A fully digital employee experience at Linedata

High expectations for HR in an IT company: “We humanize technology”

Linedata is a 20 year old French FinTech company in asset and credit management, with clients in more than 50 countries and has over 1.300 employees working in 20 offices worldwide. The HR function was relatively immature and focussed mainly on inevitable, administrative processes.

As part of a larger initiative for the whole company it was also time to modernize the HR function into a more professional and employee centred department. To realize this Laurianne Le Chalony started a little over 2 years ago as Chief People Officer for Linedata group. As the company is a software company itself, with the slogan “We humanize technology”, the expectations for a more digital HR function were high. It had to reduce employee turnover and improve knowledge sharing across different teams and locations, while remaining a budget neutral program. So how did Laurianne pick up that challenge?

11 HRTech Tools, 1 digital employee experience

Step one in the journey to a more digital HR was to find one core Talent Management (TM) tool that has the flexibility to add other required tools in a later stage. In this case Talentsoft was chosen on the one hand for it’s own TM capabilities, on the other hand because of the connectivity possibilities, using widgets to other apps through the employee dashboard. In below employee journey path you can find Talentsoft in various steps as the core application. It is combined with off the shelf HRTech point solutions, like Visiotalent for video recruitment, Microsoft Yammer and Teams for collaboration in the product teams and with internally developed tools as well, like for employee engagement. Meeting up to the current average of 11 HRTech tools in use at larger organizations according to Josh Bersin at UNLEASH, Linedata has connected all the tools to create a fully digital and global employee experience.

Steps in the digital HR transformation

From one side the environment for a digital transformation at a tech company may be somewhat easier than in a less tech savvy company. Coming from an only manual and very administrative HR function the core challenge was the change within local HR roles itself. With a change management approach focused on these four pillars the action plan was created:

1. Management (buy-in)
2. Inclusion
3. Employee Journey
4. Technology

Many workshops with local HR and managers helped the understanding of the need to transform the HR approach. The program allows the HR people to now focus a lot more on added value in talent management and employee development. Some local administrative HR roles have been replaced with technology and more HR business partner roles.

Results after 2 years

Of course there are always things that next time would be done differently, like creating a reporting data warehouse in parallel with the rollout of each new tool, instead of at the end. Overall the results are very positive, with a higher recruitment velocity, a 12% lower turnover, a 1,5 points (out of five) improvement on the Glassdoor platform and a higher credibility of HR overall. They’ve also seen the ‘boomerang hires’ increase, with IT developers returning to Linedata. The ballerina on their homepage proves the dedication to their slogan.