Case Study – The future is all about employees: GCash story by Robert Conrad Gonzales

Every GCash employee believes in the purpose of making Filipinos’ lives better.

‘With their vision of creating ‘finance for all’, they are together working towards providing financial services for everyone.

The overall population of Filipinos is about 140 million but about only 44% of the adults have legit bank accounts and only 1 out of 12 have access to credit cards. However, being a digital-savvy population, 3 out of 4 people have smartphones. Hence, Geash was able to enter the digital ecosystem and create financial solutions that could be accessible to the majority of the population. Having more than 81 million subscribers, GCash has given them the ease of choosing their financial services at their fingertips.

Gcash became very much popular during the pandemic. They were the first ones to introduce such a thing in the fintech industry and ever since they have been revolutionizing the way how people can manage their financials, whether it’s borrowing money, sending money, or as simple as investing or buying stocks.

But all of this was only possible because of one sole reason: the employees of GCash.

Comprehensive feedback from employees can help you initiate some of the best changes in an organization. Employees’ voice has undoubtedly taken center stage in organizational development today. Research shows that organizations that listen to their employees are more likely to attract and retain top talent, improve employee satisfaction, and drive innovation.

But are employers really keen on listening to what their people have to say?

Robert Conrad Gonzales, Chief People Officer, GCash took us through how they have redefined their EX strategies by fostering a culture of openness, transparency, and collaboration which in turn led to building teams that are more innovative, productive, and engaged.

Like any other organization, GCash too faced a lot of difficulties in managing their employees’ expectations, long working hours, well-being, and more. The HR team along with the leadership team made it a point to do one simple thing for them: just being there for their employees. Making sure everyone’s needs are met, their dilemmas are heard, creating proper employee engagement activities, and ensuring a smooth interview process. Every small little thing was handled with utmost care.

Gcash proactively worked towards making their feedback system seamless. They created 4 buckets in order to tackle each and every comment made by their employees.

4 major questions that the employees had were:

1) About their compensation & benefits
2) Having more clarity about the way forward
3) Not having clear vision about their own growth at the organisation 4) Wanting more inclusive working culture

The 4Cs mantra at GCash:

Care

GCsh takes their employees’ well-being very seriously. They had been doing that ever since their establishment. But COVID somehow demanded extra care and support. They created some well-being programs which are still being followed religiously. There are a couple of new initiatives that they launched:

  • A salary restructure
  • A 14-month adjustment in the allowances:
  • Flex benefits and wellness in the allowances
  • Redesigning of the annual incentive plan
  • High-performing employees now own stocks of GCash
  • Introduction of life-partner insurance and benefits

Change Management

GCash believes in open source change management style. They believe in their leaders to become change champions. At this point of time, they are firming up their Change Management Playbook which is basically a curation of lessons learnt by the leaders and employees which will help them navigate better moving forward.

Career

GCash has been stitching various programs such as development programs, leadership programs to keep their employees engaged. They also have a signature program which is about ‘uplifting leaders’ to help make their leaders understand the importance and strategy of creating a psychologically safe workplace. They also have special programs for their young talent in order to better nurture them.

Culture

At Gcash, culture holds a greater importance in all aspects of work and workplace. From ‘Purpose at Gcash 2020’, they moved to creating programs that intensify the actions of activating values at the workplace. They have also ensured their employees are recognised for the great work they have been doing. A special family day celebration at the workplace is also something they had introduced for their employees.

With a strong talent acquisition team and strong employer brand, leadership at GCash ensures that they listen to their employees. Their main priority would be to invest in data analysis and AI so that they have up to date information about their employees, recruitment, learning and development and most importantly to do predictive analysis of possible attrition and the way around mitigating such scenarios.

Robert mentioned how they believe in keeping their employees engaged and empowered will lead to valued and satisfied customers which will then lead to happy stakeholders.

“With this happiness chain effect, we will be able to bring out the best of the GCash and build a better future. And that is our GCash story.” concluding thoughts shared by Robert Conrad Gonzales, Chief People Officer, GCash.

Resource: GCash, GWFM Research & Study