“In January 2020, we were 200 employees in the organisation, and by December 2020, we became over 450 strong. It’s a massive leap that required round the clock efforts to scale-up, led by the leadership team and HR,” Raghu Ravinutala, CEO, Yellow.ai, told ETHRWorld.
As the roller coaster year 2020 gave rise to high demand for automation and digital transformation, AI-powered conversational platform Yellow.ai onboarded more than 250 people.
“In January 2020, we were 200 employees in the organisation, and by December 2020, we became over 450 strong. It’s a massive leap that required round the clock efforts to scale-up, led by the leadership team and HR,” Raghu Ravinutala, CEO, Yellow.ai, told ETHR World.
Also, the company had to figure out ways to imbibe the company culture where more than 50 per cent of the company’s workforce was new. In all of this, consistent and engaging communication was key.
“We constantly reassured all our teams about the various ways in which we would support them, be it with internet costs, healthcare consultations or sending hardware to any location,” he said.
Over time, however, Ravinutala opines, face-to-face interaction is required to facilitate collaboration, build relationships, solve complex challenges and generate ideas.
He further said, “Of course, we cannot discount the fact that continuous remote work extends the workday with blurred work-life boundaries affecting mental wellbeing.”
Thus, he said, effective leadership in this new hybrid world is a balancing act that requires different skills that go beyond traditional team leadership.
Plan to add around 150-180 more people
Yellow.ai has been preparing itself for a broad international expansion. As a part of its growth strategy, the startup is using Series B funding to expand its footprint and approach businesses in the US, Europe, Latin America, and Asia-Pacific regions.
Also, the company will invest further in its product innovation roadmap, including deepening multilingual voice bot capabilities, expanding enterprise integrations, and launching a developer marketplace for virtual assistants.
“We have been actively hiring local and international talent deeply embedded in each region to drive growth. For instance, we have employees based in Indonesia, the US, Middle East and the UK to secure business in their respective markets and also to facilitate client engagement,” Ravinutala said.
At present, the company has offices in six countries, with plans to enter more countries. “The hiring will continue at a strong pace and in 2021, we plan to add around 150-180 people to our Yellow.ai family,” he said.
HR practices are evolving to provide a seamless employee experience
As per Gartner, organisations that embrace a more personalized and consumer-centric approach to employee experience increase the average employee’s performance by 17 per cent.
Speaking of how HR operation is being transformed with the emergence of AI-powered smart virtual assistants, Ravinutala said leaders focused on the Human Capital Management (HCM) technology have begun experimenting with AI to deliver innovation and to improve HR efficiency and employee experience.
“HR automation helps increase productivity of the HR departments by saving them from tiresome manual tasks and enabling them to concentrate on higher value-added tasks, such as decision-making and strategy,” he added.
Ravinutala further said that an AI chatbot can handle many critical administrative tasks, such as selecting profiles with certain skills, filing documents, feeding information, creating and sharing files, etc.
“These tasks may take hours, if processed manually. But automating mundane tasks is just the tip of the iceberg, AI-based solutions can drive faster, easy-to-use HR services and help the HR functions develop new personalization strategies to engage the technology-enabled workforce and improve employee performance,” he asserted.
“In essence, the traditional HR practices are evolving to provide a seamless employee experience while boosting efficiency for the HR teams. They will never go away, but get stronger with the use of technology,” added Ravinutala.
Source – ET HR World
