Not a lot of people may realise this but when it comes to navigating various job opportunities, the one fundamental factor that’s often overlooked is company culture. We can discuss work-to-home proximity and debate about the ethics of comparing pay grades as much as we want, but at the end of the day, culture fit is what tips the scale when it comes to a person’s employment journey.

And haven’t we all been there? While paychecks and other concrete factors define the backbone of our decision-making, how long we last in a company and how happy we are during our time there are determined by how well we mesh with the values of the organisation.

According to a 2019 report, culture fit is the most important aspect when it comes to staff retention. Because we spend so much of our time at the workplace, it is necessary that employees feel connected in the environment they work in. This is integral not only with regard to how long employees last but also with regard to their sense of presence as well as their overall performance.

Company culture is known to have a direct impact when it comes to boosting a company’s profile and ultimately creating a brand out of its identity. Fostering this sense of identity through company culture can yield tangible results in terms of investor expectations and compensation costs.

As such, Manila-headquartered Workbean launched their culture-search platform that helps companies showcase who they are and what they value in employees to attract talents that mesh well with the company’s values and culture.

Empowering the workplace

In a nutshell, Workbean focuses on helping talents find meaningful careers in companies where they belong by helping employers showcase their most authentic stories about their people, workplace, and culture.

Launching in January 2020 with 8 pilot companies, they have now grown to working with 15 partner companies. Workbean has had over 25,000 unique views of the “culture page” of their portfolio companies, while their job-click rate (job-clicks per culture page views) rose from averaging 5-7% between February to March, and 16% in July. Starting from 1,000 monthly active users in February, they have now grown to 13,000 in July.

“We are seeing that companies are adding employer branding initiatives to their people strategies and not a lot of tools exist to assist HR leaders in this space,” said Neil Rojas, Workbean Co-founder, CFO, and Chief Strategist.

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Rojas added, “When I lived in Malaysia and Singapore, I noticed that the career perspectives of job-seekers are wider and more informed. This is not the case for Filipinos; the dream of the majority of fresh graduates is to work for the well-known conglomerates and FMCGs—product brands that are well-known.”

In the Philippine context, he argued that not a lot of people apply to tech and software companies despite the high growth potential. Filipinos are still more likely to go for areas often considered “safe” and “traditional”, whereas elsewhere in the world, there is a draw to technology companies and high-growth startups that are changing the world.

Workbean seeks to help widen the Filipino perspective and the best way Rojas believes one can achieve that is to provide a platform that offers authentic company information.

The importance of work culture in the digital age

With COVID-19 disrupting virtually every aspect of human interaction, and by extension, workplace dynamics where employees engage their coworkers through computer screens, it is especially important for companies to craft and nurture their values as an organisation.

Moreover, companies must build their teams according to those values and constantly engage their employees in ways that yield the best results both for the organisation and the individual satisfaction of team members.

Rojas believes that in this isolation economy, innovation will skew towards culture-building and engagement because these are the things that we need to preserve and improve on right now.

“In our interviews with users, we got the sentiment that employees need to feel that their management and their leadership care about them and see their human sides. This is a side of work culture that you don’t see in company websites and job ads—these are the things that we want to shine a spotlight on,” explained Rojas.

“Workbean is positioned to be the platform that showcases the human element of work.”

The future of Workbean

With the momentum that the company currently enjoys and one that they experience despite the setbacks created by the global health crisis, Workbean seeks to onboard at least 100 companies in the next 12 months and have partner companies in major cities in the Philippines.

“We want to be able to spread our mission to other parts of the country because we know that if we can widen the perspectives of a conservative nation such as the Philippines, we can also do so in other countries in Southeast Asia,” said Rojas, underscoring Workbean’s larger plan of scaling regionally in the future.

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He added, “scaling the product and having more companies in the platform [is the goal]. We want to elevate the way people search for jobs and we want to spread this culture of transparency not just in the Philippines but in Southeast Asia.”

The company is also gearing to release a self-service platform where HR teams can self-manage their culture pages. Coupled with plans to offer modified services that come in free and premium versions, Workbean hopes that companies will be able to start building their brands with Workbean for free and eventually upgrade to a premium version once operations finally stabilise.

Addressing challenges

The modified services model currently in development is a part of the company’s plan to mitigate the effects of COVID-19 to businesses everywhere. Because companies are understandably in crisis mode where some have been forced to freeze their hiring processes, Workbean hopes to be able to offer their services without burdening the precarious financial situation of different businesses today.

Moreover, with Workbean having signed up for an e27 Pro membership, the company no longer has to rely on offline incubators and accelerators to access investors and explore funding opportunities.

“e27 Pro makes it easy to identify which investors to reach out to because data is presented in a way where we can easily filter things such as funding stage, markets, and funding amount,” said Rojas, highlighting the important role of transparency and staying informed in the context of fundraising. “The ease of reaching out just to start a conversation is very valuable for us,” he added.

Workbean’s solid run despite having been thrust into a pandemic-riddled status quo says a lot about the company’s formidable team and business model. With their plans already underway and their access to e27 Pro tools and insights, we can only expect great things from Workbean and their vision to inspire a healthier and happier life at work using authentic information for people to reach their full potential.

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