How Invictus Education Group unified HR operations and navigated remote work with Zoho People
The company
Invictus Education Group was formed in 2014 with a vision to become Africa’s Leading Private Vocational Education and Training Network, educating and empowering students to become gainfully employed. Its work based practical, innovative, and online focused approach to education and training allows students to graduate job ready with requisite experience.
Invictus Education Group consists of education institutions (International Hotel School and SAE Creative Media Institute) and a Corporate Training Business (Summit). Spanning 8 campuses, 3 regional offices, an online education division with 260 passionate team members they have educated and trained more than 50, 000 students and corporate learners since inception, with 30, 000 in the last 5 years. Invictus Education Group is well on its way to fulfilling its vision.
The challenge
Part of Invictus Education's workforce is completely remote, part is stationed at campuses long-term to service students, and the last part moves from campus to campus in order to reach as many people as possible. With all of these branches and functions, the greatest challenge for Invictus Education was unifying its HR operations and building a culture that brought employees and management together across long distance.
"Our HR processes and administrative work was based on excel sheets, cabinets of files, and a great deal of printed forms. Every week, we would spend almost a day just compiling data manually. With employees working from different locations, this way of management was inefficient. We wanted to upgrade ourselves and be more efficient," said Carmen Botes, Implementation Lead at Invictus Education.
The solution
Invictus Education had already started using Zoho Recruit for their hiring processes, so choosing Zoho People was a natural choice for them.
With Zoho People, Invictus Education has gone 100% paperless. Right from self-service options to leave, performance, learning, and communication, Invictus Education manages their entire HR process with Zoho People.
The first thing that new hires are often swamped with is onboarding paperwork. It kills the excitement of starting new roles and overwhelms employees. Zoho People has turned this into a step-by-step process with e-signature options to give employees a hassle-free experience.
"The beautiful, functional onboarding portal sets a smooth start for our new hires. It reduces the first-day burden and gives a beautiful experience even when employees are remote," Botes commented
"I'm a fan of Zoho. But I also evaluated other solutions to check which would suit our requirements. Zoho People topped the list because of its excellent customization abilities. We can literally build any custom process we need. I haven't come across any other product like this before. It's a great value for money".
- Carmen Botes, Implementation Lead at Invictus EducationBefore Zoho People, even simple tasks like applying for leave were done manually on registers and excel sheets. But now, the team at Invictus Education is able to take care of their day-to-day activities all by themselves. Many use Zoho People's mobile application extensively for this self-service feature. Additionally, both the mobile portal and the main desktop app ensure that department executives and team leads are able to manage their reportees easier.
Teams at Invictus Education also made tremendous use of the customization capabilities in Zoho People. They've built digital misconduct process flows, a finance procurement system, and specialised reporting. With this flexibility, they have been able to tailor Zoho People to their exact needs.
Benefits and ROI
After implementing Zoho People, Invictus Education saw a 100% adoption rate from employees. "Employees now have the freedom to take control of their information, and every request or transaction has a digital footprint that we can refer back to in the future as well. A lot of burden has been removed from our HR department after Zoho People," said Botes.
Zoho People has created a reliable space with secure permissions and easy access to the right individuals. Before, it took about 10 hours for the HR staff at Invictus to gather data, analyze it, and come up with effective HR reports. With ready to access auto-generated reports in Zoho People, they've saved time and effort, and their decision-making has improved.
"Zoho People has been a saving grace during Covid by bringing everyone onboard and keeping our business afloat. Also, we feel very safe with Zoho. Since it gives complete control over deciding access levels down to each individual field, we're sure that no one is seeing any info they shouldn't be. This is a big relief to us," said Carmen.
Looking forward
Zoho People has enabled Invictus Education's HR team to concentrate more on their people engagement strategies and less on admin work. With all the benefits and a now-improved employee experience, they look to continue using the product, explore new opportunities within Zoho, and strengthen their HR processes even further.