Episode 64: How to Build a Culture of Trust and Measure its Impact (Interview with Jignasha Grooms)
My guest on this week's episode is Jignasha Grooms, Chief Human Resources Officer at Epicor Software, a 4,000 person, global technology company.
Jignasha has 20 years of experience in the IT Industry, both in Business and Sales Operations and in Human Resources. Prior to joining Epicor, in November 2016, she spent eight years at Cisco, where in her last role she led HR for the America Sales Organisation, The Global Marketing Function, The Global Sales and Operations Function, as well as the staffing discipline in support of all Cisco Businesses and Functions in Asia, Pacific and Japan. Perhaps Jignasha’s biggest achievement in her role at Epicor has been the development of The One Epicor Culture, which puts employees at the centre and is built on pillars, including trust, agility, authenticity and empathy. It is a particularly impressive story, as you will hear, and one that has led to some significant outcomes for the Business and the workforce.
You can listen to this week’s episode below, or by using your podcast app of choice, just click the corresponding image to get access via the podcast website here.
In our conversation Jignasha and I discuss:
How Epicor is using and measuring the success of using AI in the recruitment process
What HR can learn from the pandemic and what it needs to do to continue experimenting and not fall back into the old way of doing things
How to build and develop a culture in a company that is growing organically and by acquisition
How to measure the business impact of culture and connect the dots between customer experience and employee experience
How having the right people data in place supports a business operating in a fast paced environment
This episode is a must listen for anyone interested in Culture and leading HR in a global organisation. So that is Business Leaders, CHROs and anyone in a People Analytics, Culture, Employee Experience or HR Business Partner role.
Support for this podcast is brought to you by charthop. To learn more, visit https://www.charthop.com/digitalhr.
Interview Transcript
David Green: Today, I am delighted to welcome Jignasha Grooms, Chief Human Resources Officer at Epicor, to The Digital HR Leaders Podcast. It is great to have you on the show, Jig, can you give our listeners a brief introduction to your background and your role at Epicor?
Jignasha Grooms: Absolutely, David and thank you so much for having me on the Podcast, I am incredibly honoured. So my name is Jignasha Grooms and I have been at Epicor Software for about four and a half years, as the Chief HR Officer and I love my role here. We are a software company that provides, as we say, we are the central partner to essential businesses. We work primarily in the small/medium business space and you will recognise some of our customers as, ACE Hardwares, The Chicago Bulls, Redbull Racing, London Taxi, just some great brands all over the world. Our hardware and software solutions actually allow our Employees and our customers to be fully in the cloud, with a SaaS based model that really serves everything from point of sale to how you manage inventory. We focus primarily on Manufacturing, Distribution, Retail and Auto and we do it with 4,000 Employees spread across 31 countries.
A little bit about me, right before I was at Epicor I was at Cisco Systems for almost eight and a half years and I have loved the journey. Over the course of my life and my career I have had the chance to live, work and play on three different continents, I consider studying play David so I included that, I think bringing in a pretty global background and I am now happily based out of Austin, Texas.
David Green: I can see the sun shining in the background there as well, so very nice. You have been at Epicor for four and a half years, 4,000 employees, Cisco is around 75,000 people I think, it certainly was around the time you were there. What would you say your top learnings have been about the differences in getting work done between a large company and a smaller company like Epicor?
Jignasha Grooms: I would tell you that each of our roles provides us a little bit more of a building block on our foundational knowledge and what I brought from Cisco was my people first approach. I think the culture at Cisco really supports that and really supports making sure that our Employees are at the centre of our business value proposition. So that was some of the learning that I brought from Cisco, as well as the global mindset and how to really build a company culture that aligns with business values and business objectives. I really got the chance to do that because when I got to Epicor, there wasn't a lot of foundational work already laid for the people strategies. I had a great time, not only building it, but because we are so much smaller David, I was able to implement it with agility, obviously drive a lot of change management, but we had a great group of Employees that while they weren't sure, understood the benefits of it and then really adapted to what we were doing.
So I think that has been the biggest difference for me in that in a company of four thousand people, you can act with a lot more agility than you normally could. I think the key to driving that agility is twofold. One is trust, you have to build trust all across your Employee base, no matter where people sit, no matter what job they do, whether they have been with us for 4 days or 40 years. So I think building that deep professional and personal trust with our Employees helped and then the second thing I would say is alignment. Making sure that our Employees really understand how what they do, aligns to our overarching corporate and business objectives and how they are part of the engine that really drives up for success.
So I think that has been just not only fun, but quantitatively fulfilling for me in this role.
David Green: I know from when we prepared a couple of weeks ago, you talked about how you are using AI specifically in the selection process at Epicor. I would love to hear a little bit more about that because it is a bit of a buzzword in the space, as you know, at the moment so it is always good to hear people are actually using it.
Jignasha Grooms: Yeah and I love this conversation, so you are going to see me talking with my hands a lot when we get to AI. I am really proud to tell you that we implemented AI in HR over three years ago at Epicor.
So let me give you a specific example, our Head of Global Staffing, Shane Hicks, sits out of Bracknell UK and that is important for you to know, because I do believe that if you want to have a global mindset, you have to have an Employee base that reflects it. But equally important is that our two largest locations are in Monterrey, Mexico and Bangalore, India. Both places with great talent, but also war on talent.
So when Shane and I started partnering very closely together, after I joined Epicor, I asked him what one of his biggest issues was. He said “you know, Jig, for every Software Engineer Job I put out there for Bangalore or Monterrey, I get over 600 resumes.” And there is no way that we will build a staffing organisation to really support that. So we started doing our research and because we are curious and because we want to be innovative, we were lucky as well. So it was right time, right product, right conversation and we were able to implement AI in our staffing process. We asked this question, not just in staffing, but across HR and it just made the most sense there. So we were able to leverage an AI platform that we brought in, that was an add-on to our staffing platform, to our ATS, as we like to call it in the HR lingo. That AI allowed us to take those 600 plus resumes coming in for every job and to really distill them to maybe the top 50 to 100. Then our Recruiters, who are well-trained both from a HR perspective but also from a technical perspective, because we hire a lot of technical talent, were then able to distill it down to the top 20 to 30 and give it to the Hiring Managers. Then the Hiring Managers iterated on that, David and so they said these 10 look really good and here is why, and I don't like the rest of these. Then AI, Artificial Intelligence as you all and we all know it, would actually be able to iterate that and read that process to be so crisp, over the last three years, that we have made now over 200 hires using AI. Especially in places like Bangalore and Monterrey, where time is of the essence, often the candidates, the best ones get multiple offers and we wanted to just create a really great candidate experience. Now, let me tell you some of the other things that I think will delight. Over the last 12 months, the DE and I conversation has become a really important topic and it is very near and dear to my heart. I am an accidental HR person but when I started my HR career, 16 years ago, my first role was in D&I, that is what we called it back then diversity and inclusion. I love the E, I think it should have always been DEI, but we noticed that we were trying to help our Hiring Managers and quite frankly, all of our employees, manage their unconscious biases because we all have them. People often say, Oh Jig, you may not have very many because you have been doing this so long and I said, no, we all have them. I have very clear conscious and unconscious biases. So we are now leveraging AI to take some of those unconscious biases out of the candidate pipeline and it has made a huge difference, both from a candidate experience, but also from a Hiring Manager experience. So then what we do is we track any of our hires through AI. So then we track to see how their on-boarding goes, if they are quota carrying. What was their time to quota attainment? If they are on the product development side, what was their time to productivity? We can count lines of code written or bugs fixed and then we see how their quarterly checkpoints go and what their annual performance ratings are. So it is a really great virtuous cycle where we take a lot of the subjectivity out of the process and add in both what I call just efficiency, effectiveness, but also objectivity in a way to quantitatively measure how the talent does through the full life cycle.
David Green: And I guess you are able to measure those hires that have come through an AI process versus those hires that came through a purely manual process and see the difference in, as you said, time to productivity, for example?
Jignasha Grooms: Yes. So because we are able to track our candidates that come through the AI process versus other processes, we have great other processes so let me tell you about some of them. Some of them are just Employee referrals, we are very big on that and we actually do a pretty hefty Employee referral bonus after the Employee has been with us for 90 days, because it is important to make sure that they were a good hire, but the reason it works is because compared to market we have lower voluntary attrition. So that is another way to track it. The third way is internal mobility and I know as you and I continue our conversation, David you will hear me get equally excited about that, but I am a huge believer in internal mobility. I think it is so important for companies to invest in growing the talent they brought on. So we are able to track it several different ways and that is what helps us differentiate how our employees that came through the AI process are doing, relative to Employee referrals or internal mobility.
David Green: Really good stuff and I know we will end up talking about that more. So lets dig in a bit more to the agility bit, because I love that, we will definitely come back to the internal mobility part again as well later. We are both sitting in our respective homes at the moment, organisations have had the opportunity or some would call it a forced opportunity, to pilot the future of work. Looking forward, what will you do and what do you believe HR as a whole will do to continue this process of experimentation and not simply fall back into the old way of doing things?
Jignasha Grooms: If I may, David, I am going to answer you in reverse order. So I think for all of us that are HR Practitioners, there are many adjectives we can use for the last 12 to 14 months. I actually started the journey in January of last year because we have Employees in China. I would say it has been exciting, it has been exhausting, it has been exhilarating, it has been full of anxiety too. All of those words and I didn't mean to use so many E words, but I think for HR as a whole, it has done several things. One is, as HR Practitioners it has allowed us, as you said already, to pilot the future of work. But I think it has also put HR, if you weren't already there in your organisation, right at the Leadership table on the right hand side of the CEO. I would tell you that I have been fortunate working at companies where I have always felt like I have had a seat at that table and I think it is part of the company culture, the one I am at right now, even the ones before that. So I think for HR in general, it has really forced us to think about how we drive Employee engagement in a virtually matrix environment, we all love those buzzwords. All of us used to talk about virtual matrix, well, guess what? We actually got to fully live in it and it was a little bit like watching Keanu Reeves in The Matrix, because you just didn't know what was coming at you. So, I think that is something that all HR Practitioners have had to adapt to. The second thing I would tell you is that it has been a great opportunity, if you have been in HR, to really be the driving force in your company around business continuity and business productivity. I will give you an Epicor example now, which is that in 2020, which should have been one of our hardest years, because we were able to pivot with agility, back to my other favourite A word, we actually had one of our best years ever. We had the best July, from a revenue perspective, that we have had in our 40 year history. We were able to actually do promotions, merit increases and give out bonuses of over a hundred percent, all while making sure that our Employee engagement scores remained high, both through external measures like Glassdoor, but also through our internal Employee engagement survey. Now, the best part for me as an HR Practitioner was that it also allowed me to really shine a spotlight on health and wellbeing. I think this is where, if you are a HR Practitioner, it was your moment to shine because so many of us are wired to be empathetic, just by a function of the job we chose, but it really came out and if you did it in ways that were authentic, Employees really resonated with it. As an example, at Epicor, all of us that report into the CEO and our CEO did 10 to 15 second video clips that we pulled together, almost like in a Brady Bunch format, around what we were doing to stay healthy and balanced and sometimes just sane. We were really authentic and vulnerable and that gave our employees permission to talk about it. We offered up more mental health resources than we normally would and we tried to do it globally as much as possible. We were hoping that COVID would really take some of the stigma away from it, culturally, in certain parts of the world and allow our Employees to say it has been hard. I wasn't used to sharing an 800 square foot space with three of my family members, all of us trying to work and go to school and here is why it has been hard and I need someone to talk to. So I think from an HR perspective, David, all of those wonderful opportunities have been brought to the forefront and now we, as HR Practitioners, get to just run with it because this is where we have been headed for so long. We have talked about buzzwords, but work life balance, what great three words that none of us ever accomplish, well we were forced to do it.
So I told you from an HR perspective and now we have been through some of the Epicor examples, let me tell you personally, for people like us and if those of you that are looking at me and are smiling, you can clearly see that I am pretty energetic and a little type A, it is hard not to be 24/7. So for me personally, Covid gave me the chance to actually really draw those boundaries and lead by example. These are words that I think all people who are in Managerial roles should consider which is, lead by example. So I by design, would shut down at 6pm central time. My Boss, who sometimes was in Austin but sometimes in California, because that is where his parents and in-laws are, knew I would shut down at 4pm pacific 6pm central, unless there was a burning issue. I started cooking with my family, I started spending time with them in ways that I hadn't before and my husband, who heads up sales for a company in a totally different industry, was not sure how it would work with him being home so much because he is very used to being on the road. So I think it is important personally, to adapt to the new normal in ways that are fulfilling and I will tell you that I came out of 2020 a better cook. I think as much as in a very vulnerable moment, my husband and I were like, Oh, Oh, my goodness this is either going to be really good for our marriage or really bad. It turned out to be really good. And our 17 year old, who got stuck with us, is actually going to have some cooking skills before he goes off to university. So I think, all of the things I talked about from an HR Practitioner perspective, from a company perspective, so agility from a HR perspective, authenticity from a corporate perspective, and then just some of that empathy and self care for yourself,
I think those are all things we should carry forward.
David Green: And I love what you are saying, I spoke to Arianna Huffington and Donna Morris from your counterpart at Walmart, a few weeks ago and they were talking about how it is so important that Leaders set the example. And exactly the same, Walmart Leaders have also been doing similar 15 second clips and using that to show the vulnerability of Leaders, because it has been hard for all of us. As you said, it is almost giving Employees permission then to also be vulnerable and also share some of the challenges that they are facing as well. It is so important in this world that we are living in at the moment. So yeah, I really, really loved that.
So when you joined Epicor, you said it has been four and a half years, you have mentioned that one of your primary focuses was building that culture that permeated across the workforce. For an organisation that grows as Epicor has, through mergers and acquisitions for example, that can obviously be a challenge. Can you share some examples of how you have built the culture in what is a fast moving, fast growing environment? I know you have touched on it a little bit, but could you also include how you have adapted that culture over the last year as well?
Jignasha Grooms: Absolutely. I think this is a really timely and relevant topic, David, because much like DEI corporate culture is becoming the conversation for lots of Board meetings. So when I came in to Epicor, what I realised was that we really didn't have an Epicor culture. Mostly because we had grown inorganically, we had gotten to almost a billion dollars and when I came in there was about 3,500 Employees, fairly inorganically and you could see it. Easy examples are, Employee signatures would say the person's name and then active at a subsidiary of Epicor. Well, that wasn’t true we did fully acquire that brand or they wouldn't even put Epicor in their signature and would just keep the signature they had from the acquisition they came from. So I knew that we needed to do that. The other thing that was going on at Epicor is that we actually were really looking at global workforce strategy differently, we had just done a lift and shift for our Bangalore office. Back when we started, it was 14 Employees, but quickly getting to a hundred by the time I got here, in November of 2016. Now we are at over 525 in place in Bangalore, but what I could tell was that there wasn't a cohesive sentiment across our Employee base, that we were all one team and as I like to say, we are all one Epicor. So I would hear, when I did my listening tours of Town Halls, back when we were all traveling all the time, I would hear Employees say “well, I feel like all the jobs are going to those people over there in India or Mexico” or “I can't believe you opened a support centre in Budapest and you gave those people jobs that could have been ours.” So there was very much an us versus them mindset.
And then last but not least, one of my very first flights for Epicor was to India and that is a very long flight from Austin, Texas. It was 27 hours and of course, last minute, so I was in a middle seat. So I took the time to read our Employee engagement feedback. My predecessor had already left and my seat had been empty for three months before I got there, so I asked “what do you do with this feedback that Employees give you? Who reads it? Who actions it?” And the answers from my peers were “well, you know, I mean, we kind of look at it sometimes, but it is usually the same.” Well I read all 787 comments and it wasn't the same, but there were two or three big themes coming out. One was, I don't feel like I can meet my career potential at Epicor. Two, I don't feel like this business is set up for success and longevity. Then the third one, which was really shocking, was I don't trust the Leadership Team. I don't feel like this Leadership Team is interested in my growth and my success as much as they are in theirs. They are some pretty significant themes and very bold. So me being me, also being a little bit bold, I distilled all of them. In December I was at my first meeting with my peers and our then CEO and I said, here is what is coming out. Here is what I think we need to do. But first and foremost, we need to create a one Epicor culture because until we get that and people feel like they are part of one company and their successes are interdependent on each other, then we are not going to move anymore. The second thing we need to do is to create trust and language that supports everybody's growth. So when we have any Employees that say anything negative like “those people over there” or “why'd you get rid of my friend and give this person in Budapest my job?” We as Leaders need to immediately course correct that and we need to become more authentic and accessible to the Employees because there is clearly an ivory tower mindset.
So we picked our three big ones and we started working on it. It was hard to get a lot of our Employees to adapt because they have been here for a long time, but David, the way we did it was through small significant changes. So let me just walk you through two quick examples. One, was really launching that talk track, that narrative, through our extended Leadership Team so all our VP’s and above. So I started there and I said “you all need to start talking about it in every meeting, in every all-hands you have, in every town hall you post and if you are not comfortable, invite me and I'll do it.” At that point we were 3,500 people, so it is not that big of a deal. The second thing we did was really started putting our Employees at the centre of our business value proposition. This has really been very important to me and I think the most fulfilling thing is the last three years, it has been part of one of our corporate objectives. Which is Epicor respects and values it’s Employees and strives to be a great place to work. Not that we are, but strives to be because that is authentic, we are getting there. But I started putting our employees at the centre of our value proposition, here is the one example I will give you. The year I started, there were just a lot of natural disasters. You know, you hate that it is happening, but between floods in California, fires in certain places, earthquakes, then just droughts and floods in Texas. I said “you know what, we are not so big that we can't call and check in on every Employee.” So anytime there is a big natural disaster, we are going to make a list of all the Employees that could potentially be impacted and we are going to split up this list and we are going to call everybody. Usually it was like 20 to 25 people per HR Business Partner, me included. We started calling and it was at our first customer meeting, remember I started in November, April was when we had our big customer meeting. We had this really nice happy hour for some of our tenured Employees, people that were celebrating 15, 20, 25 years and after our now President but then CEO, did a great toast and asked does anybody else want to add anything? One of our Employees stood up big, huge six foot three, male and he said “I want you all to know I have been at this company for 28 years and never once in my career has someone called to check on me and my family.” I'm going to choke up when I tell you this, but he started tearing up and he is probably in his late fifties, early sixties and he said “I want you to know how much that meant to me and for that reason alone, I will retire this company happy.” I love that ending because that is a true example, I have goosebumps talking to you about it because that is who I want to be. That is what I want Epicor to be because it makes me proud to work at Epicor and now that has become part of our DNA. We do it every time and the employees now, in a great way, expect it and still love it. Also now our employees proactively email us to say I'm good, we are safe. Don't worry about us in the storm.
David Green: Well, that is great and as you said, a lot of us come into HR because we are empathetic and that is a great example of actually showing that. When people are facing a natural disaster that they get a call, it is not a big thing for us to do in HR, but it means so much more to those individuals.
Jignasha Grooms: Yes, it does and I think that is what it really means when you say you put your employees at the centre of your business value proposition, because the truth is David, we are a PEO billion dollar company. Our benefits are not going to look like Google's and Amazon’s or even my previous company and that is because I don’t have, how do I say it, the negotiating power of a company that has 70,000 plus people, but the total rewards of working at Epicor go beyond just your pay check and your benefits.
It is how you feel. Are you valued? Are you important? Do the customers recognise it? Does the Leadership recognise it? And I think the other big thing is, if you look at our Glassdoor ratings from October of 2016 to now, you will see a huge swing up, 20% to 30% increase in all three categories. Are we set up to be successful as a business? What do you think of the CEO and would you refer a friend? I think that quantitative data would just be completely un biased because it is just employees. I am very good about making sure we don't ask people to do that. But to me, that is really the true quantitative measure of whether I am doing my job.
David Green: And Jig, how do you measure the business impact of what has been a huge uplift in culture, by the sounds of it?
Jignasha Grooms: So are you ready for this? You are going to love this. So we have now had 15 quarters of meeting or beating our AOP. Our customer retention rate is at 95%. We have increased our SaaS offering by 130 plus percent and we have been able to do it while having, I don't want to jinx myself so knock on wood, lower than benchmark voluntary attrition. Actually having performance ratings and performance goals for over 95% of our employees in the system. When I first came, during the first year, we barely paid out bonuses. The last three years, we paid out bonuses of over a hundred percent. Now people will say, can you tie all of that back together? And I can say absolutely and quantitatively. Employee experience and customer experience are just two sides to the same coin. And we watched as our Employee engagement scores and our Glassdoor ratings have gone up but also so have our customer satisfaction ratings, which are now over 92%. So I am a fundamental believer that when you put your employees at the centre of your business value proposition, they reflect forward to your customers and your customers then reflect it back with both, staying with you as a customer and then being advocates for you.
We just did a full brand refresh, the CMO and his team did a magnificent, magnificent job of this. But what you will see on there are customer stories and I think that is what makes the difference. So I definitively feel like it has had business impact.
What I haven't told you, David, is that in addition to all this, in 2020 Epicor actually went through a full change of control event. We were one of the three biggest software deals that happened in the private equity world, globally last year. And one of the things that our current owner CDNR said is, not only did they value, I call it the three P’s, people, product, P&L. They said, not only did they see huge value in all three, but they were really impressed by the Management Team. So we did a full lift and shift of the Management Team, which is great because it keeps that alignment all the way up and down the value chain. But they said they absolutely were incredibly impressed with the culture created and the growth we are seeing globally, not just in the US market and Canada where we have always been strong, but we are starting to see that growth in our international markets too. So a significant quantitative business impact, that is tangible and visible to both our investors, as well as our Board, as well as our employees and what I love is when the employees share in that success, I am one of them. But it wouldn't feel good to get a great bonus if the rest of our employees, were not also getting to benefit.
David Green: Yeah and I think it is great because investors are definitely looking at, I hate the word human capital but tend to use it, they are looking at human capital a lot more now when they are looking at what companies to invest in and what companies not to invest in. We have seen the moves by The Securities and Exchange Commission in the US recently and I think it is going to come in more, how you treat your people and the value of your human capital is going to have a big impact on some of the things that you went through last year. I can see the passion, which is fantastic and it is clear from the initiatives that we have talked through so far that you are focused on showcasing this value quantitatively. How important is it for HR to speak the language of the business? Because when I am speaking to you, I feel like I am speaking to a business person as well as an HR person and that is not always the case with your peers, so how important is it?
Jignasha Grooms: It is critical, it is not optional. I say that, not just because I am someone who came from the Business into HR so I am pretty fluent in it because I had done a lot of that work before I came into HR.
But I tell my team this all the time, if you were to ask my team what are we going to work on? They would say we are not working on anything, unless it adds business value. What I tell my team is, we only have one job, our job is to be in the service of the business' success. And then if I were to distill that all the way down to my direct reports, I would say I only have one job, my one job is to be in the service of my direct reports success. And I think if you have that mindset and you speak the business language, it makes a difference. So as an example, David, when we decided three and a half years ago that we were really going to accelerate our SaaS play, we rolled out training around our products that are in the cloud, that are on a SaaS platform and HR didn't get an exemption. It was mandatory for everyone in HR to go through that training. Now, I made it fun where I would invite our cloud guru on to some of my all hands calls and say, give them a pop quiz, the winner of the pop quiz gets a gift, a prize, a fun monetary prize. But I do think that is important.
And one of the biggest pieces of feedback that I get is that they are always so impressed with how well my team does when it comes to being able to serve them from a business perspective. That our Recruiters actually sound technical. That our HR Business Partners understand how to really influence and deliver an org design plan that is aligned to what the business needs and not what the person needs. I hear that from Compensation, Benefits, HR Operations, HR Tech and I think it is absolutely critical. I don't think it is any longer optional for HR Practitioners to stay in our little bubble, we have to first lead with, what is the business need? Then, how do we distill that into driving alignment amongst the employee base? Then, how do we distill that even further to making sure our Managers have the muscle they need, to continue to drive that alignment? And then you take it down even further to the individual level and say, what do each of our individual employees need to get their development and business growth needs met?
Yes, I hear a lot about the business and HR needs as if they are two separate entities but HR is part of the business and that is clear from what you were saying there.
So a little bit more about how you work with your team. How do you encourage your team to think, not just about running the business but changing the business?
So you just hit on my two favourite acronyms RTB and CTB, I think both of those are equally valued by the way. I am very clear and I have been talking about them for years and I didn't know that you would bring up that exact same verbiage, but I love that verbiage because I think running the business adds just as much value as changing.
So on the run the business side, where our focus is on efficiency and effectiveness. As an example, when I got to Epicor, we had about 13 different HR systems. I said why? There is no way to get any good BI or BA out of this, forget the predictive analytics part, I can't even get clean data. And by the way, my friends in Sales will tell you the same thing from a salesforce.com perspective or whatever CRM they are using.
There is never going to be a tool that is perfect, but how we leverage the tools and how we utilise them is important. So on the run the business side, we really focus on efficiency and effectiveness. We have simplified our HRIS, we have actually added a chatbot through MS Teams so that we can free up our HR team members from having to answer basic questions, like I want to process an out of cycle salary increase, or I have an employee that resigned, what should I do? Or I have an employee that is starting virtually, what should I do? They can now use the chatbot feature for that. I mentioned the AI and staffing already. Then on the run the business side, all this time we free up what I always tell my team, my other three favourite words is, simplify, standardise and communicate. It probably comes from my ops background, I am a Six Sigma green belt, I love operations, how can you be solution forward and keep it simple, simple, simple, and standardised. When I first came, I used to get a lot of pushback and they would say, that is not possible globally we are all too different. I said, no. I am going to tell you that my true definition of inclusion is that we are actually all way more alike than we are different. You know, I bet David, if you and I had a chance to have a coffee or a cocktail, we would find all of our similarities and it doesn't mean that you are not unique and I am not unique because I do believe in a one size fits one employee experience. But when it comes to how we operationalise HR, I think standardising where you can is really important.
So we have drawn those distinctions. On the run the business side, we measure efficiency and effectiveness, including utilisation. On the change the business side, what we measure is impact, business impact.
Here is how we measure it, let me give you a really simple example. We have a pretty robust sales and anybody who is quota-carrying or influencing gets their on-boarding done in a certain way, it was a key priority. Now we have got to where they have become nicely settled and we are now on-boarding everyone, but we actually measure time to quota attained. Change the business. You want to drive business results, measure what matters, which is top line growth, then tie it back to a HR initiative, which was sales and field on-boarding and then measure it. Here is when we trained you. When did you get your first deal in the books? How did we recognise that first deal? And then, how are you doing around quota attainment?
Because here is the truth, David, when people come in on a sales comp plan, if they are making or overachieving of their numbers, they are more likely to stay and by the way, if they make their money their first year, then not only do I have better chance of retaining that talent, but I have a better chance of helping Epicor meet its corporate objectives because I have got this person to productivity faster.
That is an easy example, I can give you a million of them, well, maybe not a million but at least 10 to 15. But that is one really easy example of change the business work, that HR Practitioners can do that you can tie back and articulate to your C-suite and your Board.
David Green: I think one of the other examples that you shared on our previous call was how your team worked on an acquisition documentation, that went beyond a traditional HR playbook. It would be great to hear a little bit about that as well, if you would like to share that?
Jignasha Grooms: Absolutely. So not only do I love what this team has done, but it has become so beloved that our CEO has shared it with the entire C-suite and said, this is what we use. We have touched on a lot of this, so I will give you the slightly shorter version, but our growth plan is both organic and inorganic.
On the organic side, we will focus on cloud migration and SaaS acceleration. On the inorganic side, we focus on significantly sized acquisitions to tuck-ins. But regardless of what size the acquisition is, you really want to make sure that the integration plan is very robust. When I asked my team to build this, what I realised is that there were all these random handles, but very much in silos. So here is the Finance one, the HR one, the IT one and the Product one and I said, no, we HR are going to take lead and build one acquisition integration playbook that has all of these pieces in there. Once we pulled it together, what we realised was the same exact thing as the example I gave you around field on-boarding. Which is the faster that we can integrate this acquisition without, I always tell my team please do not use the words mandatory or absolutely required, because when was the last time you liked someone shoving something down your throat. I think we all have a pretty visceral reaction to that. So I said you have to sell this. You are not going to shove it, you are going to sell it and you want to sell it so that they are excited about being part of the one Epicor team. So we really switched it up about two years ago and just like the other example I gave you, what we measure is business continuity. What we measure is, from the talent assessment work we did, how much of them were we able to retain? How many are excelling? How many have been promoted? So this acquisition integration playbook goes from everything from building the data room, all the way to their first day as Epicoreans and how we show up.
As a simple example, several of us on the Executive Leadership Team, CEO directs, actually show up for the very first day in person. Now we haven't done one for obvious reasons in the last 12 months and if we have, we have had to do remotely. But before that, we would actually show up in person and we would walk that entire employee base through everything from how will their benefits work to who are we culturally.
But the first slide we lead with whenever we do that, David, is just pictures. If I were to show it to you, the last one I showed up with the CFO and our Senior Vice President of Product Development and the first slide was us with our dogs and cats and kids and on vacation, holding a glass of wine or bottle of beer or coffee. The reason why you do that is because it goes back to where I started this conversation with you, which is if you want a strong culture and if you want your employees to want to adapt and align, start with building trust. Building trust starts with being human and having those honest, upfront, forthright conversations. In that same meeting, because we knew everybody was wondering, is my job going to be saved? Am I going to be impacted?
Actually, once we got done with the personal introduction said before we share anything else, we want you to know that only two jobs will be impacted and we wanted to make sure that we were sensitive to those two people. So we had conversations with both of them before the town hall and you could physically feel the entire room relax, it just took all that angst down. Then they asked a question that I don't think they would have otherwise asked and let me tell you about what these businesses have done, one of them delivered a seven figure deal within 90 days of being part of our portfolio and the other one has met or beaten its forecasting targets every quarter for the last six quarters now. I am actually headed there next week because I have been vaccinated, so I am starting to visit some of our sites again. But it makes a difference and it drives business continuity, we can spend a whole hour going through a playbook like that, but having that playbook and having it be more than just the people piece and really tying all those pieces together and the timeline with which you implement, will make the biggest difference around business continuity because we have had a failure too, for exactly that reason.
David Green: I love the way you draw the comparisons with on-boarding, because instead of on-boarding new hires, you are on-boarding people coming from an acquisition so I think that is really important. We have got the penultimate question because I know we are running out of time, but I really want to dig into this a little bit more Jig. You talked about how you quantitively understand the relationship between customer experience and employee experience, which I think is so important and so powerful. Also you said that you present these insights next to each other at Board meetings. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
Jignasha Grooms: I have a peer who runs global support and so he is to customer experience, what I am to employee experience. Since I have joined Epicor, we have really high tenured employees, we really switched out a lot of the Leadership at the very top. One of my peers was here before me, but everyone including the CEO were brought in after me and one of the things that Jason and I do, who is our Head of Global Support, we actually meet with Customer Advisory Boards and we have actually started with a Partner Advisory Boards. We are pretty new to it, we don't have a large Partner play but as we build one, specifically in international, I think it is important. So Jason and I feel like another opportunity, as you said earlier David, to lead by example and to lead from the front. So Jason and I, twice a year, meet with Customer Advisory Boards. In addition to that, pre COVID and when it permitted, if we were having a conference for a specific vertical, like distribution or manufacturing or retail, we would actually go up and present at those and then host panel discussions. So the conversations that we have with customers are very aligned with the way we solicit feedback and input from our employees.
And just like I join Jason for the customer conversations, he then joins me for some of the employee conversations and we lead with that. So whether we are on the big stage during insights, which is a 2000-3000 person event for us, which sounds small, but for a company our size it is our big customer event.
We talk about how we are the two sides of the same coin. The other thing that has happened because we proactively discuss it with our customers is we have now started asking our customers “Hey, we are going to do this conference or meeting for you all, what would you like to talk about? 99.9% of the time their top three includes talent and what has become really fun and of course it makes me feel good, is that because we have such great customers, over 90% customer retention rate, more often than not they will say “well, can Jig please come and share some of the best practices or can you share some of these tools?”
I think that is how you really make sure that those two are tied together because remember we are in the small and medium business space. So while we may sound small compared to the Amazons and the Googles and the Oracles, we are actually pretty big compared to some of our customers and so I think that is how it has become a really positive symbiotic relationship, where our customers feel like they can count on us for best practices and we did that. COVID is a great example, lets go back to where we started, a lot of them needed to know how they would build preparedness plans for employees, how they would communicate if they had to go to work, if they had to go virtual, how would they do that? And while my colleagues were helping them with how to leverage their software to do that, where they could especially on the retail side, I was helping them on the employee side. Not just me personally, but a lot of our HR Business Partners and so I think that is how you tie the customer experience and the employee experience together.
Here is the best part, when everybody knows it and they are all talking about it, then everybody feels really proud of it. So now all of a sudden we have employees who are proud to work at Epicor and proud to help support this customer. We have customers who are proud to have our software and some of them, like ACE Hardware, had their best year in history because they overnight became an essential business. So they felt good about that. We didn't always get it right. So let me be forthright and tell you that while we always hope that our products scale to our customer needs, this was a very unprecedented year and there were times where we got it wrong. But I think the one thing everybody would tell you, employees and customers, is we came in to everything with our best intent to support their success and back to that wonderful A word that you and I love, we did it with agility. So the A word is agility. The B word is benchmarking and the C word is compassion.
David Green: And we are going to finish with the D word, which is data, so you have teed that up absolutely perfectly Jig. The last question to finish and this is a question we are asking all the guests in this series. How does having the right people data in place, support a business operating in a fast paced environment, like Epicor?
Jignasha Grooms: Immensely important and back to that other question that you asked me, about HR speaking business language, it is critical. So I would tell you that in my experience, every Board meeting I have attended in the last four and a half years, as well as the whole change of control process we went through, selling a $5 million company is not a simple process. All of it hinged on people data and that people data was as critical as our customer data, the CRM piece you and I talked about, and that was critical as our product roadmaps and the product data. So I would tell you that, I say this often, it is the three legged stool that the business sits on.
So that people data being clean and crisp and something that, back to our T word, something that our investors and our buyers could trust, made the whole process work better. And it is the same thing, not just in a change of control event, but just in the day-to-day running of the business. For example, on any given day somebody on the Board or my boss, the CEO will say Jig, what is our current headcount? What percentage of our employees have performance ratings? What percentage of our employees have quarterly checkpoints in place? What does our out of cycle budget look like? How are you and your peer, the CFO, accruing for bonuses? I'm not going to share all those numbers with you, David, because they are confidential. I can answer each and every single one of them, to the point where I can tell you in our 31 countries, what percentage of our employees have been utilising our very safe return to office initiative, if they would like to and if local laws allow. And what percentage of our employees are actually saying that has become a really important part of their return to normal, whereas what percentage of our employees are saying, no, I need more time because even though the office may be open at 25%, schools are not open and I have a nine-year-old that I have no place to send. So I think that kind of people analytics, it is the data that really makes sure that you have the E word, which is excellent.
David Green: Fantastic. We have got up to E, we could probably keep going to Z, but I think we have run out of time. So Jig, thank you so much for being a guest on the podcast. I have really enjoyed our discussion. Can you let listeners know how they can stay in touch with you and follow you on social media?
Jignasha Grooms: Absolutely, I am on LinkedIn so please don't hesitate to reach out to me there. And if you would like to just shoot me an email it is jig.grooms@epicor.com and I would love it. I think what all of you will find is that I am pretty responsive, whether you reach out via LinkedIn or via email.
David, thank you so much, not only have I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation and I am sure you can hear it in my voice, I am really honoured to be part of this conversation because I love knowing that you and so many others in the HR world are thinking about people as the competitive differentiator. I think it is making our people feel that very important sentiment that you and I discussed, which is value, personal value and I really appreciate it.
David Green: Well, it has been an absolute pleasure, Jig. I have really enjoyed our discussion, hopefully at some point in the future we will be in the same conference or maybe we can have a coffee together or something like that.
Jignasha Grooms: That would be great, I would absolutely love it and I look forward to meeting you in person soon.