Building the exceptional: The Best of Bob in 2023

It’s been a busy year for us here at HiBob. Our 2023 roadmap theme was “Building the exceptional,” highlighting our dedication to continuously go above and beyond to deliver an even better HCM for our customers everywhere. We rose to the challenge, providing solutions focusing on employee wellbeing and experience, streamlining HR, and enhancing the user experience. We’ve also given Bob a makeover with a new look that addresses low-vision accessibility and increases efficiency while staying true to our trademark fun and friendly design. 

To give you a taste of what we’ve achieved, we’ve handpicked some of Bob’s best new features that help our customers build the exceptional when managing global HR. So let’s get started.

Focusing on employee wellbeing and experience 

During the past year, we released several new solutions that help HR leaders focus on employee wellbeing and experience and understand more about their people. 

• We enhanced Bob’s surveys, adding the capability to generate your company’s employee net promoter score (eNPS), new ways to view survey results, and easily share those results with managers. Our new summary dashboard makes it simple to compare survey results over time and break them down by site, department, or any other group. We also added a survey heatmap that enables you to view your salary questions by theme, such as work-life balance or development and promotion, and compare scores across departments, gender, age, or any other variable, helping you to quickly identify any issues and take the appropriate steps to rectify them.
• We added a DE&I dashboard to Bob’s Analytics that tracks key diversity, equity, and inclusion metrics to your dashboards without filtering the data. Now, you can easily measure metrics such as headcount, average salary, and promotion rate according to gender, ethnicity, age, or any custom fields you’ve set up in Bob, such as pronouns, gender identity, and nationality. This way, you can identify gaps relating to pay, opportunities, or advancement and track your progress over time.
• We enhanced Bob’s Analytics with our new Advanced Analytics feature that enables you to generate a comprehensive analysis of workplace data to identify areas that meet, fall short, or exceed your DE&I targets and explore ways to improve. This new tool helps you set a goal and easily keep track of a data set without setting it up anew every time. 
• We added Mercer compensation benchmarking data to Bob’s dashboards on retention rate, promotion rate, pay gap, and more, providing a baseline for comparing your company’s workforce metrics to similar companies in the market. 

Streamlining processes with new integrations 

Scaling companies look for ways to streamline and automate processes while complying with data security and privacy standards. We designed Bob to integrate with the leading tech tools, enabling you to seamlessly transfer data between Bob and these third-party solutions for a single source of truth and more streamlined and secure processes.

This year, we celebrated the milestone of Bob integrating with over 100 tech solutions, including HR tools, team collaboration tools, developer tools, and more. We are constantly adding new integrations to our portfolio and even added two new categories—benefits administration tools and employee perks and recognition tools. We’re happy to announce the addition of the following notable new arrivals to the HiBob Marketplace in the past year: Sequoia, BSwift, TravelPerk, and Azure AD. 

We also integrated the Greenhouse Applicant Tracking System (ATS) with our Workforce Planning module. This two-way API enables you to create new jobs and job openings in Greenhouse directly from Workforce Planning and sync positions data from Bob to Greenhouse, increasing efficiency and avoiding double-data entry. 

To support payroll management, Bob’s Payroll Hub now supports over 20 local payroll systems using Payroll Connect, helping you simply sync new hires, payroll changes, and termination reports. Employee pay details for ADP, Paylocity, and Trinet are now available in Payroll Hub, allowing your people to view their personal salary information, including their net salary, deductions, and taxes, directly in their profile and Bob’s mobile app. 

Providing an enhanced user experience 

As part of our mission to build the exceptional, we gave Bob a new look. We wanted to provide our customers with an HR platform that can scale with them as they use Bob for more complex processes and analyzing more data. 

We redesigned Bob with an expanded workspace for viewing dashboards and running reports and rearranged the navigation for a better user experience. 

We’ve also made Bob more accessible for customers with low-vision accessibility by increasing the platform’s font size, adding more color contrast, and replacing multi-color menus with a single color. For customers who choose to customize Bob using their company colors and logo, we’ve expanded our offering by adding a new color palette that includes colors for creating graphs and labels that align closely with your brand. 

We also redesigned several Bob features to enhance your day-to-day experience. The employee profile and settings now have a new look, making it easier to find important employee information at a glance. We’ve also added a multi-view version to our popular Org Chart, enabling you to choose the format, configure the layout views according to hierarchy or color, and zoom in or out to view more information.

Easing HR processes with functional tools

We added many new features and updates to Bob that support global workforces and help you get more done in less time. While there are too many to list here, some noteworthy new tools include:

• Out-of-the-box time-off policy templates: Helping you manage leave for people in different countries and saving you the time spent on building your own from scratch. We’ve also added flexible attendance policies that enable you to create multiple time and attendance policies within a single site. 
• System languages: Our commitment to global reach is reflected in our continuously expanding system languages. In 2023, we added Finnish, Polish, and Turkish, bringing the total number of supported languages to 16.
• Custom translations: We added custom translations to employee categories, fields, tables, and lists, allowing you to comply with local laws requiring specific information to be provided in the local language. 
• Custom formulas: You can now define custom formulas—just like in Google Sheets or Excel—directly within Bob and add them as columns in reports and the People Directory to make your HR processes more efficient and save time. You can also now create task lists for groups of people as well as individuals, which is very handy when onboarding multiple new hires simultaneously or setting tasks for specific departments, such as IT or Finance.  
• Including the finance team in workforce planning events: You can now involve all stakeholders in the process of preparing for future events in Bob’s Workforce Planning module, including the finance and recruitment teams. So, when viewing and budgeting events, you can create a collaborative workforce planning process across your company, ensuring everyone is kept in the loop. 

Bringing you the best HCM to manage your people 

As we approach the end of 2023, we look forward to next year and promise that there will be lots more exciting releases—including a new module or two—to support your day-to-day people management. To our customers everywhere, we value you and your feedback, which helps us to continuously improve and provide you with the best HCM for your people and HR processes. We’re excited about what’s next, so watch this space!