right tech can help with “increasing the employee engagement, retention rates, and ultimately the profitability of businesses”.

“Technology does what it always has done. It allows companies to move faster, get more insight, be more effective and scale. That’s the fundamentals of most technology,” said Damien Andreasen.

“What we’re seeing is an emergence of a lot of new tech … Leveraging new technologies that have become much more mainstream and available to people and adapting to what we talk about as the new world of work.”

Mr Andreasen says that COVID-19 has shifted work norms and technology has had to adapt to the change, too. Utilising emerging tech can help organisations stay ahead of an everchanging workforce.

“The pandemic has accelerated the rate of change that we’ve witnessed in just how we think about jobs … Working from home, work-life balance, diversity, inclusion, employee engagement. These are the type of things that are starting to come to the forefront of HR strategy,” he explained.

“There’s such a huge range of new tech that’s out there, that’s really helping to solve these problems. I think ultimately, helping HR teams even bigger than just HR teams now, organisations scale faster and more effectively.”

Hiring is one of the areas where tech can assist employers that are dealing with challenges heightened by the pandemic, such as talent shortages.

“The take-up rate of that technology is huge. Fundamentally, what that’s allowing companies to do, is access talent in a talent-short market. All of a sudden, it’s easier to hire engineers in the Philippines, salespeople in the US,” Mr Andreasen said.

“Effectively, it simplifies [things] and allows companies to move faster.”

Looking at internal talent, Mr Andreasen commented: “There’s a great example in a local company called Reejig. Reejig is using AI in a really intelligent way to look at workforce agility, and really pare down where the skills within the organisation are.”

Mr Andreasen noted that investing in tech will not only benefit the business, but the way your staff perform. Making sure staff are supplied with the right tools for the job can help them feel looked after.

He continued: “If you want the best out of your people, they want you to invest in them in return. It’s become a very different environment now, and companies are having to adapt really rapidly to meet the demands of the best talent in market. Ultimately, that’s what drives change. It’s a market like anywhere else. If you want the best, then you have to be able to provide a really unique platform that your people can thrive in.”

Mr Andreasen added: “Richard Branson has the age old quote: ‘Look after your people and they’ll look after your customers’. And they’re the fundamentals of business in the modern day and age.”

The transcript of this podcast episode, when quoted above, was slightly edited for publishing purposes. The full audio conversation with Damien Andreasen, recorded on 6 July 2022 is below, and the original podcast article can be found here.