Cloud Firm ‘Synergita’ Strives To Emerge Out Of COVID Stronger

The company through its cloud-based solution, offers effective features like Employee Promotion, Continuous feedback tagging employee goals, culture rating system and Advanced Voice-to-text. To keep in pace with the current situation, Synergita has also introduced an innovative feature called E-Communication.

In a candid conversation with Gairika Mitra, Shankar Krishnamoorthy, Co-Founder & CEO of Synergita tells us about the future of the HR tech space.

How do you think is the HR Tech space going to upsurge post-COVID?

Every company across the globe had to resort to the WFH strategy as a result of the COVID crisis. This comes up with its own challenges such as setting up infrastructure, policies, communication tools, etc. to enable employees to work from home.  HR personnel has become very occupied with activities to ensure the safety of employees and engage the entire workforce.

The effective usage of HR tech products has helped HRs and employees well.   From managing leaves, timesheet, and conducting pulse surveys to maintaining constant communication with employees, enabling collaboration between teams, etc. HR technology plays a pivotal role in business continuity. The use of Zoom, Microsoft Teams, etc, have spiked during this pandemic situation. Similarly, we are noticing an increase in the number of feedback and appreciations delivered by the managers to their team members in our client organizations who are using our employee performance and management software, Synergita.  COVID has augmented the rate of digital transformation on the HR front and so we feel that the usage of HRTech will increase post-COVID.

What are the USPs of Synergita, that’s unique from other gigantic players in the market?

Synergita is award-winning, continuous employee performance and engagement software.  Typically, most of the organizations think “performance appraisals” as “performance management”.  What we are enabling is to bring in continuous paradigm and shift the approach from once a year reckoning to something more usable which results in higher performance and engagement throughout the year.  Some of the USPs are:

• My OKRs (Objective and Key Results):  Employees can set their objectives and plan the key results (leading indicators) to reach the objectives.  We feel that post-COVID, employees will be more focussed on their goals, objectives, and results.  Synergita’s MyOKR will be very handy for them; It will help them to be nimble and agile to respond to these work requirements.
• Balanced Score Card, SMART Goals:  Management and Employees can set their BSC, SMART goals, KPIs and track against them.  Managers can also have goals-specific conversations with their team members and guide them. This will help employees to focus on their goals post COVID situation.
• Continuous Feedback/Conversations:  Regular check-ins or anytime conversations among team members and their managers (or) anyone.  With this, it is easy to share appreciation, plan goals specific activities, and conduct one on one meetings, etc.  We have seen a good rise in the usage of continuous feedback among our customers.  It is an indication of managers wanting to increase engagement with their team members.  Continuous feedback will be really helpful for HR during and Post COVID to engage with their employees.
• E-Communication:  Employees rely on official communication from the management/HR for several important topics.  Distributing this information is quite a time consuming task for HR.  Especially, if an organization is distributed in different states, they have to spend a lot more time figuring out the information distribution mechanism:  different levels of people, different demographics, etc.  Synergita makes work easier for HR by providing simpler options for sending the information based on levels, location, etc.  HR will also know the open/click ratios to figure out their communication strategy.
• Employee Perception Surveys:  This is another way to learn about employee perception and anxieties.  HR can design the questionnaire and conduct a survey using Synergita.  It is an extremely helpful tool to know and analyse employee perception.

We have made all the features extremely simple and easy to use.  Not much training is required for our end users.  Combined with our support excellence, we are determined to help our customers emerge stronger during and post COVID situation.

How important do you think is it for people to rely on technology? Are there any major follies per se?

Technology has helped people to cope with the challenges caused by COVID. Organizations are able to deliver their services to their customers (wherever possible) only due to increased technology usage.  Without technology, our life would have been miserable.   We rely a lot on e-commerce for purchasing groceries and get them delivered to our home.  Without technology, our life would have been miserable.  

At the same time, we have to use it in the right way that will be suitable for us.  We certainly need to be aware of the training, best practices, etc. while using a tool.

How is your firm coping up during the pandemic?

Its been about 8 weeks since we started remote working.  We certainly miss the warmth and face to face interactions and collaborations.  However, employee safety is critical at this moment.  Our engineering and operations center is located in Chennai.  But, many of our team members are from different parts of the state & country.  So, they had to go back to their native to make sure that their family members are safe and healthy.  Now, everyone is working from home safely.

We are a cloud company; our product (Synergita) is delivered from the cloud.  And, we also use several cloud tools for development, customer support, project management, CRM, telephony, etc. This has helped us to be nimble and move to WFH in very little time, when the lockdown has started, without impacting our customers.

We have prioritised communication and collaboration with our customers.  Several of them have gone live during this pandemic situation and launched their appraisal cycles.  They have also appreciated our team for providing great support even during this difficult situation.  And, we are grateful to our customers for their trust and cooperation.  Many of our customers have paid promptly, which helped us to meet our expenses.

And, from product innovation front, we are launching new features and modules to help our customers to fight with the COVID.  We have gone live on ADP MarketPlace in the US ; we have also launched Synergita Engage, OKR, etc.

So, we are relentless in delivering values to our clients and fighting with COVID.

What are your immediate and long-term milestones like?

Our immediate goal is to emerge out of COVID stronger. I am sure everyone is concerned about the current situation and so are we.  We are taking a conservative view to make sure that we are able to sustain, deliver our services, and focus on growth. 

Long term -> our aspirations are to make Synergita a global leader in the talent management space.  We currently have 200K users on our platform. We aim to continue winning new customers and hit 1M users soon.  Majority of our customers are based in India at this moment.  We want to become a global player.  We are focussing on the US and Singapore markets to expand the business.

Lastly, any word of advice for the industry which is coping with the current pandemic?

I came across this question in one of the webinars – What kind of company are you:  stuck due to COVID / Introducing new services to fight with COVID / Thriving in COVID?  It is a difficult situation for sectors like Airlines and restaurants.  They cannot do much until the situation returns to normal.  Thankfully, some of us are not in that sector.  And, we want to fight and emerge stronger in the newer world.  We are able to introduce new services and help our customers.  We just need to stay optimistic in the long-term and prepare for the new normal.  Focus on your existing customers, use this downtime to acquire new skillsets, reskill people, develop newer service lines, etc.    Let us fight COVID together and emerge strong, together.