2020: The year that wasn’t
Tags: 2020, Employee Engagement, Product, Growth, Apps

Top 5 new features 2020:

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Microsoft Teams integration

🤳 WhatsApp integration

💗 External Pulses & Editable Pulse templates

🎮 Hi5 Games Centre

🗓️ Notice Board calendar view

Check out all our new features >

Internship

We ran our first ever fully-remote internship! High school graduate Sebastian joined our team for 4 months of intense learning; we threw him in the deep end of every aspect of startup life and we’re proud to have unleashed him on the big bad world!

Learnt so much from everyone — such as industry information and mannerisms — and plenty of valuable skills that will stay with me for most of my career. Thanks everyone for the opportunity and everything you guys have taught me, I appreciate it so much and I’m gonna miss working with all of you ❤ — Sebastian, Hi5 Intern 2020

Saying goodbye and enjoying a COVID-friendly meal with the team

If you’re keen to enroll in our Graduate Recruitment Programme, check out our Careers page here.

Nominations

In 2019, we were honoured to be one of the top selected startups in the international startups acceleration programme, BigBooster, in Lyon (France). We were invited to the Boston, MA (USA) leg of the programme and joined up in January 2020 when international travel was still a thing.

We built some lasting friendships with the amazing folks we met in Boston, including Carin-Isabel Knoop, the Executive Director of the Global Research Group at Harvard Business School. Check out the podcast episode we recorded with her below and some of her latest articles on our blog here.

Reviews site Goodfirms nominated us once again as a Top Employee Engagement software. Read more about this here.

Events

We hosted DisruptHR Cape Town #7 at the Red & Yellow Creative School of Business on 5 March 2020, just before the lockdown in South Africa was put in place on 26 March. It seems such a distant time ago when we were able to meet in-person for engaging talks around the future of work and talent management!

Check out the talk videos👇

Resources

We were super busy on the content front this year! We published a whopping 81 blog posts, surveyed 396 employees to learn about their Culture at Work and published the 8-Step Guide to HR for Startups.

Follow the link above to get the Guide!

Clients

We sadly saw some clients having to downgrade, but we also saw new clients join as we released more integrations & features and as the need for remote team software became more prevalent and urgent.

We rolled out to our first multinational African company, aYo Holdings. Based in South Africa, Zambia, Ghana, Uganda — and soon to be joined by their teams in Côte d’Ivoire and Nigeria — aYo Holdings is a simple product for Africans to get hospital cover, life insurance and send cash via the MTN mobile service provider. You can check them out here.

“We believe that insurance cover should be accessible to everyone in Africa and easy to use. That’s why MMI Holdings and MTN have teamed up to bring you aYo, a new way to get hospital and life cover using your cellphone.”

Two of our longest-standing clients, ooba homeloans and GlueData, agreed to allow us to conduct customer case studies at their companies to gain some insights into how Hi5 is helping them become better. ooba saw a 50% reduction in employee absenteeism in their Claims team, and GlueData’s stats show that their employee growth is picking up in spite of the pandemic!

Growth at Hi5

Our user base doubled last year, and grew by 81% in 2020! Needless to say, we’re pretty relieved to have maintained an upward trend in user growth 😅 Besides seeing a lot of the growth concentrated in USA, we couldn’t help but notice that our user base in India grew but just shy of 10X in 2020! 👏