People as the company’s most valuable resource

Augumenta´s Chief Operating Officer's thoughts on human resource management. Eeva is revealing the strategic decisions that make us us.

February 24, 2021

Blog

These days many companies struggle with the same challenges: how to survive during a pandemic so that company and jobs persist, and how to find suitable talents to work in their organization. During these difficult times companies may need to make hard decisions and on the other hand, sometimes talents are looking for someplace else.

So how to secure the economic viability and have talented personnel all at the same time. Both are crucial for any company. Some of them solve the challenge of economic flexibility by doing temporary or zero-hour contracts or move their production to low-cost countries. In my opinion, these all are very strategic decisions and a company can also choose differently: permanent employment agreements, adequate salaries, and benefits build loyal personnel. The most flexible and resilient company is the one that can create a balance between stability and flexibility while maintaining personnel trust and confidence. In my opinion, it is possible to have both the economic viability and committed personnel, if we just makes the right strategic decisions.

Augumenta has always had high respect and valuation for its personnel. Since I started working in Augumenta in spring 2018 I have been purposefully improving our human resource management. Back in the day, the team was four other employees and three founders and during these three years, we have doubled the size of our team. Already during my job interview for the post at Augumenta, I noticed that we share the same values and thoughts: personnel are the company’s most valuable resource and the main task of human resource management is to take care of the people. Augumenta has been an inspiring environment and I decided to continue my management studies and to create an HR Strategy for the company so that we can write down all the strategic decisions that make us us.

Finding talents from recruiting channels

One of those decisions has been the selection of recruiting channels. Finding suitable talents is a challenge especially for software companies. Our business is quite unique and we do things that no one has done before, so it’s basically impossible to find ready-made talents who can already do what we do. We decided to find future employees via different education programs or schools. In 2018, we already had two employees recruited from those programs, and so far, four and hopefully two more in the following summer. I feel that there is a lot of talent and potential in those programs and I find the training period to be more like an orientation period, after which we are ready to make an employment agreement.

What personnel values the most?

Another strategic decision is investing in work well-being, which includes a lot of stuff, such as flexibility, which is one of the things that our personnel values the most. Investing in work well-being is much more than just occupational health care, in the end, it’s all about how people are doing in general. For me, it means also that even in a difficult economic situation the personnel comes first. The easiest thing to react to uncertainty and secure companies’ finances in a situation like the pandemic, would have been laying off people, but we took a different path, we found ways to balance the situation without a negative impact on the team and daily operations. For us, the virus is also a possibility and the current challenges give us the opportunity to show the benefits of augmented reality to the fullest.

Flexibility, the most important thing for Augumenta personnel, means flexible working hours – working hours that one can decide by themselves, free choice of working place – one can work at the office or from home, summer cottage or from abroad, whichever one decides, ease of combining work life and family life and flexibility in sickness and in health. We want our talents to feel well and if that means, for example, that they wish to work part-time while on sick leave or parental leave, we arrange things in a way that makes it possible. I am on parental leave at the moment. Being a parent is a full-time job but I also love working in Augumenta so much that we agreed that I can work part-time during my leave. For me, Augumenta is the best workplace ever. And apparently for all the others too, since no one has ever resigned. And I want to keep it that way!