The Success Story of Dustin and Sympa HR

Dustin is a leading online-based IT partner with operations in the Nordics and the Netherlands, employing over 1500 people in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland and the Netherlands. The company has grown more than five times its size in the last twelve years through a mixture of organic growth and acquisition.

The time for modern HR development initiatives is now

“The only thing that is constant is change,” says Morten Jakobi, Executive Vice President, People and Culture at Dustin. “The world is changing fast and so are the wishes of our customers. Businesses and HR simply have to be able keep up.”

Jakobi has seen the way changes affect employees as well. “People have a vast array of different career paths to choose from and the average length of careers within a company is becoming shorter with new generations entering the job market. At the same time, people are getting more stressed,” he says.

When Dustin started working with Sympa in 2016, they had no HR system in place. What Jakobi did have, however, was a clear vision: “I think the first step for HR when approaching any change or development projects is to actually define what to develop. Only then can you continue with the manner in which to develop and what aspects to prioritise – in other words, the how.”

"To be able to support the well-being of your employees and help them grow, engage and commit to your company, modern HR development initiatives are needed."

Creating a solid foundation with Sympa

Dustin has been able to solve these questions by establishing clear values and by building strong principles for leadership within the organisation. “You have to give your people and your teams a solid foundation to work from. When the foundation is being taken care of, you create space for your people to develop and thrive”, Jakobi continues.

This is where Sympa HR, or ‘Worklife’, as the Sympa HR solution is branded at Dustin, is making a huge difference. The solution is now the backbone around which Dustin has built a solid structure the company needs to support its HR and its leaders as they manage change and execute initiatives.

“Getting the key numbers for decision-making and being able to scale our HR operations is huge for us – especially since we’re located in several countries and run projects and processes in parallel.”

Sympa HR tracks all the human capital within Dustin and provides a clear overview. “Before Sympa HR, it could even be difficult to count the exact number of employees we had,” Jakobi remembers. “Such a basic question! We actually had to call accountants and HR in each location to get to the total number.”

Sympa HR also supports both global and country-specific processes, making them much easier to deploy, track and quantify.

Learning from each other

The implementation of Sympa HR pushed both teams at Dustin and Sympa to their limits as they explored new territory. “Sympa and Dustin have been on a great journey together, and we both learned a lot” Jakobi says. Back then, Dustin didn’t have experience in HR system implementations, while Sympa had limited experience with a multinational organisation of Dustin’s complexity.

“We have had a positive effect on each other and always maintain a good dialogue, which was especially valuable when running into bumps in the road – and with a development project of this kind, there will always be bumps in the road”, Jakobi says.

An HR system is a must-have

Jakobi stresses the impact that an HR system has on value-creating processes and initiatives. “I’ll say this: we cannot live without our HR system”, Jakobi says. “It’s the foundation for all other development. Having an agile and easily adaptable HR solution that can work across multiple countries and be flexible enough to reflect new ways of working, has been essential.”