YSoft Labs is Reinventing the Enterprise Office

Today the gig economy is 45 million workers strong, with a market value set to reach $63 billion by 2020.[1] And according to the IBM Center for Applied Insights, “independent workers such as contractors or freelancers beat traditional employees in job engagement, innovation, satisfaction, and pride. Where they fall short of regular employees is in another area: commitment.”[2]

These two sets of metrics define the challenge enterprise HR departments face today. The emergence of a fluid workforce is a done deal. How to maximize the value of those workers for the term of their engagement with your company is the riddle that still wants solving.

Seeking the right balance between fluidity and commitment

Think of it as the difference between speed-dating and getting married. If everyone—company and worker alike—believes s/he’s entering into a long-term relationship, the cost of a leisurely start is relatively low. But when enterprise efficiency becomes a key driver of business profits, time matters. Those 45 million gig workers are increasingly competent at getting up to speed fast. It’s the job of the HR department to make sure they can.

The HR professional in your back pocket

At YSoft Labs, we’re expanding the scope of our intelligent business solutions to improve the intake and uptake of human resources. The same tools and technologies that have driven disruptive changes in the economy can also introduce powerful new ways to streamline talent acquisition, increase on-boarding efficiency and shorten new employees’ time to proficiency.

When was the last time you met somebody without a smart phone? That powerful little computer in everybody’s backpack or back pocket can enable today’s companies to document and socialize new hires swiftly and systematically, no matter where in the world they are, what hours they work or even what language they speak.

Welcome aboard. Now get productive.

The solution we’re developing is designed to be both the welcome mat and the key. Concentrating on the pre-boarding and on-boarding of new hires, our developers are creating applications that let new employees complete their paperwork, experience company culture and start learning the nuts and bolts of their new jobs before their first day on the payroll. Our goal is to create efficient digital interactions that reduce HR costs, assure the first day on the job makes sense, and dramatically reduce time-to-productivity for the workers your company needs. And that’s just the front end.

Beyond the seasonal gig, a community of workers

Beyond the seasonal gig lies the idea of a community of skilled workers an enterprise can contact and engage as needed, an identified and qualified resource pool that’s digitally maintained and activated. This isn’t just good for the business but for a new breed of workers who know their value and are able to take control of their work lives rather than being controlled by an employer’s calendar.

This is where the idea of commitment really gets important. If you want the best and the brightest to respond to your company’s call for skilled workers, you need to keep in touch with them, treat them well and make it painless for them to engage with your company, again and again. Nobody likes feeling dumb. When your company helps a human being get smart and feel valued, that human is much more likely to perform well now and come back when you need them later.

Good user experience builds good will

As the gig economy grows in size and sophistication, success will increasingly be dependent on the quality of user experience. We know we need to write good code. Now the YSoft Labs team is focusing on usability, on interface and cross- platform accessibility.  Beyond the challenges of pre-boarding and on-boarding, those things so urgent in the here and now, we’re already contemplating how to extend our digital solutions to the whole enterprise/employee lifecycle, whether that valued worker is seasonal, regional or part of a worker pool that persists over space and time.

It’s a great race

Are we in a race? Of course we are. Are we ahead?  Well, we like to think so. Some of the biggest retail operations in the Czech Republic are putting our solutions in place, testing them at scale, helping us understand the shape and the tempos of their human resource needs. This feedback loop is invaluable for creating a solution that meets real needs in the real world.
Successful digitization is much more than getting the ones and zeroes right. It’s about making human experience both more productive and more pleasurable.

We love our jobs.