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The fact that people start using the card and don't feel the need to ask any questions is a great sign, and it ends up saving a lot of time.
July 28th, 2020 — it may be “a date like any other”, but Pedro Pinho has it in the tip of his tongue. Near Sea Tech’s inception date is a little atypical, but he thought: “Why not found a company in a pandemic year?”. In a kind of surprising way, this says a lot about the person behind this boutique tech company.
Although he has been working as a team lead since 2015, Pedro started as a computer engineer in 2009 and slowly started to grow into a natural leader. In 2018, he found himself spending most of his time taking on a more entrepreneurial and administrative role, as Head of the Porto team of a German company. That team grew from 5 to 100 people in less than two years — and growing that team was the experience Pedro needed to realise the importance of diversified compensation offers, the challenge of finding the right solutions and, once found, managing them. At the end of this experience, he decided to put all his chips in to set up an organisation that would be a more structured solution for the projects he had always kept on a freelance basis. Building this business, Pedro decided to do everything with the calm and ponderation he believes they ask for, taking advantage of the benefits that a smaller company has to offer.
Near Sea Tech’s focus is on providing tech services, with a multidisciplinary team of backend and frontend developers and product owners that works on different kinds of projects, for mostly European clients. In 2021, they launched a new business area to help with specialised recruitment services for other companies, working as the man in the middle and focusing on finding the right people for the right jobs, betting on culture fit instead of quantity.
Currently, this organisation has 15 employees working 100% remotely, with most of them located geographically close (in cities throughout the Northern part of Portugal and one person in Madrid) to be able to meet a few times a year, and have these meetings really count.
It is clear that the well-being of Near Sea Tech’s employees is a concern for the company's manager. Pedro Pinho believes in the importance of making the “foundations of the project” solid since the very beginning of an organisation's life — “without the right foundations, a project can collapse very easily. It's like building a house: you have to start with the foundations”. A solid, good principle, one that informed the decision of hiring a specific resource to work on People & Culture very early on.
Pedro Pinho is a thoughtful manager: he is concerned with consistency. He knows that, to have a team be consistently productive, his people need to be cared for and have access to the conditions they need to be able to provide the quality he requires and expects.
Pedro Pinho needed to explore the tools at his disposal that would allow him to create up-to-date, custom compensation packages that offered flexibility and competitive value, to help him grow his team while giving them the conditions they needed and deserved and to help keep everyone happy and motivated. Always looking to the future, he knows that the priorities of his team will change over time and to be a part of each and every employee’s personal growth, which led him to look for a solution that would not become obsolete as soon as someone different joined the team, avoiding the need to find a new solution every time a new use case came along.
The company found in Coverflex a way to follow its growth organically and gradually. The team grows and Near Sea Tech answers its changing needs. The fact that a company can get to know the platform step by step, exploring the results of the different options available, selecting which benefits employees will take advantage of, makes Coverflex the ideal partner for a company that is not in a hurry to be the fastest or the best, which is the case of Near Sea Tech.
The fact that “it is super easy for employees to understand how to use and what they need and can do with the product” is, according to Alice Coelho, responsible for People & Culture, an essential feature to help them make the most of what Coverflex has to offer. “The fact that people start using the card and don't feel the need to ask any questions is a great sign, and it ends up saving a lot of time.”, she adds.
Other important things to consider when it comes to a flexible compensation solution are safety measures and how easy it is to manage for companies. Alice says Coverflex has met their expectations, adding that, at the moment, the solution covers “all the use cases we need and also makes the organisation lighter, as there is no need to decentralise the tools we use .”
This story was first published on the Coverflex blog in May 2021.
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