Why STARTEAM doesn’t have an HR department

We believe ‘Human Resources’ is an old-fashioned, impersonal and cold term for the organizational function that takes care of its people. At STARTEAM, we do not see each employee merely as a ‘resource’, but as a vital member of the greater STARTEAM family. Our ultimate goal is that everyone working for us genuinely enjoys what they do, is fully engaged and can be the best version of themselves.

To make the full spectrum of our responsibilities clearer and more approachable to our colleagues, we therefore renamed our ‘Human Resources’ department to ‘PCC’ a couple of years ago.

‘P’, because it's all about PEOPLE,

We make sure that our employees are in the right jobs, exactly where they can best apply their capabilities and talents. Under this set up everyone can strive to achieve above and beyond success in their job and for the company. We also make sure we understand and cater to the engagement factors of each individual employee, to achieve a sense of belonging of the STARTEAM family.

We also do our best to ensure that they can focus on their expertise and continue to work unaffected by any external disturbances. For that we apply modern IT solutions, specifically a well-integrated HR system, so most HR-related processes and documents are automated, paperless, conveniently accessible, yet highly secure.

Due to the volatile business environment the past years with its different lockdown scenarios and travel restrictions, we have also established a much more flexible working style, enabling our employees to ‘work from anywhere’ as long as their job nature allows it, which therefore creates a better work-life-balance for many, particularly families.

The first ‘C’ represents our CULTURE,

At PCC we regard ourselves as the drivers to create a safe working environment that facilitates professional and personal growth, fosters teamwork and takes responsibility to continuously seek perfection and bring about positive change. To build such a culture, we regularly question and optimize our HR processes and policies in order to reflect our culture parameters and form a cohesive workplace. In regard to employee development, we are adapting to less classroom- and more flexible virtual training solutions that are catered to the individual needs of each role, always considering the innovative and sustainable aspects of progress. At STARTEAM we also often finance the wishes of employees to acquire new knowledge externally through part-time university studies (e.g. B.A./ M.A./ MBA) or extended technical certification programs.

The last ‘C’ stands for COMMUNICATION,

Not only since we embedded ‘Working from Anywhere’ into our way of working, we recognized the importance of being connected and sharing information. At STARTEAM we believe in honest, respectful, straight and constructive communication. In fact, the feeling of ‘being able to talk openly with supervisors’ has always been among the top scores in our annual NPS survey in the past 5 years.

PCC’s role in communication is to cultivate and enhance our various internal modern communication platforms and to support other departments in setting up effective communication to the global STARTEAM community. We also take care that top management’s communication about company strategy, newest business developments and project initiatives reaches all levels of the organization. Most importantly, we also enjoy listening and tasking ourselves with understanding the needs of our individual employees and colleagues, recognizing that strong relationships drive smarter decisions and generate better solutions.

At PCC we genuinely enjoy the high variety of tasks we deal with on a daily basis (with hiring just being a fragment of it). It is rewarding to not only dive into the more traditional processes of HR, but also to expand our scope of responsibility to culture and communication. In today’s modern workplace we see that People, Culture and Communication are inseparable for creating and sustaining a safe, caring, advanced and high-performance culture and workplace for our employees at STARTEAM.