Gellibn is a completely new monitoring and staff feedback platform built from an inherent desire to nurture team members and give back to the culture of business with the most powerful gift of all – the presence of a fully engaged team, writes Cameron Pine.
Voulla Fronis is no stranger to staff training. After 12 years at the helm of Headlines Distribution, the distributors of ghd in Queensland through its launch period, and more recently as the owner and director of Earth Markets, Voulla has always prioritised empowering others and building strong businesses through the power of people.
Throughout her years in business, Voulla’s accepting and engaging spirit hasn’t gone unnoticed. Fast forward to now and you’ll understand why Gellibn is the next piece of the journey.
Making all kinds of feedback something that every team member, regardless of the structure, can resonate with, Gellibn is designed to unite the team in one place and eliminate ineffective feedback or emotion fuelled feedback that often has little or no clear path for improvement.
Based around a colour scheme of green, yellow and purple, the app in itself is calming and collected, with tiers of ‘you’re doing great’, ‘you’re getting there’ and ‘let’s improve’. Gellibn simplifies feedback and ensures a productive and positive workplace and little room for misunderstanding.
While feedback has often been considered negative, Gellibn turns the notion of feedback on its head. Staff can easily see their strengths and areas to improve in just one swipe of the app, unlike text messages or WhatsApp chats that are proven to bring the vibe down for many.
Almost like a daily reminder or affirmation, Gellibn acts as a motivational resource for many SMEs who don’t always have the budget for big outsourced training or HR firms.
“When you look at purple and the psychology of purple, it’s a comforting colour, it’s about staying calm, it’s a colour of optimism,” Voulla said. “I purposefully didn’t go for orange and red. I put a lot of thought into that and showed a group of researchers. We set about creating a system that would shift any negative association with colour.”
The main driver with the colour coding is so you can see at a glance where you are with your performance across a number of levels. Without words your areas of competence are easily understood.
Voulla’s grounded disposition and curiosity for uncovering the why and belief in everyone around her has transferred to a very successful string of businesses from hair, to product, produce and, most importantly, the business of people. For Voulla, the last few years and leading into the launch of Gellibn feels as though she has come full circle and back to her roots of working with her beloved salon industry, and any small business that relies on the team for the ultimate service and success.
In any business Voulla has been involved with, her passion draws from the immense satisfaction in being able to develop and train the employees and seeing them achieve their goals before her own, which she sees now can be easily lost, especially in a business like hairdressing. She feels we are so focused on keeping the business afloat that we miss that valuable feedback time with our team.
“I put my vision on paper about two years ago and then took the steps of researching what small to large businesses all have in common and really need for their staff. I invested all my expertise, researched app developers and looked into the psychology behind the usage of the app as well,” Voulla said. “It’s very important that it does what it’s meant to do and serves the practical purpose, but it emotionally makes people feel better.”
With Gellibn, staff reviews become more of a great chance to catch up and talk over all the highs and lows and are less of a confronting process of discovery. Every issue and progress is dealt with in real time. A lot of the time in business the staff member often has a different perception that the salon owner and Gellibn manages the expectations of both sides as it happens. Via Gellibn what you discuss in staff reviews is actually more positive because they’ve been able to communicate all along the way.
“You’re actually measuring and tracking a better result than if they were to just let things go for six or 12 months, and then all of a sudden you have to have a conversation about all the things that went wrong in the last four months,” Voulla said.
Through her decade long experience with ghd, Voulla empowered an education and sales team before going on to start Earth Markets. Even though her focus switched across to food retail, the people component in all her stores was essential to the brand’s success.
“It’s one and the same, it’s actually creating this culture in the business where you’re celebrating things, you’re communicating things, everyone is updated. Everyone feels like they’re part of something that they belong to, everyone feels like they know what their expectations are,” Voulla said. “Inducting people into the new culture of the business is quite overwhelming, so if they feel culturally included and things are well set out in the beginning it sort of alleviates that pain.”
Growth opportunities are not visible to every team member but, with Gellibn, the goals and targets are something that everyone can strive for. Beyond just the premium level of motivation the program implores, team members can work to their own personal development plan. Whether it’s an untidy workstation that needs a little more tweaking or something more aligned to the business of time and money, Gellibn is as involved as you want it to be in the process of what gets us out of bed every morning such as great daily team affirmations or more detailed targets and benefits for the entire team to reach.
“It’s inclusive, but can also be done privately so that it’s doesn’t interfere with the rest of the team,” Voulla said.
It’s as simple as selecting a private chat thread or integrating group feedback to a more private conversation that gives everyone the peace of mind to refer back to whenever they may need. Gellibn goes well beyond the traditional HR process and almost acts as a legal aid, because all the chat is in the one place and there’s less room for accusatory texts or situations where words can be misconstrued. This is often a clunky and unregulated process for many small businesses and Gellibn takes the guess work and anxiety our of staff management while boosting the sentiment around mental health.
If you were wondering about the name and where it came from, anyone that knows Voulla knows that family is her priority, so fostering this healthy communicative relationship with her daughter is close to her heart. It was her eight-year-old Chloe that actually came up with the name. While at first Voulla admits it didn’t seem right, the more she reflected on the DNA of the app, the more she realised the name leaves a team and family legacy that Voulla has worked so hard to build in every business and within her home.
“It doesn’t need to be a complex HR system, it has to be something that is actually so simple and effective. We often complicate things for no reason. Sometimes when someone leaves it’s too late but you can prevent them from leaving if they know where they stand much earlier on,” she said.
Voulla worked in three salons in her career including training people in Korea and beyond, so her understanding of hair salons goes much deeper than just the business level.
“I trained people who are now very successful in their field and this gives me a great sense of reward, but I did it intuitively without an app. I just did it based on nurturing them and giving them feedback on the good and where to improve as often as I could.”
When Voulla started her distribution business, she took the same approach with sales staff and everyone that built the brand to great success.
“I trained them on the go, I gave them feedback on the go, but I nurtured them as much as I could in real time all the way through. I used to tell them what my expectations are, I used to communicate the expectations, and I used to measure those expectations. Now, when I started to think about what the app was actually capable of, I started helping out other businesses to achieve the same thing.”
There are other staff management apps out there but few that streamline and categorise feedback outside of a thread or feed. The way to look at Gellibn is that it’s not just about an app for business, it’s something that emotionally makes people feel better, in a time where emotions are at an all-time high and one of the biggest threats to the consistency of business. The current app for Gellibn is really just the beginning and there’s a journey ahead that will only make the Gellibn community bigger and stronger.
“I think the way the app is shaped will come down a lot to the end users. As people use it and gain success in their business, we will continue to listen, after all that’s what Gellibn is all about.”
A finger on the pulse in life and in business, Voulla explains that we have so much data driven information available to us, but we can’t really look at an improvement or emotion that’s witnessed by a human. That divide is bridged with a system like Gellibn. Considering that a direct line of communication does not come naturally to most people, the guess work is taken out and those that fear confrontation will flourish.
“It takes me back to when I was a kid, we’d receive a jellybean for doing something good. Now as adult’s it’s only fair that the same notion is setting the standard for an elevated way of business for everyone. Why wait six months or more to create a framework for feedback and performance review when in less than six minutes every team member can see where they stand day after day, feel rewarded instantly and keep growing?”
On that note, I’m craving some Gellibn in my life.
For more information visit www.gellibn.com
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