The North Alliance

The North Alliance (NoA) is a multinational network of a dozen creative digital agencies spanning four countries; Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Poland, and collectively employing around 850 people.

Boosting the employee experience with digital HR

For a modern organisation like NoA, its people are its capital and providing an outstanding employee experience is a key part of attracting and retaining the talent that it needs to grow and to serve its clients.

As a part of this wider strategy, NoA’s Head of People & Process, Marte Alvfalk and her team at the HR-department have sped up the switch to digital HR by investing in Sympa. The wish list consisted of a system that would easily keep up with changing circumstances, that reflected NoA’s forward thinking culture, was cloud-based and, above all, would be easy to use. Because NoA’s core business centers around IT-development, its users were always going to be a tough audience with high expectations, making it very important for Alvfalk to pick a system that would live up to all expectations and please all.

“I scanned the market thoroughly and found both older systems that breathed old-school HR and newer systems that were unnecessarily complicated,” Alvfalk says. “Sympa offered a good balance between a modern system with good usability yet it wasn’t too complicated.”

She is now looking forward to bringing the system online and using it to further develop and refine the NoA employee experience, something that may well mean something very different in the post-COVID era.

Getting ready for “the new normal”

Ideas of ‘normal’ ways of working have evolved quickly in order to cope with the new situation. NoA’s people, just like millions elsewhere, have been spending much more time working from home. Sympa will accelerate NoA’s shift to digital HR and the system’s pioneering use of e-signature technology hasn’t just eliminated the need for paper but makes it easier to avoid non-essential, in-person meetings.

Enthusiasm for the new system is already spreading even as it prepares to go live. A particular hit has been Dear Lucy’s dashboard. At the outset it was mainly the HR department and individual country managers who saw the benefits of Sympa, but the ease with which NoAs different systems can communicate with one another has won its fans among the finance department and elsewhere as well.

As for Alvfalk, aside from putting all the information she needs at her fingertips, the degree of automation of routine HR tasks that Sympa offers will leave her free to concentrate on the areas where she feels she can really make a difference.

“Strategy, branding and people – working in all those dimensions at the same time really powers our growth strategy and transformation. It allows me to develop our business as part of our wider strategy. That’s what Sympa is allowing me to focus on.”