Ocean Investments aligns company culture with HeartCount for faster scaling
7 minute read
Case summary
Ocean Investments faced the challenge of aligning company culture and fostering employee engagement across its rapidly growing portfolio while scaling operations under tight deadlines.
To address this, they implemented HeartCount, a real-time feedback and engagement insights platform, alongside workshops and team-building initiatives. By promoting transparency and leveraging data-driven insights, Ocean Investments strengthened cross-team collaboration, improved decision-making, and enhanced employee satisfaction, enabling sustainable growth and minimizing turnover across the group.
Customer profile
Ocean Investments is a family-owned investment holding company. Although relatively young, it’s part of a group with 25 years of experience in different industries. Based in Sofia, Bulgaria, it’s focused on early-stage technology innovators across Europe, the USA, Africa, and Asia. Its team has a mission to support bold and innovative entrepreneurs on their journey to change the world for the better.
Ocean Investments offers full-stack support for innovators through funding, business and people management, and software building. They’re dedicated to scaling new businesses in cybersecurity, education, food, health, and real estate industries.
Atanas Simeonov, owner and CEO, specifies: Unlike traditional investors and VC funds, we provide comprehensive support, including technical expertise, domain knowledge across all focus areas, and, most importantly, a strategic vision. Additionally, our extensive network of industry leaders and partners ensures that our portfolio companies have access to the connections and resources they need to thrive in a competitive global market.
While dedicated to supporting others, Ocean Investments doesn’t overlook its teams. Only in 2024 did Ocean Investments earn three different awards from the Bulgarian Association for People Management, acknowledging them as Employer of the Choice 2024 for Office & Work Environment and Internal Communication and Best HR Project of a Large Company while scaling rapidly.
Simeonov explains: What truly distinguishes us is our belief that universal human values take precedence over expertise. While technical skills are essential, we believe that the shared human values-integrity, empathy, and collaboration form the foundation for sustainable success. This philosophy drives our decision-making and ensures that every partnership aligns with our vision of growth through meaningful connections.
Customer’s problem
As Ocean Investments and its portfolio companies were growing rapidly, the challenge surged:
How can all newcomers be onboarded, adding value and different points of view while keeping the group aligned within the company? How can every employee be dedicated to sustaining a company culture and nourishing positive sentiments while working under a lot of pressure and hard deadlines?
Simeonov elaborated on this strenuous task they faced: As our portfolio expanded, the complexity of managing cross-functional teams and preserving organizational alignment became increasingly prominent. Fostering real-time employee engagement across multiple geographies also emerged as a critical challenge.
Our primary goal at this point was to maintain a cohesive company culture across diverse portfolio companies. Simultaneously, we had to focus on scaling our operations while ensuring employee satisfaction and engagement, which has been a significant hurdle. – Atanas Simeonov, owner and CEO
The organization’s driving values are focused on people being interconnected, supportive, free, healthy, and happy. Ultimately, they are driven to enable everyone joining the company to feel secure, seen, and validated. Only then can people give their best to clients, they reassure.
That’s why they decided to tackle down alignment challenges as they appeared. They were keen to find a way to open a conversation about people’s feelings, morale, and attitude to improve engagement and, ultimately, retention so they could fully focus on growth rather than constantly going back to replacement processes.
Simeonov honestly shared that aligning the goals and cultures of individual portfolio companies with the group’s shared values was extremely challenging, and it did, in fact, temporarily slow decision-making processes and growth strategies. However, in the long term, it actually enabled greater scaling without burnout or high turnovers.
Solution
Being the experienced team they were, Ocean Investments didn’t wait for things to go wrong. They started prevention as soon as they figured out what possible scenarios could happen during company growth.
We addressed these challenges by introducing regular workshops and team-building initiatives and aligning our operations with the core values of Health, Freedom, Happiness, Righteousness, and Ocean Guild. – Veneta Kiryakova, CHRO, shares, adding – We also implemented HeartCount to measure and improve employee engagement through weekly pulse surveys, anonymous feedback, and customized surveys tailored to team needs.
This was a logical step for the group, as one of the companies has been using HeartCount for years and has had quite a positive experience.
NAME highlighted that they’re using HeartCount to gather insights on employees’ sentiments towards the company, management, colleagues, and their jobs overall. She/he emphasizes that the employee overview feature has a crucial role here, as they can track the consistency and percentage of survey participation across every company within the group’s portfolio. It was substantial in that period that they were able to highlight those being neutral or within a negative scale in a matter of seconds so they could have a more thorough conversation to gather as much feedback as possible.
Weekly pulse surveys provide timely data, helping us identify trends or concerns and allowing quick interventions and adjustments. The monitoring is carried out by the HR function on the one hand and by team managers on the other. Most often, they check whether there are any responses on the negative scale and if there are any reasons for them that are sought in a conversation. Those who often respond neutrally and those who do not respond are observed. The company’s results are periodically compared with those of other companies, and for that, we use HeartCount’s data insights.
Individual monitoring may sound too harsh and invasive, so it’s essential to highlight that HeartCount is an employee experience management platform that ensures anonymity through secure survey mechanisms. This platform enables employees to share honest feedback without hesitation. Ocean Investments uses an anonymous version of the platform that empowers employees to be as open as possible about feedback.
Above all, as NAME noted, their employees rarely take advantage of the anonymous option and more often share their feedback and praise openly.
The most important thing for us is that we have increased the transparency of communication and feedback in the organization, and we encourage a culture of giving and receiving feedback.
Outcome
Ocean Investments was able to scale fast yet sustainably by implementing HeartCount in its already consistent initiatives.
As a result, it experienced [quantifiable results], which led to [positive impact on business].
There is no doubt, as Atanas Simeonov, owner and CEO of Ocean Investments, confirms:
HeartCount has been instrumental in fostering employee engagement, as evidenced by improved survey participation rates, better cross-team collaboration, and higher employee satisfaction scores.
For Ocean Investments and all the companies in their portfolio, the use of HeartCount has led to:
- stronger collaboration across teams,
- improved decision-making by leveraging timely feedback and
- enhanced transparency and trust within the organization.
Combining team and individual reports helped them better understand whether and how employee engagement and performance change over time. These data played a key role in adapting approaches and aligning culture and operation across the group’s portfolio.
Growing sustainably with HeartCount
As Atanas Simeonov, owner and CEO at Ocean Investments, shares, they plan to enhance its use of HeartCount by integrating it with other HR tools and exploring its advanced analytics capabilities to support strategic decision-making better.