FAQs

Joy: I think the best way to not to have or to avoid having the dispute, and as we know, most of the disputes are based on, unfortunately, the employees’ behavior themselves. Now that we are 100% reliant on Empower in terms of the timekeeping data, I think one of the issues that were mitigated is the conflict between the time and attendance from June versus the time and attendance in Empower that the payroll team has to reconcile every pay period. So hopefully, with the full support of Empower and the employees, the payroll team will make sure to diligently process your timesheets to make sure that we will avoid errors that would obviously result in disputes.

Anj: The implementation of the global payroll solution would also help improve the payroll process for us, which is targeted to go live in the middle of the year.

Naji: Yes, it’s part of that. The inflation rate has been considered. A certain percentage has been considered as well in each of the planning that we do. And yes, we wanna make sure that this is not just one time, but on the side of People and Culture, creating a team that would be able to help us out on a regular basis when it comes to benchmarking our salaries and benefits.

Anj: We’ll take note of that request back and coordinate with our service delivery team. As you know, in our Baguio site, we do have sleeping quarters there because Baguio has been one of our sites where we have 24/7 operations. We took that into consideration. So now that we are expanding the operations also in our Manila offices then that’s also something that our facilities and administration team is going to be looking into for sure.

Inge: I wanted to add that this is not only for night shifters because regardless of your shift, we’re not supposed to be sleeping while we’re working, right? And I know we’re not, so it’s more about even during the daytime, for those who are working during the day, during your break you might wanna take a snooze or if the commute hours are very, very long then it might be good even for daytime shifts. It’s all about actually giving an opportunity for team members across all shift schedules to rest during their breaks or before and after the shift.

Scott: The MVP is expected to be released in early Q2. We’re working towards releasing it as soon as we can, but early Q2 is when we should expect it. So what will the MVP include? The critical thing for the minimum viable product is we address the immediate pain points. Communication is a pain point. We want to address the problems that we have communicating with people, the issues that we have with HR, making sure employee data is current, things like phone numbers, etc., and the ability to do push notifications. We’ve seen what happens with SMS messages when they sometimes are a lot more challenging than we would hope. So being able to do push notifications is important. Being able to get your leaves, being able to get information about your pay slips and your other concerns. So that’s what we’ll have pretty much from the MVP, and as we go on that’ll grow, and we’ll add more and more features. So one of the things that we’re really excited about is being able to add a loyalty program to the super app so we can start rewarding our people for doing the right thing. And you know, we’ll open up a Loyalty Shop which we’ll make sure to have wonderful rewards inside it, such as iPads and iPhones and all these wonderful things. While Q2 is the super app’s expected delivery date, we are actually setting up a new team in the next couple of weeks, and hopefully, we can get it out the door quicker.

Henry: Last year, we pitched the first batch of ECL (Emapta Customized Laptops), and we’re able to work with the vendor to iterate and improve on them. And at the moment, we’ve got over 2,000 laptops in stock here in the Philippines, and starting in February, we’ll start to issue them as standard for all talent onboarding. So that’s for core and client hires.

We’re working to establish import permits in Colombia, Macedonia, and Sri Lanka. Malaysia will be included too when we start operating there. This is to ensure we can deliver and provide laptops right from onboarding talent. We’re also looking at expanding the portfolio of what we have available in terms of laptops. So we have multiple models, our standard one, and then some higher specification options available that the Growth team can share with customers when they’re coming on board. In addition to the laptops, we’re also getting Emapta Customised Monitors, which will have the Emapta branding and will start to be issued as a standard from March to April this year. The second part is around the gadgets and or what’s going to happen to the old hardware. Unfortunately, we do have some compliance aspects with PEZA and other regulatory bodies, which makes it a little bit harder for us to give away until the assets are at the end of their life.

Henry: We’ve hired a number of additional engineers, and we have a roadmap for 2023 where we’ll be implementing additional tools that monitor when certain attacks are taking place, and we’ll take preventative action to automatically stop someone from trading data.

But probably just one thing to call out on terminology: there’s a difference between an incident, a security incident, and a breach. A security incident is when the event happens, and we need to investigate what’s occurred and identify if any data is actually being stolen or lost, and it’s declared as a breach we’ve actually verified that there has been a loss of data. We do have privacy@emapta.com, which is an e-mail address where you can communicate when if you feel that there’s an incident or would like any support in understanding policies or processes. So feel free to send an email should you have any concerns.

Coming back to our roadmap, you know we’re looking at implementing data loss prevention solutions which are installed on our workstations and can detect sensitive information such as birth dates, names, bank details, Social Security numbers, and so on and it will preventatively prompt people should they try and send it outside of the organization. So we’re also looking at implementing, as I mentioned, tools to monitor our networks and servers and also on our web servers where Empower is hosted, as well as tools that detect if there’s any attempt that attacks and can shut them down as well. So hand in hand with the Global Legal and Compliance team, our data protection officer, and information security, we are taking the appropriate action to safeguard our core data and, of course, more importantly, our employee data.

Emapta is going to undergo ISO 27001 certification, so that’s information security management and that requires us to comply with a long list of controls and international standards to verify that we have the appropriate policy in place to safeguard data as well. We plan to achieve our certifications in Q1 this year.

Scott: The MyEmapta app will absolutely interact with HRIS. For example, you’ll be able to update your own personal information. One other feature that the Super App has that relates to HRIS is something that we still need to discuss with the HR group. But pretty much anything that is available in the HR system can be made available in MyEmapta.

The whole idea of MyEmapta is we’re moving the information that you care about to your mobile phone. We’re able to provide you with the information that you need on the mobile phone. So it doesn’t specifically answer your question, but definitely, if we feel that the information is appropriate to put on My Emapta, then that’s definitely something we will do.

Scott: We have a number of initiatives and at the moment, there are two things we’re doing. One is talent onboarding, and the other one is customer onboarding. Anybody that is involved in both customer or talent onboarding, you know the number of forms that we fill out, you know the processes – some are automated and others are manual. The goal with both the customer onboarding and the talent onboarding is that it will be fully automated from end to end. We are also creating an HRIS as we speak. Most of the design was already done, so we will have one source of information.

We are also embarking on a big data initiative, so we will have our talent information in big data, and we’re working towards some very exciting systems that will allow us to search for candidates better than any of our competition and we’ll be releasing some details of that over the coming months.

Inge: Matt and I work in Growth, and we talk to a lot of future prospective customers as well as with the service delivery team with our existing customers. So we see what the demand or the need from our customers and future customers are. And yes, there are certain roles that are being replaced by AI, but we’ve really seen in the last three years as well through the pandemic there are a lot of roles that are not replaced by AI and continue to be filled by people, and a lot of it is also part of that digital transformation that we are also making happen. Digital transformation doesn’t happen overnight. While it’s happening, people are needed, and that’s often when customers come to us and say, ‘you know what, we have got these five systems we need to implement, but we need a data entry person for six months to help us with this,’ and we see that those customers then after the six months, they don’t let the person go. They actually utilize them for other tasks. So we are already seeing a trend from our customers that they are utilizing their team across different roles. They’re upskilling them and using them for other things in the companies because there is other work to be done. So we can already see that there is an organic kind of future-proofing happening already within companies. We see it ourselves, but we see that with clients.

Matt: We will inevitably lose some roles to AI, but then those roles will become AI developments. So it’s just a matter of how it actually transformed. We’re seeing it every day like obviously certain roles just sort of say, OK well, we don’t need that as much anymore. But you know what? Now that we’ve actually done digital transformation, we actually need more support on our IT side of things.

Henry: I think AI is replacing the monotonous tasks that can be repetitively done and automated to streamline and optimize things. There’s always a level of critical thinking or analysis that will be required and will require human intervention. So I think it’s actually probably making or improving the quality of work that we’ll be doing here by having tools take care of those more boring tasks that take a lot of time.

Inge: The development team is helping us hone our skills and our team members so that we all can grow and learn new skills to make that happen.

Scott: I think, as an organization, we would be very naive to ignore the importance of AI, and we actually have some pretty significant AI initiatives in place at the moment. We’re actually taking on a 30-year veteran expert in this field as our Chief Architect, so it’s something that we take very, very seriously. We’re looking at creating a next-generation portal for talent that will incorporate AI from day one. The good news about AI is some things will disappear. There will be a lot fewer lawyers in the world. I guess a lot of people think that’s a good thing. No disrespect to our lawyers, but it’s also gonna bring a lot of exciting things, particularly in the areas of healthcare. The people that do screening for cancers and things like that, AI can already do that much more efficiently. So it brings a lot of benefits to the world. I think we’re many, many years away from having someone like Data from Star Trek. So, don’t worry so much. AI is very limited in what it can do, but it’s certainly something that we need to embrace as a company.

Naji: I know that Inge already mentioned the learning and development, but that’s where the critical part would come in on the side of People and Culture, to make sure that we would be able to upskill our employees and do that multi-skilling as well, offer certain certifications that are required. and at the same time, when technology comes in, data mining is important because we’d be able to analyze and foresee what is needed, and what kind of role or talent would we need eventually.

Jenn: From a talent acquisition of perspective, we’ve seen a lot of research involving AI and replacing jobs, but the overall result says that AI will not replace humans, but it will complement humans, or it will add more jobs. Because based on performance, if technology is complemented by talent by humans, then the performance is more efficient and faster, and innovative than just using it without technology or AI. So don’t worry about that. We’ll have more jobs that are more strategic than we used to do.

Nina: As the Emapta is concerned, and as long as relationships in the heart stay in our core values, no other AI could have the best relationship with our clients and our customers. So as long as we all value relationships, no one or AI could do that best but us.

Scott: I think the first thing is really looking at North Star goals, and for us to reflect. Reflection means that we recognize that we cannot continue doing things to same way and expecting different results. It simply doesn’t happen. So we really had to look at the expertise we had within the team. We needed to be realistic about our capabilities within the team.

We decided to take a monumental leap into a technology that’s commonly known as Rapid Application Development (RAD). We have something called OutSystems which is a RAD platform. It’s not a new company, believe it or not, they’ve been around for over 20 years, so we’re not embarking on something that provides risk for us. That’s actually the opposite. They just so happened to be number 1 in Gartner as far as where they sit in their space. It will allow us to build technology much faster than we can today.

In fact, the minimum speed increase will be significant. It will allow us to look at the things we have built. Let’s understand the lessons we’ve learned from those technologies that we’ve built and let’s take a bold move and actually rebuild them all. So in Q1, we will be doing talent onboarding in this new technology, which I know is a pain point for someone who joined the company and had to go through that onboarding process — and it was pretty painful. But the idea is that we’re gonna be delivering a new technological solution that will make life a lot easier. Now, what do I mean by that?

Everybody that I’m talking to now has a phone in their pocket or in their hands, right? We’re also asking people to keep basic things like your information up to date. And how do we do that? We need to go, and you need to go to this link, and you need to go to this form. It would be so much easier if I could give you a push notification to your mobile phone and ask you to update the information on your phone, right? It would be much easier if you could do your time and attendance on your phone and if marketing could tell you about events we’ve got on your phone.

When we experience natural disasters, which are common in the Philippines with the weather. We found out that 30% of the people never even got a notification because their information was incorrect. So we will be launching My Emapta which is our own in-house super app. Afterward, we’ll start with the basics. So you’ll be able to get your time and attendance. You’ll be able to get your payroll and leave information, you’ll be out to get information from marketing about what’s going on in the company.

And as time goes on throughout the year, we’ll be adding more and more features to that app. And we want that to be the core of what we build for everybody going forward. So expect a lot from us in, in the first quarter. We have a lot on our roadmap and we’ll start rolling things out just before the end of Q1. But the rapid rollout will be significant in the other quarters and our goal is to replace everything that provides us with high levels of pain. The IT team has taken on the challenge. There’s a lot of retraining, retooling, and relearning. We’re engaging in an agile methodology, which makes it much easier for us to engage with our customers.

Anj: To be clear on the CRM for our service delivery team, as we’ve mentioned earlier, there is a client onboarding experience solution that we are developing together with a partner company called Mobius Solution, and this is already something that we’re starting on to develop with the rapid application development. By partnering with this company, our teams on Empower are concentrated on the development and speeding up the development of the super apps, but that doesn’t mean that all other initiatives are put on the back burner and we know that alongside the talent onboarding is just as important as client onboarding. We will integrate them into the currency arm that our growth and enablement teams are using to put it in a position where the service delivery team will have access as well to that information. So it flows naturally or completely without having to go from multiple systems or manual processes to another. The same goes for integrating and accessing employee data.

Inge: I just wanted to highlight why that the client onboarding module on Empower is so important. It’s because you know our teams now we currently operate the employee data separately from the client data. And that’s also one of the sources for a lot of manual work that when we’re trying to get a report about, I wanna know something about this company, how big they are, what’s their team size about as well as who their team members are. Connecting the client onboarding module and the talent onboarding module is so critical because they will finally then bring those two pieces of information together. And then in the super app that will flow through and it will then finally make it easier for us to work on a system where we have all the things we wanna know in one.

Inge: I think it’s a question concerning our client staff when they are required to work in the office. We currently have a function where that they cannot log in to Empower on their mobile phone because it’s about the office location.

So the short answer is yes. There is a plan for restrictions if and as needed; if a staff member would be allowed only to work in the office, they would not be able to log in remotely to avoid misuse.

Naji: Big chunks of plans and actions are laid out in this section of training and development. Last year we focused on strengthening our HR Business Partnerships as well as HR operations. But this year, really we would like to focus on building the culture, improving engagement, and developing our people.

In the coming days, we will start to roll out the activities related to Annual Performance Review and use it as an opportunity to kick off the job analysis and competency mapping. So we can determine the training needs in each department or particular role and identify critical roles as well for succession management and leadership development, including skills certifications.

There are also discussions on how we can further promote internal mobility not just on Core but also on the side of our offshore staff. We are also beefing up the team in the section with the hiring of technical trainers and instructional designers who can help create digital content or modules customised to the needs of our clients or of our organization to increase their reach. Lastly, it is important to understand that all this is tied up with establishing our distinct rewards and recognition programs, including benchmarking of salary and benefits.

Naji: Yes, earlier I was able to announce that we have added people to our Learning and Organisational Development team. We have technical trainers now and, of course, instructional designers. We have the plan to offer technical training as well and eventually, go into certifications. We’re also looking at supporting someone when it comes to educational assistance or getting certifications externally.

Naji: Yes, we do. Leadership development is part of the plans that we are working on, and hopefully, we could offer it sooner while we introduce or, should I say, we go through the annual performance review. So that would be a good kickoff.

Naji Cruz: We have to be kind of deliberate and clear on expectations about working from home. We need to create policies and procedures that could support that culture. We should have policies that would support clearly defined rules and responsibilities with clear performance metrics or KPIs (key performance indicators) as well. Each department should be held accountable, or they should establish processes to promote collaboration and, at the same time, set an expectation that on their end, the managers are also required to check in and review the work of their teams on a consistent basis or manner.

Once we have those policies in place and procedures, we will let everyone know that that is part of our EVP or Employee Value Proposition. As you know, having that in our EVP would mean making it part of our sales pitch to prospective clients and employees. This will help the growth that we have been discussing because we are expanding our workforce or network as well. This would also help us reach out to the talents or even keep our existing talents regardless of their location. And lastly, we should be supported with the right technology or cloud solutions to help make our employees productive. It is critical that we have a dedicated communication channel or portal where everyone can go to check updates or documents or whatever is necessary information.

Naji: Regarding the yearly inflation, we have to understand that budget allocation for a certain percentage of salary increase is in place and considered as we plan for the year to come. The major activity where HR and department heads come together for this is during the Annual Performance Review (APR), where each leader will have the opportunity to reward the performers and align salaries as needed based on market or role development. We also really don’t need to limit it to just the APR or the annual performance review period, so we are building a framework to ensure that salary structures are in place and benchmarking is done on a regular basis as well.

In relation to the question on the Health Maintenance Organisation (HMO), there are initial proposals of other benefits listed and are currently undergoing evaluation. The approach is to offer flexible benefits that our employees and clients may choose from depending on their employees’ needs. This includes probably reallocation of some benefits that are already approved but are seemingly untapped, such as the leaves that we are already approving, then eventually, you know, being forfeited at some point and replacing it with another option.

Some of the things being looked into that may require further study would be educational assistance, medical reimbursement, or probably strengthening mental health support. I know that at this point, the HMO is the main benefit that you are seeing. But I just wanted to emphasize that for this year particularly, there has been a huge or big enhancement on that one to break the traditional hierarchy-based dependent enrollment. And so far, for now, we can actually accommodate dependents who are over age already, from 60 to 70 years old, and not all companies are actually offering that and even allowing married employees to still support their parents with medical insurance. Additionally, one of the things that we have been working on is the enhancement of the group life insurance. And by February, we’re hoping that we’ll be able to do the roadshow.

As for retirement, I would have to say that yes, there were initial conversations that have happened already and we’ll ensure that it will continue for further development of how this concept can be considered in our menu of benefits and total rewards.

Naji: The company’s growth, employee retention, and employee experience have always been HR’s priority. We have started with the reorganisation of the team and identifying the right roles or expertise that is required. And at the same time, a number of resources have been added to our team to support the lack of technology or automation that is needed in our process.

Next, we’ve actually started partnering since last year closely with the Legal and Compliance team for consultation and review of the processes surrounding Data Privacy and Info Security and how we can better protect the company, our clients, including employees, as we collect, store, and use those information. We’re also in the process of consolidating, and reviewing not just the code of conduct but also the handbook and all of the policies that we have here, and this includes sitting down with our managers or each of the departments to carefully understand their requirements on common challenges that can be addressed by certain policies, guidelines, and effective performance management.

Lastly, there is a continuous and cautious effort to put forward the demand for automation and acquire the right technology that would address the complexity of transactions in HR. We’re glad to actually share that we’re about to sign a partnership with another vendor that would help us out when it comes to ticket management, and hopefully, that would improve the SLA of our team. That type of ticket management or ticket tool would actually deliver omnichannel support in our transactions. It would build a knowledge base and, of course, promote self-service as well. Also, just to add, maybe to what Scott Darrow have mentioned already, our very own developers are also working on the talent onboarding module for us to have a one-stop shop for our successful candidates or new hires. This will build a seamless flow from the onboarding team to use and communicate to successful candidates from job offer issuance, up to contract signing, up to the submission of pre-employment requirements to extend support to new hires on self-service manner or have a dedicated resource in HR to actually help them out through their journey as a new hire.

Inge: Even before the pandemic, we were already very much a hybrid type of company. Having multiple offices specifically in the Philippines, not all of us could in just one site. So we always had to work on Skype and MS Teams, and that has made it easy for us during the pandemic to switch to working from home. We’re seeing the advantages and at Emapta, we are always here to give maximum flexibility.

It’s also important to be there in person for some activities – it can be how wonderful to be around others, and so we very much encourage everyone to come into the office, meet with team members, meet other departments, and really just join wherever and as much as you can.

The question was also asked earlier whether we plan to establish a head office for core, and the answer was no, but not it’s not because the work we do as part of the core team is the kind of work where we need to be where our people are. We are for our client staff, supporting them, being there for them, being around them, connecting with them, and making sure they have everything they need. That’s literally our product and that’s our service. So we need to be where they are. We need to be where the action is. This is why our core teams will always be at all our offices and office locations and the same of course in Sri Lanka, Colombia, and Macedonia, as we get more client staff globally.

Tim Vorbach: We want to focus on establishing and building our new countries, but we have got Malaysia as well. So Malaysia has just been incorporated. Again, it’s all about adding access to our talent pool so that we can very quickly have the talent available to meet the demand in a faster manner than what the market is used to being able to deliver people.

Tim Vorbach: Yes, I think that’s definitely a long-term plan of ours. As soon as we can establish our still emerging, fledging offices in some of the regional areas, then yes, we’ll continue to build out offices further and further across the Philippines, and ultimately, we hope to do that in other countries as well. Our pool of talent would appreciate being able to work outside of the main CBDs (central business districts), and yeah, we’ll bring our facilities and our operations there as soon as we can justify that type of investment and that exercise.

Jenn Alba: For the person who asked the question. you can send me specifically the concern or the list of referrals that have not been contacted by the team. At the same time, I will also check with Mina and Joms. These are our team members who handle our EMBuddy or Employer Referral Program (ERP), just to make sure that we’ve contacted them. We added team members to the ERP program and came up with a process.

From the time that we receive the referral from our employee, there should be a confirmation, and immediately, it should be processed and provided with feedback. For 2022, for core employees, we received 258 referrals, and 13% or 33 people were hired: 24 or 9% for core requirements, and nine or 3% for client staff. So for our core employees who are referring candidates for core and client staff, we want to maximize or leverage them because they are part of our top 10 channels effective channels for hiring. At the same time, we should be doing a great job in providing feedback. So apologies for that, and I will take a look at that and provide feedback immediately.

Bianca Osorio: Also working side by side with our global talent solutions team, if I may add as well. So in the last years, there were certain gaps in maybe technology and processes that we really worked hard for, back and forth, multiple different iterations in trying to build up the technology, the Applicant Tracking System (ATS) that we’re using, as well as the different actual processes that we’re going to be taking so that we’ll have less human errors. And I think moving forward, this year onwards, you’ll see more responsiveness because of that… Because we’ve built the efficiency in the process there as well.

Inge Zwick: When we refer colleagues or friends, or family members to Emapta, if it’s for a client opportunity at Emapta, it’s the client who decides who they want to hire. So I could put my brother forward, who I think is amazing, but in the end, it’s a customer who decides who they choose. So as Jenn already mentioned, of course, we need to make sure we respond and contact all the referrals. So that’s amiss, but also know that we don’t have an impact on who can be hired for clients because it’s their choice, and we really are hiring as per the talent.

Nina Avecilla: We are always on the lookout for great office spaces for us because that’s one of our commitments to Emapta. One of our strategies is to ensure that we have office spaces that are closest to the homes of the people. And so recently, we have been looking at possible expansion spaces in Baguio, which will also serve as our business continuity strategy. We are currently exploring a PEZA-certified site which Poy Chavez and Reggie and Duncan, and the rest of the workspace innovation team have started assessing if it could really meet our standards. It’s not too far from our existing office in Baguio, but it’s also still in the city center.

The same goes with Quezon City because we know that they are starting to outgrow the T.I.P. site, so to those who also live in the northeast side, we’re looking at the possibility of whether we expand within the T.I.P. or also consider other strategic locations in Quezon City nearer to the Bulacan, Fairview, Commonwealth area or North Caloocan area.

For now, we have a very good footprint in Makati. As you know, we already opened the two new floors at PNB. We have another floor that’s opening up in early February, in a few weeks’ time and that will add about 135 seats making our total seats in PNB 1,000.

In Ortigas, we still have three offices. In terms of physical security, with the leadership of the I.T. team, we have actually already started there and the centralization of all our CCTV cameras. Next to that is the centralization of our biometrics system so that with the use of technology, we will heighten our security without the need of hiring guards. In fact, at PNB, we have already piloted an automatic door closer for those on the 4th floor. You may have noticed that we have used technology to heighten our physical security and modernize our offices so that we still feel safe at work, even without a guard. All our buildings have been carefully selected to be fully secure so that all our buildings have guards at the main lock entrance at the ground level anyway. We’ll continue enhancing what we can do from a physical security standpoint, but those are the ones we have in place. 

Bianca Osorio: If we were doing an exercise about one word to start 2023, it’s going to be “growth” because we have really lofty goals about growth. We’re hoping to reach 1,000% more leads and more customers and that also means a lot of different things for a lot of different people. I’m sure some of you have heard 1,000% more customers than that means like 10 times the things that I’m doing right now. No worries, Nina and the team will share with you the support that we’re going to provide you as well.

We definitely want to be able to expand more in our four different regions, not just in terms of our customer base, but we’re also looking at the headcount that we’re bringing in. You’ve heard about the North Star, and our vision is to be faster. Everything now requires us to be quicker. So from the customer acquisition side, ourselves in Marketing and Growth, with Matt and the rest of the Growth department, we’re seeing not just the growth in terms of our core team, but also growing our customer base. We’re expanding to a lot of different countries right now, gaining more visibility, and bringing in experts to really help us with these goals. And from there, we rely on our trusted recruitment team to help bring in the headcount, because as you already know, every new customer that we are able to close would require several headcounts.

There are a lot of strategies from talent attraction marketing to the overall operations of recruitment, we have the tools that we’re setting up to be able to support this – the headcount increase that we’re seeing, that’s going to happen in the next year and this year as well. So there’s definitely a lot of growth at a faster pace with operational excellence through the right people in place, and more collaboration. So we hope to collaborate more with our Growth, Customer Enablement, Recruitment, and Customer Success teams, and I’m sure that’s also the sentiment of our other departments.

Roy Figueroa: I think that the key here as we talk about growth that’s available to each and every one of us, especially the core team, I think we need to realize that to make this happen, everyone has to be thinking globally as a solution.

Expanding to Sri Lanka, Colombia, and Macedonia means that for our clients, we could make recruiting for roles faster because you have all of a sudden recruitment teams working and more opportunities for them to place roles that they may not have thought of before. Maybe they’re working with another provider or still doing it themselves, you know, hiring the people from the U.K. instead of hiring that person from Macedonia. So really, to make this work and it will work, it is already working: we now have 100 staff outside the Philippines, client and core staff. In fact, our first global solution in Sri Lanka was actually to address our internal requirements in it. So we know it works.

And then as core employees, we just need to think global all the time. Are we doing the same for our clients or our staff outside the Philippines? For example, if you’re holding a client-facing role, you will have the opportunity to know enough about our operations. If you don’t, please ask us, and we’ll let you know. But just introducing the idea that, hey, you know, we’re now in Macedonia, Sri Lanka, which is in the same time zone as yours, if it will get the interest of your clients and they will ask the questions which again we’ll be very happy to guide you to respond to and again addressing that last point.

Very recently, Cris Soliman, who’s been with us a long time, has moved on to help us with global client management. It’s a realization of the fact that through expansion, global opportunities are open to all core staff. It really starts with that mindset, you know, think global. In four or five years’ time, we will see at least 30% of our staff will be from outside the Philippines. It’s not because we’re moving away, but because we’re hiring a lot of people outside the Philippines now who are going to support our existing core staff, whose knowledge and know-how can be leveraged by giving you the opportunities to grow with us and contribute to the success of Emapta.

Inge Zwick: In terms of expanding for office location, and this is also very relevant to Colombia, we’re always looking to expand our office locations because they are the backbone of our operations and they are our way of being a great employer that can easily close to great talent.

Actually, one of the reasons I joined Emapta back then is because Tim allowed flexibility. This was before the pandemic and he’s like, “I don’t need you in the office every day,” and we have an office in Alabang which is close to where I live, too. So that attracted me to the company and this is part of our value. So yes, we are expanding more office locations both in and around Metro Manila as well as Baguio and for Colombia, I know Chris Ross is already expanding or looking for expanding into new office locations in Colombia.

For us as a business, our strategic office network has to make sense in that there is enough demand and enough people who really want to be around those locations. We’re very open to your input as well if you feel that as a company we should have a site in a certain location. Please do let us know so we can evaluate it.

Nina Avecilla: Well, similar to what Roy said, we won’t make it happen just by ourselves, right? And that’s the reason why there’s been a very strong collaboration, particularly with the Service Delivery and the People and Culture team, as well as all the other departments, of course.

I think when we talk about growth, we talk about people, right? And with people comes experience, that’s why we launched #EmaptaExperience. I hope you guys have used that on your social media because seeing your experience matters. We have always been very open to feedback. Even during the New Hire Orientation (NHO), our facilitators would always tell our new hires to share their feedback. This also goes for both our clients and our staff, because we treat them as our customers.

The leadership team would treat everybody as our customers because we are here to serve them. And that all boils down to that experience, so, from Service Delivery, we have started rolling out the Voice of the Customer (VoC) survey, which measures our Net Promoter Score (NPS) and client satisfaction. We really want to make sure that we’re doing the right thing and that’s what the customers expect out of us, but also on the employee side, on the People and Culture side, we have started building the open mic sessions, which has been a great open forum like a focus group discussion wherein we get to listen to our teams so that we know what we could improve on or what is it that we should stop doing or what is it that we could continue doing. Whatever feedback you have, it’s for our good because we’re always very open –we reflect on it, and we act on that right and we report the fact to you because it’s important that we’re able to share the results of the input that they have given us.

And I think that’s part of the growth that the company is not just growing by the numbers, but you also feel it for yourself that you know that you’ve grown not just by title, but also financially and whether that translates to achieving your dreams because that’s the perfect way of saying that “I grow with Emapta,” right?

We really want everybody to feel that you are part of this. In the past 12 years, we are where we are and we are who we are because of you. We want to continue looking after our people and that’s why even today, after three years in the pandemic, you know we have adopted and embraced a hybrid working model so that we could provide flexibility to everybody. We have #HappyAtWork programs, health and wellness initiatives, as well as a lot of engagement activities.

We have been continuously working on the experience, including the upgrade of our communication channels. This includes the relaunch of CHEER (Center for HR Employee Enquiries and Requests) last year. We will continue improving it because it’s really one of the ways that you could share with us what you need because it’s an HR and employee portal. We are building on providing you with a great experience where you’re able to get what you need faster in the snap of a finger and where everybody feels supported.

Growth may be good, but at the same time, it creates fear. However, we have been doing it together, as we always say, stronger together, and we’re better together to overcome what’s uncertain.

Tim Vorbach: Yes, we did reach our revenue target, and the profitability was in line with our expectations. But equally important to that, I think last year was really a transformational year as far as the quality of our performance is concerned. I’ve had clients that have been with us for seven years that have reached out to me, and some of these clients are very discerning. They’re very quick to let me know when things aren’t going so well, and they’ve made very specific points about watching us evolve as an organization. And I’ve said we are the strongest we’ve ever been, and I really believe that, and I think that if I look back on the year, not just the revenue, not just the profits, but about how the organization transformed itself, that is the most significant thing to me.

Jenn Alba: As early as Q4, we met with division managers and division leaders to understand their forecast for 2023 with the North Star Target and help them plan early for all the recruitment requirements. Currently, we’re working on about 80+ requirements for Q1, and we’re anticipating to increase that to another 100 headcount which means, if we look at the current headcount for Core, that’s more than 30% growth to be able to manage the growth of client staff and also the current business, making sure we deliver all the requirements in Core in a faster turnaround time.

Our current average is 30 days; our target is to meet that in 15 days. Last year’s turnaround time was 26 days. We’ve set up a lot of new strategies and teams, from talent attraction and marketing to sourcing, global recruitment, and multi-geo sourcing. We started using our applicant tracking system, dealing with a lot of data analytics to come up with great strategies for attracting talent.

To make sure that the team is scalable, we recently completed our first batch of RISE programs. These are our free training for people with disabilities. From this group, we will train them to become sourcers and recruiters, and eventually, they can also manage our clients and requirements. From this team, we will grow the recruitment headcount organically and again support the growth for Core hiring.

We also launched a lot of campaigns, including the IT graduate program, where we recently completed and hired six headcounts to complete 10 headcounts for growth because one of the challenges in hiring for Core is in technology. And while there are new technologies coming in, I think part of the strategy is to be able to provide training as early as the senior years for university graduates and align that gap with the requirement and continue doing that under our Emapta Academy and their Learning and Development.

Tim Vorbach:

1. Resourcing capacity – We have been fortunate enough to be growing, and we didn’t keep up. It is now because we were able to start catching up on that and increasing the team sizes and aligning them more accurately and appropriately for the growth of our clients and their teams. So that was the first challenge that we’ve had, and I feel we’re in a very different position, and hopefully, everybody can also feel it inside the teams, and our commitment to that is by working closely together with our forecast growth and our budgets and making sure that we’re not getting caught behind and that we are being prepared and proactively hiring for people and talent so that we are always aligned and we’re not behind it.

2. Technology – We’ve been an organization that has gotten across the line every single time by the sheer hard work of everybody here. It’s been the long hours, the work ethic, the conscientiousness from almost a very, very manual process, and many, many times. But I’m very, very confident with Scott joining the organization and everyone rallying behind him and all the initiatives that Henry’s driving forward, we are really investing very, very heavily in that. And the goal is that rather than us as an organization dragging our technology because that’s what it feels like is that we’re going to be a technology-ed company and really this year is gonna be hopefully a defining year where we look at us today, and then we see us at the end of the year as far as our technology is concerned.

Anj Capispisan: So during the leadership summit for the North Star strategy session, one of the expectations and one of the things that we’re presented by our global expansion director, Roy, is the plan for the expansion for the geographies. I could remember that for the year 2023, the expected number of staff for the global expansion should be at 600. In the video earlier, you’ve seen that there are already 100 across the expansion countries. So that includes Colombia, Macedonia, and Sri Lanka, and includes both the Client Staff and the Core Staff. So the 500 more is expected to be delivered by all of those three countries, and with Malaysia also adding up to the countries for this year, I think that’s something that is for sure would be doable for our Sales and Recruitment teams, right? 

Bianca Osorio: Yeah. Additionally, there are a lot of campaigns that are actually pushing out right now with the specific intent for our prospects, for our potential customers to really look at… For instance, someone in the U.S. is really looking at nearshoring in Colombia. There are a lot of opportunities that had gone to increase as well. Obviously, it starts from generating interest to really hiring a headcount for that. But yeah, what I just mentioned sounds about right in terms of the projected headcount. Obviously, we wanna overachieve, but that’s what we’ve said for this year at least. 

Tim Vorbach: Yes, we did reach our revenue target, and the profitability was in line with our expectations. But equally important to that, I think last year was really a transformational year as far as the quality of our performance is concerned. I’ve had clients that have been with us for seven years that have reached out to me, and some of these clients are very discerning. They’re very quick to let me know when things aren’t going so well, and they’ve made very specific points about watching us evolve as an organization. And I’ve said we are the strongest we’ve ever been, and I really believe that, and I think that if I look back on the year, not just the revenue, not just the profits, but about how the organization transformed itself, that is the most significant thing to me.

Jenn Alba: As early as Q4, we met with division managers and division leaders to understand their forecast for 2023 with the North Star Target and help them plan early for all the recruitment requirements. Currently, we’re working on about 80+ requirements for Q1, and we’re anticipating to increase that to another 100 headcount which means, if we look at the current headcount for Core, that’s more than 30% growth to be able to manage the growth of client staff and also the current business, making sure we deliver all the requirements in Core in a faster turnaround time.

Our current average is 30 days; our target is to meet that in 15 days. Last year’s turnaround time was 26 days. We’ve set up a lot of new strategies and teams, from talent attraction and marketing to sourcing, global recruitment, and multi-geo sourcing. We started using our applicant tracking system, dealing with a lot of data analytics to come up with great strategies for attracting talent.

To make sure that the team is scalable, we recently completed our first batch of RISE programs. These are our free training for people with disabilities. From this group, we will train them to become sourcers and recruiters, and eventually, they can also manage our clients and requirements. From this team, we will grow the recruitment headcount organically and again support the growth for Core hiring.

We also launched a lot of campaigns, including the IT graduate program, where we recently completed and hired six headcounts to complete 10 headcounts for growth because one of the challenges in hiring for Core is in technology. And while there are new technologies coming in, I think part of the strategy is to be able to provide training as early as the senior years for university graduates and align that gap with the requirement and continue doing that under our Emapta Academy and their Learning and Development.

Tim Vorbach:

1. Resourcing capacity – We have been fortunate enough to be growing, and we didn’t keep up. It is now because we were able to start catching up on that and increasing the team sizes and aligning them more accurately and appropriately for the growth of our clients and their teams. So that was the first challenge that we’ve had, and I feel we’re in a very different position, and hopefully, everybody can also feel it inside the teams, and our commitment to that is by working closely together with our forecast growth and our budgets and making sure that we’re not getting caught behind and that we are being prepared and proactively hiring for people and talent so that we are always aligned and we’re not behind it.

2. Technology – We’ve been an organization that has gotten across the line every single time by the sheer hard work of everybody here. It’s been the long hours, the work ethic, the conscientiousness from almost a very, very manual process, and many, many times. But I’m very, very confident with Scott joining the organization and everyone rallying behind him and all the initiatives that Henry’s driving forward, we are really investing very, very heavily in that. And the goal is that rather than us as an organization dragging our technology because that’s what it feels like is that we’re going to be a technology-ed company and really this year is gonna be hopefully a defining year where we look at us today, and then we see us at the end of the year as far as our technology is concerned.

Anj Capispisan: So during the leadership summit for the North Star strategy session, one of the expectations and one of the things that we’re presented by our global expansion director, Roy, is the plan for the expansion for the geographies. I could remember that for the year 2023, the expected number of staff for the global expansion should be at 600. In the video earlier, you’ve seen that there are already 100 across the expansion countries. So that includes Colombia, Macedonia, and Sri Lanka, and includes both the Client Staff and the Core Staff. So the 500 more is expected to be delivered by all of those three countries, and with Malaysia also adding up to the countries for this year, I think that’s something that is for sure would be doable for our Sales and Recruitment teams, right? 

Bianca Osorio: Yeah. Additionally, there are a lot of campaigns that are actually pushing out right now with the specific intent for our prospects, for our potential customers to really look at… For instance, someone in the U.S. is really looking at nearshoring in Colombia. There are a lot of opportunities that had gone to increase as well. Obviously, it starts from generating interest to really hiring a headcount for that. But yeah, what I just mentioned sounds about right in terms of the projected headcount. Obviously, we wanna overachieve, but that’s what we’ve said for this year at least. 

Tim Vorbach: We want to focus on establishing and building our new countries, but we have got Malaysia as well. So Malaysia has just been incorporated. Again, it’s all about adding access to our talent pool so that we can very quickly have the talent available to meet the demand in a faster manner than what the market is used to being able to deliver people.

Tim Vorbach: Yes, I think that’s definitely a long-term plan of ours. As soon as we can establish our still emerging, fledging offices in some of the regional areas, then yes, we’ll continue to build out offices further and further across the Philippines, and ultimately, we hope to do that in other countries as well. Our pool of talent would appreciate being able to work outside of the main CBDs (central business districts), and yeah, we’ll bring our facilities and our operations there as soon as we can justify that type of investment and that exercise.

Jenn Alba: For the person who asked the question. you can send me specifically the concern or the list of referrals that have not been contacted by the team. At the same time, I will also check with Mina and Joms. These are our team members who handle our EMBuddy or Employer Referral Program (ERP), just to make sure that we’ve contacted them. We added team members to the ERP program and came up with a process.

From the time that we receive the referral from our employee, there should be a confirmation, and immediately, it should be processed and provided with feedback. For 2022, for core employees, we received 258 referrals, and 13% or 33 people were hired: 24 or 9% for core requirements, and nine or 3% for client staff. So for our core employees who are referring candidates for core and client staff, we want to maximize or leverage them because they are part of our top 10 channels effective channels for hiring. At the same time, we should be doing a great job in providing feedback. So apologies for that, and I will take a look at that and provide feedback immediately.

Bianca Osorio: Also working side by side with our global talent solutions team, if I may add as well. So in the last years, there were certain gaps in maybe technology and processes that we really worked hard for, back and forth, multiple different iterations in trying to build up the technology, the Applicant Tracking System (ATS) that we’re using, as well as the different actual processes that we’re going to be taking so that we’ll have less human errors. And I think moving forward, this year onwards, you’ll see more responsiveness because of that… Because we’ve built the efficiency in the process there as well.

Inge Zwick: When we refer colleagues or friends, or family members to Emapta, if it’s for a client opportunity at Emapta, it’s the client who decides who they want to hire. So I could put my brother forward, who I think is amazing, but in the end, it’s a customer who decides who they choose. So as Jenn already mentioned, of course, we need to make sure we respond and contact all the referrals. So that’s amiss, but also know that we don’t have an impact on who can be hired for clients because it’s their choice, and we really are hiring as per the talent.

Nina Avecilla: We are always on the lookout for great office spaces for us because that’s one of our commitments to Emapta. One of our strategies is to ensure that we have office spaces that are closest to the homes of the people. And so recently, we have been looking at possible expansion spaces in Baguio, which will also serve as our business continuity strategy. We are currently exploring a PEZA-certified site which Poy Chavez and Reggie and Duncan, and the rest of the workspace innovation team have started assessing if it could really meet our standards. It’s not too far from our existing office in Baguio, but it’s also still in the city center.

The same goes with Quezon City because we know that they are starting to outgrow the T.I.P. site, so to those who also live in the northeast side, we’re looking at the possibility of whether we expand within the T.I.P. or also consider other strategic locations in Quezon City nearer to the Bulacan, Fairview, Commonwealth area or North Caloocan area.

For now, we have a very good footprint in Makati. As you know, we already opened the two new floors at PNB. We have another floor that’s opening up in early February, in a few weeks’ time and that will add about 135 seats making our total seats in PNB 1,000.

In Ortigas, we still have three offices. In terms of physical security, with the leadership of the I.T. team, we have actually already started there and the centralization of all our CCTV cameras. Next to that is the centralization of our biometrics system so that with the use of technology, we will heighten our security without the need of hiring guards. In fact, at PNB, we have already piloted an automatic door closer for those on the 4th floor. You may have noticed that we have used technology to heighten our physical security and modernize our offices so that we still feel safe at work, even without a guard. All our buildings have been carefully selected to be fully secure so that all our buildings have guards at the main lock entrance at the ground level anyway. We’ll continue enhancing what we can do from a physical security standpoint, but those are the ones we have in place. 

Bianca Osorio: If we were doing an exercise about one word to start 2023, it’s going to be “growth” because we have really lofty goals about growth. We’re hoping to reach 1,000% more leads and more customers and that also means a lot of different things for a lot of different people. I’m sure some of you have heard 1,000% more customers than that means like 10 times the things that I’m doing right now. No worries, Nina and the team will share with you the support that we’re going to provide you as well.

We definitely want to be able to expand more in our four different regions, not just in terms of our customer base, but we’re also looking at the headcount that we’re bringing in. You’ve heard about the North Star, and our vision is to be faster. Everything now requires us to be quicker. So from the customer acquisition side, ourselves in Marketing and Growth, with Matt and the rest of the Growth department, we’re seeing not just the growth in terms of our core team, but also growing our customer base. We’re expanding to a lot of different countries right now, gaining more visibility, and bringing in experts to really help us with these goals. And from there, we rely on our trusted recruitment team to help bring in the headcount, because as you already know, every new customer that we are able to close would require several headcounts.

There are a lot of strategies from talent attraction marketing to the overall operations of recruitment, we have the tools that we’re setting up to be able to support this – the headcount increase that we’re seeing, that’s going to happen in the next year and this year as well. So there’s definitely a lot of growth at a faster pace with operational excellence through the right people in place, and more collaboration. So we hope to collaborate more with our Growth, Customer Enablement, Recruitment, and Customer Success teams, and I’m sure that’s also the sentiment of our other departments.

Roy Figueroa: I think that the key here as we talk about growth that’s available to each and every one of us, especially the core team, I think we need to realize that to make this happen, everyone has to be thinking globally as a solution.

Expanding to Sri Lanka, Colombia, and Macedonia means that for our clients, we could make recruiting for roles faster because you have all of a sudden recruitment teams working and more opportunities for them to place roles that they may not have thought of before. Maybe they’re working with another provider or still doing it themselves, you know, hiring the people from the U.K. instead of hiring that person from Macedonia. So really, to make this work and it will work, it is already working: we now have 100 staff outside the Philippines, client and core staff. In fact, our first global solution in Sri Lanka was actually to address our internal requirements in it. So we know it works.

And then as core employees, we just need to think global all the time. Are we doing the same for our clients or our staff outside the Philippines? For example, if you’re holding a client-facing role, you will have the opportunity to know enough about our operations. If you don’t, please ask us, and we’ll let you know. But just introducing the idea that, hey, you know, we’re now in Macedonia, Sri Lanka, which is in the same time zone as yours, if it will get the interest of your clients and they will ask the questions which again we’ll be very happy to guide you to respond to and again addressing that last point.

Very recently, Cris Soliman, who’s been with us a long time, has moved on to help us with global client management. It’s a realization of the fact that through expansion, global opportunities are open to all core staff. It really starts with that mindset, you know, think global. In four or five years’ time, we will see at least 30% of our staff will be from outside the Philippines. It’s not because we’re moving away, but because we’re hiring a lot of people outside the Philippines now who are going to support our existing core staff, whose knowledge and know-how can be leveraged by giving you the opportunities to grow with us and contribute to the success of Emapta.

Inge Zwick: In terms of expanding for office location, and this is also very relevant to Colombia, we’re always looking to expand our office locations because they are the backbone of our operations and they are our way of being a great employer that can easily close to great talent.

Actually, one of the reasons I joined Emapta back then is because Tim allowed flexibility. This was before the pandemic and he’s like, “I don’t need you in the office every day,” and we have an office in Alabang which is close to where I live, too. So that attracted me to the company and this is part of our value. So yes, we are expanding more office locations both in and around Metro Manila as well as Baguio and for Colombia, I know Chris Ross is already expanding or looking for expanding into new office locations in Colombia.

For us as a business, our strategic office network has to make sense in that there is enough demand and enough people who really want to be around those locations. We’re very open to your input as well if you feel that as a company we should have a site in a certain location. Please do let us know so we can evaluate it.

Nina Avecilla: Well, similar to what Roy said, we won’t make it happen just by ourselves, right? And that’s the reason why there’s been a very strong collaboration, particularly with the Service Delivery and the People and Culture team, as well as all the other departments, of course.

I think when we talk about growth, we talk about people, right? And with people comes experience, that’s why we launched #EmaptaExperience. I hope you guys have used that on your social media because seeing your experience matters. We have always been very open to feedback. Even during the New Hire Orientation (NHO), our facilitators would always tell our new hires to share their feedback. This also goes for both our clients and our staff, because we treat them as our customers.

The leadership team would treat everybody as our customers because we are here to serve them. And that all boils down to that experience, so, from Service Delivery, we have started rolling out the Voice of the Customer (VoC) survey, which measures our Net Promoter Score (NPS) and client satisfaction. We really want to make sure that we’re doing the right thing and that’s what the customers expect out of us, but also on the employee side, on the People and Culture side, we have started building the open mic sessions, which has been a great open forum like a focus group discussion wherein we get to listen to our teams so that we know what we could improve on or what is it that we should stop doing or what is it that we could continue doing. Whatever feedback you have, it’s for our good because we’re always very open –we reflect on it, and we act on that right and we report the fact to you because it’s important that we’re able to share the results of the input that they have given us.

And I think that’s part of the growth that the company is not just growing by the numbers, but you also feel it for yourself that you know that you’ve grown not just by title, but also financially and whether that translates to achieving your dreams because that’s the perfect way of saying that “I grow with Emapta,” right?

We really want everybody to feel that you are part of this. In the past 12 years, we are where we are and we are who we are because of you. We want to continue looking after our people and that’s why even today, after three years in the pandemic, you know we have adopted and embraced a hybrid working model so that we could provide flexibility to everybody. We have #HappyAtWork programs, health and wellness initiatives, as well as a lot of engagement activities.

We have been continuously working on the experience, including the upgrade of our communication channels. This includes the relaunch of CHEER (Center for HR Employee Enquiries and Requests) last year. We will continue improving it because it’s really one of the ways that you could share with us what you need because it’s an HR and employee portal. We are building on providing you with a great experience where you’re able to get what you need faster in the snap of a finger and where everybody feels supported.

Growth may be good, but at the same time, it creates fear. However, we have been doing it together, as we always say, stronger together, and we’re better together to overcome what’s uncertain.

Naji Cruz: We have to be kind of deliberate and clear on expectations about working from home. We need to create policies and procedures that could support that culture. We should have policies that would support clearly defined rules and responsibilities with clear performance metrics or KPIs (key performance indicators) as well. Each department should be held accountable, or they should establish processes to promote collaboration and, at the same time, set an expectation that on their end, the managers are also required to check in and review the work of their teams on a consistent basis or manner.

Once we have those policies in place and procedures, we will let everyone know that that is part of our EVP or Employee Value Proposition. As you know, having that in our EVP would mean making it part of our sales pitch to prospective clients and employees. This will help the growth that we have been discussing because we are expanding our workforce or network as well. This would also help us reach out to the talents or even keep our existing talents regardless of their location. And lastly, we should be supported with the right technology or cloud solutions to help make our employees productive. It is critical that we have a dedicated communication channel or portal where everyone can go to check updates or documents or whatever is necessary information.

Naji: Regarding the yearly inflation, we have to understand that budget allocation for a certain percentage of salary increase is in place and considered as we plan for the year to come. The major activity where HR and department heads come together for this is during the Annual Performance Review (APR), where each leader will have the opportunity to reward the performers and align salaries as needed based on market or role development. We also really don’t need to limit it to just the APR or the annual performance review period, so we are building a framework to ensure that salary structures are in place and benchmarking is done on a regular basis as well.

In relation to the question on the Health Maintenance Organisation (HMO), there are initial proposals of other benefits listed and are currently undergoing evaluation. The approach is to offer flexible benefits that our employees and clients may choose from depending on their employees’ needs. This includes probably reallocation of some benefits that are already approved but are seemingly untapped, such as the leaves that we are already approving, then eventually, you know, being forfeited at some point and replacing it with another option.

Some of the things being looked into that may require further study would be educational assistance, medical reimbursement, or probably strengthening mental health support. I know that at this point, the HMO is the main benefit that you are seeing. But I just wanted to emphasize that for this year particularly, there has been a huge or big enhancement on that one to break the traditional hierarchy-based dependent enrollment. And so far, for now, we can actually accommodate dependents who are over age already, from 60 to 70 years old, and not all companies are actually offering that and even allowing married employees to still support their parents with medical insurance. Additionally, one of the things that we have been working on is the enhancement of the group life insurance. And by February, we’re hoping that we’ll be able to do the roadshow.

As for retirement, I would have to say that yes, there were initial conversations that have happened already and we’ll ensure that it will continue for further development of how this concept can be considered in our menu of benefits and total rewards.

Naji: The company’s growth, employee retention, and employee experience have always been HR’s priority. We have started with the reorganisation of the team and identifying the right roles or expertise that is required. And at the same time, a number of resources have been added to our team to support the lack of technology or automation that is needed in our process.

Next, we’ve actually started partnering since last year closely with the Legal and Compliance team for consultation and review of the processes surrounding Data Privacy and Info Security and how we can better protect the company, our clients, including employees, as we collect, store, and use those information. We’re also in the process of consolidating, and reviewing not just the code of conduct but also the handbook and all of the policies that we have here, and this includes sitting down with our managers or each of the departments to carefully understand their requirements on common challenges that can be addressed by certain policies, guidelines, and effective performance management.

Lastly, there is a continuous and cautious effort to put forward the demand for automation and acquire the right technology that would address the complexity of transactions in HR. We’re glad to actually share that we’re about to sign a partnership with another vendor that would help us out when it comes to ticket management, and hopefully, that would improve the SLA of our team. That type of ticket management or ticket tool would actually deliver omnichannel support in our transactions. It would build a knowledge base and, of course, promote self-service as well. Also, just to add, maybe to what Scott Darrow have mentioned already, our very own developers are also working on the talent onboarding module for us to have a one-stop shop for our successful candidates or new hires. This will build a seamless flow from the onboarding team to use and communicate to successful candidates from job offer issuance, up to contract signing, up to the submission of pre-employment requirements to extend support to new hires on self-service manner or have a dedicated resource in HR to actually help them out through their journey as a new hire.

Inge: Even before the pandemic, we were already very much a hybrid type of company. Having multiple offices specifically in the Philippines, not all of us could in just one site. So we always had to work on Skype and MS Teams, and that has made it easy for us during the pandemic to switch to working from home. We’re seeing the advantages and at Emapta, we are always here to give maximum flexibility.

It’s also important to be there in person for some activities – it can be how wonderful to be around others, and so we very much encourage everyone to come into the office, meet with team members, meet other departments, and really just join wherever and as much as you can.

The question was also asked earlier whether we plan to establish a head office for core, and the answer was no, but not it’s not because the work we do as part of the core team is the kind of work where we need to be where our people are. We are for our client staff, supporting them, being there for them, being around them, connecting with them, and making sure they have everything they need. That’s literally our product and that’s our service. So we need to be where they are. We need to be where the action is. This is why our core teams will always be at all our offices and office locations and the same of course in Sri Lanka, Colombia, and Macedonia, as we get more client staff globally.

Naji: Big chunks of plans and actions are laid out in this section of training and development. Last year we focused on strengthening our HR Business Partnerships as well as HR operations. But this year, really we would like to focus on building the culture, improving engagement, and developing our people.

In the coming days, we will start to roll out the activities related to Annual Performance Review and use it as an opportunity to kick off the job analysis and competency mapping. So we can determine the training needs in each department or particular role and identify critical roles as well for succession management and leadership development, including skills certifications.

There are also discussions on how we can further promote internal mobility not just on Core but also on the side of our offshore staff. We are also beefing up the team in the section with the hiring of technical trainers and instructional designers who can help create digital content or modules customised to the needs of our clients or of our organization to increase their reach. Lastly, it is important to understand that all this is tied up with establishing our distinct rewards and recognition programs, including benchmarking of salary and benefits.

Naji: Yes, earlier I was able to announce that we have added people to our Learning and Organisational Development team. We have technical trainers now and, of course, instructional designers. We have the plan to offer technical training as well and eventually, go into certifications. We’re also looking at supporting someone when it comes to educational assistance or getting certifications externally.

Naji: Yes, we do. Leadership development is part of the plans that we are working on, and hopefully, we could offer it sooner while we introduce or, should I say, we go through the annual performance review. So that would be a good kickoff.

Scott: The MVP is expected to be released in early Q2. We’re working towards releasing it as soon as we can, but early Q2 is when we should expect it. So what will the MVP include? The critical thing for the minimum viable product is we address the immediate pain points. Communication is a pain point. We want to address the problems that we have communicating with people, the issues that we have with HR, making sure employee data is current, things like phone numbers, etc., and the ability to do push notifications. We’ve seen what happens with SMS messages when they sometimes are a lot more challenging than we would hope. So being able to do push notifications is important. Being able to get your leaves, being able to get information about your pay slips and your other concerns. So that’s what we’ll have pretty much from the MVP, and as we go on that’ll grow, and we’ll add more and more features. So one of the things that we’re really excited about is being able to add a loyalty program to the super app so we can start rewarding our people for doing the right thing. And you know, we’ll open up a Loyalty Shop which we’ll make sure to have wonderful rewards inside it, such as iPads and iPhones and all these wonderful things. While Q2 is the super app’s expected delivery date, we are actually setting up a new team in the next couple of weeks, and hopefully, we can get it out the door quicker.

Henry: Last year, we pitched the first batch of ECL (Emapta Customized Laptops), and we’re able to work with the vendor to iterate and improve on them. And at the moment, we’ve got over 2,000 laptops in stock here in the Philippines, and starting in February, we’ll start to issue them as standard for all talent onboarding. So that’s for core and client hires.

We’re working to establish import permits in Colombia, Macedonia, and Sri Lanka. Malaysia will be included too when we start operating there. This is to ensure we can deliver and provide laptops right from onboarding talent. We’re also looking at expanding the portfolio of what we have available in terms of laptops. So we have multiple models, our standard one, and then some higher specification options available that the Growth team can share with customers when they’re coming on board. In addition to the laptops, we’re also getting Emapta Customised Monitors, which will have the Emapta branding and will start to be issued as a standard from March to April this year. The second part is around the gadgets and or what’s going to happen to the old hardware. Unfortunately, we do have some compliance aspects with PEZA and other regulatory bodies, which makes it a little bit harder for us to give away until the assets are at the end of their life.

Henry: We’ve hired a number of additional engineers, and we have a roadmap for 2023 where we’ll be implementing additional tools that monitor when certain attacks are taking place, and we’ll take preventative action to automatically stop someone from trading data.

But probably just one thing to call out on terminology: there’s a difference between an incident, a security incident, and a breach. A security incident is when the event happens, and we need to investigate what’s occurred and identify if any data is actually being stolen or lost, and it’s declared as a breach we’ve actually verified that there has been a loss of data. We do have privacy@emapta.com, which is an e-mail address where you can communicate when if you feel that there’s an incident or would like any support in understanding policies or processes. So feel free to send an email should you have any concerns.

Coming back to our roadmap, you know we’re looking at implementing data loss prevention solutions which are installed on our workstations and can detect sensitive information such as birth dates, names, bank details, Social Security numbers, and so on and it will preventatively prompt people should they try and send it outside of the organization. So we’re also looking at implementing, as I mentioned, tools to monitor our networks and servers and also on our web servers where Empower is hosted, as well as tools that detect if there’s any attempt that attacks and can shut them down as well. So hand in hand with the Global Legal and Compliance team, our data protection officer, and information security, we are taking the appropriate action to safeguard our core data and, of course, more importantly, our employee data.

Emapta is going to undergo ISO 27001 certification, so that’s information security management and that requires us to comply with a long list of controls and international standards to verify that we have the appropriate policy in place to safeguard data as well. We plan to achieve our certifications in Q1 this year.

Scott: The MyEmapta app will absolutely interact with HRIS. For example, you’ll be able to update your own personal information. One other feature that the Super App has that relates to HRIS is something that we still need to discuss with the HR group. But pretty much anything that is available in the HR system can be made available in MyEmapta.

The whole idea of MyEmapta is we’re moving the information that you care about to your mobile phone. We’re able to provide you with the information that you need on the mobile phone. So it doesn’t specifically answer your question, but definitely, if we feel that the information is appropriate to put on My Emapta, then that’s definitely something we will do.

Scott: We have a number of initiatives and at the moment, there are two things we’re doing. One is talent onboarding, and the other one is customer onboarding. Anybody that is involved in both customer or talent onboarding, you know the number of forms that we fill out, you know the processes – some are automated and others are manual. The goal with both the customer onboarding and the talent onboarding is that it will be fully automated from end to end. We are also creating an HRIS as we speak. Most of the design was already done, so we will have one source of information.

We are also embarking on a big data initiative, so we will have our talent information in big data, and we’re working towards some very exciting systems that will allow us to search for candidates better than any of our competition and we’ll be releasing some details of that over the coming months.

Inge: Matt and I work in Growth, and we talk to a lot of future prospective customers as well as with the service delivery team with our existing customers. So we see what the demand or the need from our customers and future customers are. And yes, there are certain roles that are being replaced by AI, but we’ve really seen in the last three years as well through the pandemic there are a lot of roles that are not replaced by AI and continue to be filled by people, and a lot of it is also part of that digital transformation that we are also making happen. Digital transformation doesn’t happen overnight. While it’s happening, people are needed, and that’s often when customers come to us and say, ‘you know what, we have got these five systems we need to implement, but we need a data entry person for six months to help us with this,’ and we see that those customers then after the six months, they don’t let the person go. They actually utilize them for other tasks. So we are already seeing a trend from our customers that they are utilizing their team across different roles. They’re upskilling them and using them for other things in the companies because there is other work to be done. So we can already see that there is an organic kind of future-proofing happening already within companies. We see it ourselves, but we see that with clients.

Matt: We will inevitably lose some roles to AI, but then those roles will become AI developments. So it’s just a matter of how it actually transformed. We’re seeing it every day like obviously certain roles just sort of say, OK well, we don’t need that as much anymore. But you know what? Now that we’ve actually done digital transformation, we actually need more support on our IT side of things.

Henry: I think AI is replacing the monotonous tasks that can be repetitively done and automated to streamline and optimize things. There’s always a level of critical thinking or analysis that will be required and will require human intervention. So I think it’s actually probably making or improving the quality of work that we’ll be doing here by having tools take care of those more boring tasks that take a lot of time.

Inge: The development team is helping us hone our skills and our team members so that we all can grow and learn new skills to make that happen.

Scott: I think, as an organization, we would be very naive to ignore the importance of AI, and we actually have some pretty significant AI initiatives in place at the moment. We’re actually taking on a 30-year veteran expert in this field as our Chief Architect, so it’s something that we take very, very seriously. We’re looking at creating a next-generation portal for talent that will incorporate AI from day one. The good news about AI is some things will disappear. There will be a lot fewer lawyers in the world. I guess a lot of people think that’s a good thing. No disrespect to our lawyers, but it’s also gonna bring a lot of exciting things, particularly in the areas of healthcare. The people that do screening for cancers and things like that, AI can already do that much more efficiently. So it brings a lot of benefits to the world. I think we’re many, many years away from having someone like Data from Star Trek. So, don’t worry so much. AI is very limited in what it can do, but it’s certainly something that we need to embrace as a company.

Naji: I know that Inge already mentioned the learning and development, but that’s where the critical part would come in on the side of People and Culture, to make sure that we would be able to upskill our employees and do that multi-skilling as well, offer certain certifications that are required. and at the same time, when technology comes in, data mining is important because we’d be able to analyze and foresee what is needed, and what kind of role or talent would we need eventually.

Jenn: From a talent acquisition of perspective, we’ve seen a lot of research involving AI and replacing jobs, but the overall result says that AI will not replace humans, but it will complement humans, or it will add more jobs. Because based on performance, if technology is complemented by talent by humans, then the performance is more efficient and faster, and innovative than just using it without technology or AI. So don’t worry about that. We’ll have more jobs that are more strategic than we used to do.

Nina: As the Emapta is concerned, and as long as relationships in the heart stay in our core values, no other AI could have the best relationship with our clients and our customers. So as long as we all value relationships, no one or AI could do that best but us.

Scott: I think the first thing is really looking at North Star goals, and for us to reflect. Reflection means that we recognize that we cannot continue doing things to same way and expecting different results. It simply doesn’t happen. So we really had to look at the expertise we had within the team. We needed to be realistic about our capabilities within the team.

We decided to take a monumental leap into a technology that’s commonly known as Rapid Application Development (RAD). We have something called OutSystems which is a RAD platform. It’s not a new company, believe it or not, they’ve been around for over 20 years, so we’re not embarking on something that provides risk for us. That’s actually the opposite. They just so happened to be number 1 in Gartner as far as where they sit in their space. It will allow us to build technology much faster than we can today.

In fact, the minimum speed increase will be significant. It will allow us to look at the things we have built. Let’s understand the lessons we’ve learned from those technologies that we’ve built and let’s take a bold move and actually rebuild them all. So in Q1, we will be doing talent onboarding in this new technology, which I know is a pain point for someone who joined the company and had to go through that onboarding process — and it was pretty painful. But the idea is that we’re gonna be delivering a new technological solution that will make life a lot easier. Now, what do I mean by that?

Everybody that I’m talking to now has a phone in their pocket or in their hands, right? We’re also asking people to keep basic things like your information up to date. And how do we do that? We need to go, and you need to go to this link, and you need to go to this form. It would be so much easier if I could give you a push notification to your mobile phone and ask you to update the information on your phone, right? It would be much easier if you could do your time and attendance on your phone and if marketing could tell you about events we’ve got on your phone.

When we experience natural disasters, which are common in the Philippines with the weather. We found out that 30% of the people never even got a notification because their information was incorrect. So we will be launching My Emapta which is our own in-house super app. Afterward, we’ll start with the basics. So you’ll be able to get your time and attendance. You’ll be able to get your payroll and leave information, you’ll be out to get information from marketing about what’s going on in the company.

And as time goes on throughout the year, we’ll be adding more and more features to that app. And we want that to be the core of what we build for everybody going forward. So expect a lot from us in, in the first quarter. We have a lot on our roadmap and we’ll start rolling things out just before the end of Q1. But the rapid rollout will be significant in the other quarters and our goal is to replace everything that provides us with high levels of pain. The IT team has taken on the challenge. There’s a lot of retraining, retooling, and relearning. We’re engaging in an agile methodology, which makes it much easier for us to engage with our customers.

Anj: To be clear on the CRM for our service delivery team, as we’ve mentioned earlier, there is a client onboarding experience solution that we are developing together with a partner company called Mobius Solution, and this is already something that we’re starting on to develop with the rapid application development. By partnering with this company, our teams on Empower are concentrated on the development and speeding up the development of the super apps, but that doesn’t mean that all other initiatives are put on the back burner and we know that alongside the talent onboarding is just as important as client onboarding. We will integrate them into the currency arm that our growth and enablement teams are using to put it in a position where the service delivery team will have access as well to that information. So it flows naturally or completely without having to go from multiple systems or manual processes to another. The same goes for integrating and accessing employee data.

Inge: I just wanted to highlight why that the client onboarding module on Empower is so important. It’s because you know our teams now we currently operate the employee data separately from the client data. And that’s also one of the sources for a lot of manual work that when we’re trying to get a report about, I wanna know something about this company, how big they are, what’s their team size about as well as who their team members are. Connecting the client onboarding module and the talent onboarding module is so critical because they will finally then bring those two pieces of information together. And then in the super app that will flow through and it will then finally make it easier for us to work on a system where we have all the things we wanna know in one.

Inge: I think it’s a question concerning our client staff when they are required to work in the office. We currently have a function where that they cannot log in to Empower on their mobile phone because it’s about the office location.

So the short answer is yes. There is a plan for restrictions if and as needed; if a staff member would be allowed only to work in the office, they would not be able to log in remotely to avoid misuse.

Joy: I think the best way to not to have or to avoid having the dispute, and as we know, most of the disputes are based on, unfortunately, the employees’ behavior themselves. Now that we are 100% reliant on Empower in terms of the timekeeping data, I think one of the issues that were mitigated is the conflict between the time and attendance from June versus the time and attendance in Empower that the payroll team has to reconcile every pay period. So hopefully, with the full support of Empower and the employees, the payroll team will make sure to diligently process your timesheets to make sure that we will avoid errors that would obviously result in disputes.

Anj: The implementation of the global payroll solution would also help improve the payroll process for us, which is targeted to go live in the middle of the year.

Naji: Yes, it’s part of that. The inflation rate has been considered. A certain percentage has been considered as well in each of the planning that we do. And yes, we wanna make sure that this is not just one time, but on the side of People and Culture, creating a team that would be able to help us out on a regular basis when it comes to benchmarking our salaries and benefits.

Anj: We’ll take note of that request back and coordinate with our service delivery team. As you know, in our Baguio site, we do have sleeping quarters there because Baguio has been one of our sites where we have 24/7 operations. We took that into consideration. So now that we are expanding the operations also in our Manila offices then that’s also something that our facilities and administration team is going to be looking into for sure.

Inge: I wanted to add that this is not only for night shifters because regardless of your shift, we’re not supposed to be sleeping while we’re working, right? And I know we’re not, so it’s more about even during the daytime, for those who are working during the day, during your break you might wanna take a snooze or if the commute hours are very, very long then it might be good even for daytime shifts. It’s all about actually giving an opportunity for team members across all shift schedules to rest during their breaks or before and after the shift.

Matt: What we’re seeing from the clients is, yes, ideally, they would like people to be back in the office, but the reality is that 70% of the country is not back in the office, so that is sort of the balancing act that we walk in Growth to sort of set that expectation, but also sell the fact that we can look at hybrid situations where you come in on Friday, perhaps put a pizza day or that sort of thing, have people in. It’s those kinds of initiatives that we are trying to encourage, but ultimately it does come down to the client. If the client wants people in the office, then that’s what the client gets. If they’re comfortable with their staff working from home, then we’re happy to do work from home.

Inge: As I mentioned before, we were already doing a hybrid and a partially remote setup before the pandemic. So I think I can say for our core team that it is here to stay. There are certain functions that require being on site every day, and that will not change.

We really strongly encourage all of our core team members and departments to come to the office more often, collaborate with the people, and meet people in person. So we encourage hybrid. We don’t say everyone has to come back in, but we really encourage it.

Do we have a plan for one core site? I think the answer can be no. As I mentioned earlier, flexibility is one of the values that Tim has also cited as our culture. Our business is supportive of the customers, and we put them first in the sense that we need to be where our teams are and where our customers are. So we belong everywhere. So it’s not that we don’t want to put an office up for our core people. It’s that we need to be everywhere because we support everyone. But like we see with the new office sites here, for example, at PNB’s 11th floor, we added a lot more coworking spaces, and that is having our core teams in mind.

We are all working on laptops since the majority of us are very flexible in that we can plug and play and just find our notes. I know it’s not always easy. We often feel homeless, and we have to kind of just find an area to be. But that’s really the nature of our work. So the answer is there are no plans at the moment to have one like the core site because we need to be where the action is. We’re always welcome and strongly encouraged to come to the offices, we just have to be flexible and kind of fit in wherever we can.

Nina: We really want to increase the presence of our core team in all our offices. As far as Service Delivery is concerned, you can see the CXM are taking turns in manning our home sites. The same goes for our facilities and administration teams. We have been strengthening the support there. You will always have somebody there, whether it’s from utility, maintenance, logistics, or facilities and admin.

The same goes for People and Culture on behalf of Naji and Wondz. That has been the goal as well – that we would always have somebody in the office so that he could come to you or you could run to anyone. And I suppose that we’ve gotten support as well from Henry and Jason when it comes to IT and Operations support. Even in Angeles, when we barely have five people in, we would always have a core staff ready to support.

And I guess we call out to everybody that we have beautiful offices, let’s use them, let’s be visible so that we could also support each other, support our client teams, and we could collaborate and get the most out of it. So I just want to go back to one of the questions earlier from Naji on how we build culture. Even if we have a predominantly work-from-home arrangement, it all goes back to us. Because, you know, we build our culture, it’s not dependent on where you work from, but it’s dependent on how we work together. We highly encourage people again to maximize our office. This a call to action to everyone to be in the office, be with the team, and be present. But from service delivery, people, and culture, you’ve got our commitment. We are here now.

Inge: Even before the pandemic, Emapta was already a company that was working remotely because we have we at the time we had 12 to 14 offices. So we were already used to working remotely. So I hope if somebody is asking for the on-site support team, we do always have people who manage our offices on-site, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t have the support. So we’ll make sure that in Emapta, it’s all about just knowing who to go to and then messaging them in Teams. We’re very low profile. Everyone can message everyone. We don’t have to go through a hierarchy, and I think that has been one of our strengths before the pandemic already that, oh, you always have to check all which office are you at today? Where do you work today? We go through different offices, and it might not be that I always find my HR person always in the same office because they also go around, so just encourage everyone that we already operate remotely. And yes, when we can see each other in person, that’s amazing. It’s the best, but don’t let it stop you from asking for help.

EMBuddy is one of the programs of Emapta that incentivize its employee for successfully referring their friends.

You can earn the following for every successful referral. The referral incentive will depend on the country and job family of your referral.

Emapta employees are eligible to participate upon signing the job offer except those part of:

• Emapta Global Talent Solutions

• Emapta Core Team Supervisors, Managers and Directors with job grade level of TL40, ME50, HO60 and DI70 who have direct reports fall under their supervision.

• Client Staff with influence over the hiring decision that will refer for the same account (ie. Hiring Managers, Interviewers, Test Administrators, Direct Managers/Supervisors

• Non-permanent employees (i.e. interns, consultants, temporary personnel, project-based employees)

• At least 18 years old and above
• At least a high school graduate
• With good or excellent communications
• With related experience for the position he/she is applying for

• Just go to the EMBuddy website emapta.com/embuddy-old
• Fill out the information needed
• Upload your referral’s CV
• Read the data privacy policy and click accept if you agree
• Click submit once done

Upon submission of a referral, you will receive an email validation within 24-48 business hours if it’s valid or invalid. The referral will be tagged as invalid if the referral falls under the following circumstances:

• Candidates from recruitment-initiated activities such as, but not limited to, campus recruitment, job fairs, etc. within the last 6 months
• Referral endorsed by a search firm/third party provider within the last 6 months
• Referral who responded to Emapta’s job advertisements, regardless of the position they applied for and whether their applications had previously been processed or not (e.g. LinkedIn, Jobstreet, Monster, Indeed, etc.) within the last 6 months
• Referral who directly applied to Emapta (e.g. email, walk-in, etc.) within the last 6 months
• Referral initially referred by any other employee within 6 months of referral ownership
• Referral who were former employees or associates of Emapta or any of its clients
• Candidates who were hired for non-permanent employment or are currently employed on a non-permanent basis.
• Referrals who were submitted as referrals through other channels aside from the EMBuddy Portal (e.g. emailed to client or recruiter, etc.)

Yes, you are eligible to get the referral incentive. The incentive will be processed one time following the completion of the conditions.

Below are the cut-offs per country. If your referral’s start date, 3rd month, or 6th month falls on the following cut-off, the incentive will be included in the said payout.

Philippines:
Cut-off: 11th to 25th of the previous month – 5th payout date
Cut-off: 26th of the previous month to 10th of the current month – 20th payout date

Sri Lanka:
Cut-off: 21st of the previous month to the 20th of the current month – 30th payout date

Colombia:
Cut-off: 16th to the 30th of the month – 5th payout date
Cut-off: 1st to the 15th of the month – 20th payout date

Macedonia:
For confirmation

The referral incentive will be credited to your account as long as you and your referral are actively working during the expected payout date.

You can send an email to embuddyreferral@emapta.com. You can only file a dispute within 30 calendar days from the referral’s start date.

Whether it’s business administration, software development, finance, marketing or sales support, Filipino talent are likely to be a perfect fit to your team.

Check out the different industries we work with and get a glimpse of the kind of roles and teams we have built for our customers.

Our sourcing process to onboarding typically takes as little as 3-6 weeks. We assume you’ll be choosing talent whom we have head hunted and are currently employed, thus, they will also have to render notice period of up to 30 days. If you require a sooner start, we will focus on resources that are more readily available.

The short answer is: yes. The Philippines is home to an incredibly large talent pool and produces over 400,000 University Graduates across different specializations every year.

We go out into the market to recruit specifically for your requirements once we have a full understanding of the role, the tools required to perform the role, and how the role is managed and fit into your organization.

Because you are selecting the personnel, you will have the opportunity to interview the candidates to determine if they are aligned to your company culture, we can administer a wide range of assessment tests from practical skills, deductive reasoning skills to personality tests, and we customize the interview process based on your best practices.

While the employee(s) will be legally employed under Emapta, they will be exclusively working only for you and your organization. We put your company/brand first and treat your employees as an extension of your company in the Philippines – while Emapta is their support network on the ground.  We have found this to be a key success factor for high-performing teams and a great contributor to long-term employee retention.

Emapta is located in the Philippines, which is UTC +8, but our teams work in different shifts, 24/7.

You decide when you want your team to work, this could be your countries’ office hours or alternative hours to provide after hour coverage.

We ensure that our employees can care for themselves and their loved ones by providing private health coverage and provisions for paid time off.

We offer continuous learning and development classes to build their confidence and motivate their desire to improve and work smarter, supported by a range of engagement activities to build connections to the EMAPTA community.

We stay focused on giving our clients the right tools that enable them to build their relationship with the employees. Attracting and retaining top talent is as much the responsibility of our clients as it is ours and successful clients are those that are fully engaged in the performance management of the personnel.

At Emapta, a critical part of our role in this engagement is to help you make better decisions in building your offshore team.
Our recruitment team is composed of seasoned and highly professional Senior Recruiters and Subject Matter Experts specializing in 5 main verticals:

1. Accounting and Finance
2. Information Technology
3. Call Center and BPO Services
4. General Admin/ Sales and Marketing
5. Engineering, Architectural and Industrial Services.

Our approach to recruitment and selection, defines a simple process for identifying and hiring A-players with a high degree of success:

1. Phone Interview: Immediately done for A-grade candidates once they apply
2. Initial Video Interview (optional): We fast track candidates to this process once they’ve qualified for the phone interview.
3. Initial Client Assessment and Qualifications Submission: We’ll send to you the collated phone and video interviews together with complete details of the candidate’s CV, references, working experience, skills and all relevant qualifications for the role they’re applying so you can select who you prefer to interview.
4. Additional Tests: Subject to your preference, we can include a whole range of skills, psychological, IQ and EQ tests to measure the suitability and alignment of the candidate to your company.
5. Final Video interview: When the candidate passes all initial process, we’ll assist you and facilitate a video interview between you and the candidates.
6. Job Offer: After all the interviews and selection of candidates, we assist in negotiations and give the best competitive offers to candidates to secure them for you.
7. Approved Candidate Profile: Once they’ve accepted the offer and we’ve collated all information and qualifications about the candidate, we submit it to you for final review and approval.

Generally, high-quality talents go where opportunities are, and the Philippines is no different in this respect; exceptional local talents converge in Manila’s central business districts where Emapta offices are strategically located. Makati and newly emerging BPO hub Pampanga provide a vast talent pool of young, educated and experienced accounting and finance professionals.

All our offices have appealing attributes. Proximity to where talent lives is the difference between locations and we keep expanding our network of offices to provide offices within reach of the best talent. Regardless of location, Emapta clients and staff are equally serviced and provided with state-of-the-art facilities in premium grade buildings.

To search and apply for open roles at Emapta that interest you, please visit Jobstreet or click the “Join Us” option in the ‘Discover’ tab at the top of your screen.

We currently have 15 sites throughout the Philippines and Sri Lanka providing us the greatest reach for talent having offices near where staff reside and reducing their daily travel time.

Our sites are located in central business districts with easy access to public transportation, recreational, medical, and educational facilities.

With our network of 15 offices across the Philippines, as well as our Emapta Anywhere™ solution for remote work, we can provide safe and secure work environments for our employees, suited to their location preference and our customer requirements.

Visit our Amazing Workspaces Page to see some of our facilities and office locations. All offices feature 100% back-up power, high speed internet with multiple redundant connections and 24×7 security with CCTV and biometric access.

We would recommend a private office for teams larger than 5 head count. There is no premium to be in a private office and the service fee remains fixed.

You may also brand your private office with your company logo, and customize the layout based on your requirements. Our inhouse Workspace Innovations team can help in the design and layout.

Our open share plan is also a great option for smaller teams and would allow them to engage with other employees.

All our facilities are equipped with co working spaces, meeting rooms, training rooms and formal boardrooms. There is no additional cost for use and your team may reserve the space as often as needed.

When we are recruiting for your role(s), our team will source across all our regions and typically will allow you to decide the best placement for your team.

Emapta will provide you recommendations for top talent based on our understanding of the candidate profile you are seeking and the headcount you require.

In the case of team transition, wherein you have an existing team in the Philippines, we will work with you to transfer them to the Emapta site with minimal impact on your existing team.

Because of the flexibility in our multiple site strategy, you may also opt to place team members throughout different sites. This would be dependent on the role, the dependency for interaction with each other, and your comfort level.

With over 109 million population, the Philippines has a vast pool of highly skilled talent across a wide range of specializations. Paired with lower living costs, this allows for a drastic reduction in operational costs, without sacrificing quality or productivity.

Moreover, the outsourcing industry is a key driver of the Philippine economy and provides work opportunities for millions of hardworking Filipinos with long-term career opportunities that would otherwise have been unavailable to them.

Emapta’s pricing structure is very transparent.

We don’t mark up the salary of the staff and is invoiced to our clients as a direct pass through. We also include the costs of 13^th month pay and redundancy coverage so customers are not faced with a large lump sum amount at the end of the year (or in cases where redundancy occur).

Our Service Fees and One Time Fees are separate line items so customers know exactly what they’re paying for at the time of service.

No upfront payments. You pay nothing until you have selected and approved your offshore staff.

We have one-time fees for the set-up and recruitment of the talent, charged upon successful hire of your new team member. From there on, employee costs (no markup) and our service fee is charged monthly.

There is no upfront cost and no security deposit required if you choose to cover the benefits/insurances of the personnel monthly.

Emapta operate in full transparency and we will provide you labour rates and benefits based on your requirements and current market before and during the recruitment process.

Once your talent is employed, you will have access to their employment contract and time record and have full visibility of their wage – we never markup salaries.

You will have an HR Business Partner throughout your engagement with Emapta to oversee and manage all employee related matters as well as provide you guidelines and trends in annual salary increases and recommendations at the appropriate times.

Emapta has developed its own proprietary technology that allows customers to monitor and manage teams’ productivity, communicate with and reward team members and maintain full visibility of the teams information.

Emapta adheres to Republic Act No. 10173, also known as the Data Privacy Act of 2012 (DPA), which aims to protect personal data in information and communications systems, both in the government and the private sector.  In line with the requirements of the DPA, we make sure that all personal data collected is processed in adherence to the general principles of transparency, legitimate purpose, and proportionality.

Accordingly, Emapta ensures that personal data under its custody is protected against any accidental or unlawful destruction, alteration and disclosure as well as against any other unlawful processing. To achieve this, we have implemented appropriate security measures for storing collected personal information, depending on the nature of the information. To find out more, visit our Maximum Security page or reach out to us so we can discuss your specific concerns and security requirements.

Emapta has great experience in working with a wide range of systems and technologies that our clients require. We tailor a solution to the specific technological requirements of our customers’ businesses.

Emapta has a disaster recovery plan and tailored BCP (Business Continuity Plans) for our customer teams.
With our network of 15 offices, all of which are equipped with multiple redundant internet connectivity and power backup, we can ensure the ongoing operation for our customer. Should natural disasters occur, EMAPTA has established BCP that effectively utilize our technological expertise and multiple offices throughout the Philippines. If one site goes down for whatever reason, we simply move the team to a different office location or provide remote support.