Accent Jobs is an employment agency and pioneer in ‘werkplezier’, or work satisfaction. It has more than 1,000 employees across Belgium, and is part of the House of HR group.
Accent Jobs’ vision is to “embrace talent, and give people ownership of their own careers”, explains Ellen, Accent’s Talent Manager. To achieve this, the company wants to map employees’ skills to reveal any gaps and improve internal mobility.
It sounds straightforward but as a geographically diverse organisation, Accent was finding it a challenge to uncover each employee’s skills and get an overview of the talent inside the company.
“Co-create a platform from the employee for the employee.”
This led to frustrations – for Accent’s employees and its HR team. The lack of skills visibility was making it impossible to let people grow. Employees felt their skills weren’t being recognised. And when they searched for promotion opportunities and vacancies within the company, they couldn’t find them.
As a result, some employees quit their jobs to take up new roles elsewhere, even though a suitable position had been available in-house. In a company of Accent’s calibre, that should never have been the case.
Accent realised its problem needed a technological solution. It looked at the various digital tools in the market to find one to support its employees; but each platform had something missing. Then Accent met huapii, and found the perfect match!
Our platform allows employees to proactively manage their careers. It’s also intuitive and simple to navigate, because we know that ease of use is the key to rapid adoption of any new technology.
And not only did Accent love the platform, the company was impressed by huapii’s approach. Accent saw we were on the same page, which made implementation easier and faster.
The huapii team worked with Accent as partners. We became part of the company to deliver a successful launch. As Ellen recalls: “It felt like I had two new colleagues in HR!” The huapii customer success team was there for Accent every step of the way to understand the company’s vision and share our expertise in change management.
Accent needed a platform where employees could contribute to their personal growth – and that of the business – and see the opportunities for advancement within the company. To make this happen, we wanted to understand the culture at Accent and the challenges employees were facing. So we gathered employee input and arranged for Accent to co-create with our project team!
Employees across the whole Accent organisation joined our workshops. They were encouraged to give their perspectives on the challenges they faced day-to-day, reveal how this impacted their internal mobility, and how it hampered opportunities for feedback. This allowed us to start from the needs of employees and build something together. Or as Ellen puts it: “Co-create a platform from the employee for the employee.”
One month later, Accent’s vision was implemented in the platform, and it was time to spread the word inside the company! Accent appointed huapii ambassadors to help colleagues with the new ways of working. As Ellen confirms: “The tool and the platform grew within Accent organically. The onboarding was a really nice process to be part of.”
“The tool and the platform grew within Accent organically. The onboarding was a really nice process to be part of.”
Change can be hard for employees and can take time. But the benefit of working with an intuitive tool is employees are onboarded very quickly. At Accent, everyone was onboarded within a month.
Accent is keen for employees to reflect on their skills, work experiences, and career aspirations. This gives the HR team an overview of current skills within the company, and allows them to get to know the career ambitions of employees. That way, HR can match employees with roles they may be interested in and good at; and Accent can keep their talent inside the company.
A few weeks into the new regime, Accent added ‘giving and receiving feedback’ to the agenda. Previously, employees had struggled to give constructive feedback peer to peer, or from team member to manager. The huapii platform enables employees to regularly engage with each other to provide and ask for feedback, increasing the communication inside the company and across teams.
Thanks to huapii, feedback has become a regular habit, and Accent’s employees now happily devote 15 minutes every Friday to give feedback. Accent says this has created a huge difference as employees are now keen to discover points for improvement and polish their existing skills.
“We see people talking to each other after a presentation or meeting and offering to give feedback,” says Ellen. “You can see the platform is alive.”
Users
Skills in the platform
Feedbacks exchanged
We asked Ellen to describe huapii in three points:
huapii is for every employee in your company. Every business unit, seniority level, and team can use huapii easily to take part in their personal growth.
We developed huapii with the input of 26,000 employees. Their feedback made us stronger. As a result, huapii is very easy to use for employees.
huapii enables every employee to ‘own’ their career. We support everyone to take action!
We explore how HR can champion this transformation of business by: leveraging the opportunity to work together better by sharing feedback.
With constructive feedback, increase motivation in the organisation.
Download our free e-book to grow your people and skills!
FEEDBACK HABIT Two-thirds of employees expect more feedback from their manager and colleagues! And they are right, as feedback is one of the best drivers towards better performance and personal development. With the help of the huapii team, we involved all stakeholders and built the persona to give a strong story to the whole organization
I always found a way to get or to create for myselfs jobs where I could achieve my life’s purpose: connecting with people and helping them grow (while growing myself).
After studying general management and HR in Lyon, I joined Solvay where I had several rich & diverse HR experiences. I worked in Lyon, Brussels and Paris, to finally come back to Brussels and accept the challenge of creating and managing Solvay’s Digital Studio flagship.
Being an intrapreneur leading an innovation incubator, taking part of creating a new ways of working platform that transformed the company culture and HR woke up my inner intrapreneur and made me jump into co-founding huapii!
Today at huapii I use my HR and change experience to make the workplace a developing and empowering place to be.
