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Media Coverage

CEO SPOTLIGHT: Partha Neog of Vantage Circle
14th March 2022

Can you tell us a bit about your background and what led you to become the CEO of Vantage Circle today?
I have over two decades of experience in Product and Executive Management with a successful track record of scaling winning businesses. I also played a pivotal role in the conceptualization and launch of 99acres.com (India’s number one property portal). Having done my MBA from ISB Hyderabad, I have also worked at Aricent, Hughes Software Systems, and Bharat Electronics, attaining expertise across multiple industry verticals.
I, along with my other co-founder Anjan Pathak and KC Ramakrishna, explored the gap in the field of employee engagement and collectively worked together to bridge the gap taking feedback from the HR departments of global leading corporates.
Through this varied experience, I have developed unique insight into the employee engagement space, and I’ve always been as passionate about product management as I am about immersive leadership. Now as the CEO of Vantage Circle, I have tried to lead the company with innovative flair, leveraging everything I can to ensure Vantage Circle enjoys a sustained competitive position in the market.
Can you briefly describe Vantage Circle’s products/what you offer?
Vantage Circle is a global employee engagement and wellness platform that uses Artificial Intelligence and machine learning to deliver easy-to-use and effective employee engagement solutions to HR to retain and attract the best talent while also creating a great work culture.
The company’s suite of solutions, namely, Vantage Rewards, Vantage Perks, Vantage Pulse, and Vantage Fit, is designed to address the conscious need to enhance workforce productivity by presenting a great employee experience.
Our Products
- Vantage Rewards: Vantage Rewards is a powerful SaaS-based reward and recognition platform that makes the employee recognition process easy, fun, cost-effective, and globally accessible. It helps your organization recognize and appreciate great work in a meaningful yet seamless way with Vantage Rewards.
- Vantage Perks: Vantage Perks is a comprehensive employee benefits platform that provides exclusive corporate deals, discounts, and cashback on a global catalog of top online and offline brands. It prioritizes your employees’ financial well-being by enabling them to save money with Vantage Perks.
- Vantage Pulse: Vantage Pulse is an employee survey tool that lets you collect, measure, and act on real-time employee feedback. Uncover actionable data, predict employee behavior, and get an accurate picture of your organization’s employee engagement levels with Vantage Pulse.
- Vantage Fit: Vantage Fit is an AI-based corporate wellness platform that helps organizations nurture a healthy workforce by enabling a gamified wellness experience for a diverse workforce. Meet your workforce’s wellness needs through team events, and incentivize health achievements with Vantage Fit redeemable reward points.
What makes Vantage Circle stand out within the niche of employee engagement and reward systems?
Every day at Vantage Circle is a new challenge to better ourselves and become the best that we can be. I believe that our products, described above, help us make employee engagement a pillar of a good organizational culture. Everything we do has been automated as a result of modernization and digitalization. And, as organizations shift toward automation, Vantage Circle’s cloud-based solution has made it possible for businesses to make this transition smoothly.
Our ability to provide a robust and transparent reward and recognition system has helped businesses identify areas for improvement to make the workplace more sustainable. Not only has our platform enabled businesses to increase their engagement efforts with a people-centric approach, but it has also enabled them to place a greater emphasis on employee empowerment.
Walk us through a day in the life as CEO.
As a CEO, I don’t consider myself to be the boss who wants to maintain the hierarchical relationship between a boss and an employee. I regard the entire team as coworkers, and the day usually begins with warm morning greetings to set the tone for the day.
Mornings are then followed by scrums with all of our client-facing teams, such as our Sales team and the CX teams for India, US, North America and Australia. I have a habit of taking important notes that I believe are significant and will be useful to the company and my teams in particular. Then I usually have a couple of client meetings to present valuable insights that we have been gathering in order to improve the picture of employee engagement in the business world.
I usually end the day with strategic internal meetings to discuss how we can improve our product to provide the best client experience possible and brainstorm processes that will position us as a key player in revolutionizing employee engagement. Then there are various aspects of human resources that I oversee that I believe are critical to good people management. I really like to focus on regular workplace feedback–there is nothing more important than being compassionate and empathetic, and actually caring for your workforce.
As a CEO, I believe that every detail is important and that the emphasis should always be on improving the work culture. This could be from a financial standpoint, sales, or the workforce that we have in our company.
What’s been the greatest lesson you’ve learned (so far) as CEO?
Vantage Circle has been in operation for more than ten years, and it has always been a learning experience. However, one important lesson I have learned thus far is that your hiring or recruitment should be precise and top-notch. Your future coworkers should be those who see how they can bring a fresh perspective and ideas to help the company grow. One good hire can have a significant impact on the company, and two good hires can completely transform the company’s image. With that knowledge, I’ve worked to hire candidates based on talent and potential rather than just experience.
Another important lesson I’ll never forget is that without vision, you can’t grow or evolve. With the changing environment and dynamics, you must be adaptable and flexible. When you understand this, you will become a person who values ethics and who is always grateful for what you have.
What’s been your greatest challenge as CEO?
As a CEO, every day is a challenge and a learning opportunity for me. I do not like to take things for granted. For me, it is a process that you have to adapt to with time.
When it comes to the most difficult challenges, I can’t pick just one. It varies depending on the stage of the company. The challenges during the first few years of the company, when Vantage Circle was new, were convincing potential clients to try our product. I worked really hard with my team to show off our tool and the benefits of using Vantage Circle.
Once we established ourselves, the next challenge was hiring the right people who could really make a difference. It was a long process, but we were eventually able to put together the team that we have now.
That, however, was not the end of my challenge as CEO. The next step was to keep the workforce engaged and productive. As a company that specializes in employee engagement, I thought that was something we’d be really good at from the get-go. But the struggle was quite real. Things can get complicated with a diverse workforce, but with the right strategies in place, we overcame this obstacle. Still, that’s an ongoing challenge that we work on every single day. It’s a constant learning opportunity, even to this day.. Employee engagement is something that requires ongoing attention and development over time. As a company that provides employee engagement tools, my colleagues and I acknowledged this fact and realized that it is not something you set and forget.
With all of that said, I think the biggest challenge for me as a CEO is to create a workplace culture that is for the people and by the people. It is always about putting in place the right processes that will help the people in the company feel like they are at home. That is something we are always striving for and will continue to do so, of course with the hope that it will benefit not only the company but the people around us, too.
In your opinion, what should the CEO of any company be responsible for?
A CEO is responsible for everything and anything that goes on in the company. It is not just one thing that you need to focus on. There are various aspects that you have to look after. But the most important things, for me, include:
- People management
- Development of each individual
- Emphasizing the needs of the workforce
- Job Satisfaction
- Building a psychologically safe work environment
Can you pinpoint the moment or time in your life when you realized you had what it takes to be a CEO?
I don’t believe there was such an “ah-ha” moment for me. The only guiding principle has been to “do whatever it takes to get things done,” but in the proper and appropriate manner. What I do and have done should be consistent with my vision and beneficial to others. Even now, after all of this time and experience, I’m not sure about a lot of things, and I’m aware that there are always people with more knowledge than me.
As a CEO, one thing I’ve learned over and over is that hiring the right people for the right job is critical to achieving the success you desire. And I believe this will be a life-long learning experience for me.
Vantage Circle’s main priority is building strong work cultures and helping boost employee engagement. How do you maintain these values with your own employees?
Employee engagement is something that we not only preach about but also actively practice in our company. We have created a platform for everyone in the organization to recognize one another through features such as celebrating and sending kind words on special occasions, recognizing virtual anniversary celebrations, enabling peer-to-peer recognition, and sending incentivized awards for accomplishments.
We use the in-house Rewards and Recognition platform to maintain our engagement efforts, and there is active participation throughout our organization. Everyone is connected with each other and can see who is being recognized for their contributions thanks to the social feed. On top of that, we consistently recognize and reward our employees with badges and redeemable vantage points on our platform. We do this on a monthly basis for their exceptional efforts and dedication.
Our efforts to automate the recognition process have been aided by the appreciate feature, which allows employees to recognize one another without difficulty. One important distinction is that we do not maintain a hierarchical structure in which only managers have the authority to recognize or reward employees. Everyone in the organization can appreciate one another, which has greatly aided us in increasing employee engagement levels.
If you could go back to your first day as CEO and give yourself a piece of advice, what would it be?
If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t change much because this journey shaped me into the person I am today. But one thing I would tell my younger self is that patience and long-term thinking can and will solve any problem. So, never give up hope, and always keep a long-term vision in mind.
What are you most excited about right now for Vantage Circle? What can we look forward to in the next year?
What excites me the most about Vantage Circle right now is the company’s growth. We have not only given emerging talent new opportunities, but we have also contributed to the development of a workforce capable of reaching greater heights. I am pleased that the business world is now recognizing employee engagement as a critical component of their work culture. This makes me proud that we were able to achieve our vision and goals gradually.
When it comes to employee engagement, the future looks bright. I believe we can play a critical role in changing the culture of engagement in organizations and making it an integral part of every working culture.
Despite the fact that 2021 brought new challenges and a completely different work environment, as a team we have grown, not only in size, but also in the amount of progress we made. G2, Crozdesk, and Great Place To Work recognition are just a few of the honors we have received this year.
In terms of feature launches, we are very user-centric, and we are constantly upgrading our products to ensure that they meet market standards. We also actively solicit feedback from both our clients and user base to ensure that we do not overlook any features that would improve the user experience.