2021 has indeed been rough. The ever-evolving pandemic has yet to become a fading memory and, although we see the light at the end of the CoViD tunnel, we are still cautious about the decisions we are making.
As the year comes to an end, we tend to push ourselves a little harder, so we can reach our goals and finish what we planned for this last quarter. This is a natural impulse for anyone that likes to get things done, but it is important to take a moment to reflect on the things that we have accomplished as we enter the new year.
While many companies decided to go into hibernation during this 2-year winter, Sprout, as many of our clients did, went the other way. We decided to face the market challenges head-on, constantly looking for opportunities to make our clients, and consequently ourselves, better.
We looked at every pain point, every request, each and every difficult and uncomfortable situation with the diligence and expertise that our clients demand, and put our heads together to find the right solutions for each.
Some of these solutions became products, others, services; ideas became initiatives, which in turn became special projects, new departments, or strategies. We published whitepapers, case-studies, and ebooks; dug into the hard data that could make an impact. Wrote dozens of blog posts, gave free classes, engaged our clients with over a thousand calls, created over 700 Knowledge Base Articles, and our Customer Success Managers held over 1,100 meetings with our clients to help them improve the way they do business during these difficult times.
We quickly saw that companies were going through so many changes, and we were prepared for any scenario. We offered Sprout Touchless, to make it so much safer for companies that needed to brave the trip to the office, with facial recognition and temperature readings to serve as biometrics.
We also improved our web bundy, regular biometrics, mobile, etc to work in any configuration that was needed from our hybrid clients. We also added fingerprint and facial authentication to mobile, to further secure the mobile experience, as well as Multi-Factor Authentication via email.
We created a way for our clients to monitor the changes in their employees' payroll information.
Did you hear about the latest SSS contribution practices? We did! And as always, we updated our system in record time, and we improved our system so staying compliant completely automated
We also improved our Alphalist (version 7), so our clients can upload their reports directly into the BIR tools.
We added a simplified month-end report so you can see all your information in one sheet.
We understood that moving into a hybrid setup required a lot of insight to know whether each company was implementing it properly. And our clients also expressed the value of analytics to their hybrid setups, especially when it came to important decision making.
Insight also laser-focused on the metrics that mattered with our Industry Benchmark feature, which allows clients to compare their Attrition and Absenteeism rates within their specific industry.
In response to some of the findings we had, we pushed to offer Wellness packages that clients could now build from scratch, to meet whatever their company needs. Over 5,000 individuals this year alone have used Sprout Wellness.
Some of our services saved lives, quite literally. InstaCash helped many, many employees face their financial challenges, thanks to their employers. In 2021, we were able to assist over 9,000 employees with medical expenses, utility payments, and other emergency expenses. And to make it even easier to avail, we made it available through the Sprout mobile app.
To make this financial benefit even better for HR and Payroll admins, we made BDO, BPI, and UnionBank DAT file templates on Sprout payroll so to make sure your admin work is as seamless as possible.
For the companies that were growing, we partnered with Manatal, a tool that changes the way companies recruit, drastically improving candidate sourcing, applicant tracking, profile enrichment, team collaboration, and much more, cutting our average time for hire by over 50%.
We also added the highly demanded Performance Management System to our suite of services, offering more than any other platform in the Philippines with Performance+. This new product helps you monitor the performance and the development of your employees easily and flexibly, and automates a Growth & Development plan. With this service, we've helped companies streamline their entire performance management process - so employees that don't meet the target for a specific competency can automatically be assigned a course addressing that need. And it comes with a library of over 500 courses! How's that for Growth and Development?
Did we stop there? Of course not!
We also engaged our clients with the very first inter-company competition of Sprout Engage, with over 300 participants, we helped understand our clients’ unique situations with Pulse Special Ops, conduct their annualizations, run their payroll, launched our 10-day implementation program, helped them pay their government contributions,... Our legal team helped clients draft their policies, conducted multiple free HR training sessions, lobbied with the BIR,...
And internally, our People Ops department was constantly at work. They helped the whole company (and others) by validating our new initiatives, testing our new services and features, creating a Remote Work Playbook, rolling out our critical success factors, succession planning, renewing our ISO certification, creating leadership development programs, contributing to publications as the Subject Matter Experts that they are, conducting dozens of engagement initiatives, contributing through ProjectSEED to the MovED Foundation, Animal Kingdom, PAWS Foundation, and Save the Children, and much, much more.
And that’s just a sample of the incredible work that the people in Sprout have done during 2021.
We are deeply humbled and proud of the unbelievable team of individuals that have contributed to this year. Your incredible work does not go unnoticed.
And, of course, we are nothing but grateful for the amazing clients that, year after year, choose to share their journey with us.
Merry Christmas, and see you next year.