We have spent the last 5 years at InDebted building products that define what a modern approach to debt recovery and collections processes looks like. It has been amazing to watch the next generation of consumer credit businesses, especially those involved in the Fintech and Buy Now Pay Later industries, embrace our vision for customer-centric collections and deploy our digital first and data driven solutions to assist their customers to cure their outstanding accounts. Today we are announcing the next evolution of this journey.
The COVID pandemic has forced all businesses to think about the nature of work differently and has given rise to many opportunities to change the way we work. InDebted has always been a results-oriented company and we care about our team member’s outcome, not how they get there.
As a business, we have moved to a fully distributed, remote first model and have seen tangible benefits resulting from this change. As a company, we believe we are truly innovating for our clients but more recently we have been turning that innovation lens on ourselves and asking how can we innovate for our team?
So today we are announcing that InDebted will be moving to a 4 day work week (‘4DWW’). We’re also making our customer service team available to our customers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
How do they work together? Let us explain.
So what exactly does this mean?
From October 1, all employees at InDebted will only be required to work 4 days a week rather than the traditional 5 days that is most common today.
When we mention we are moving to a 4DWW we get several common questions about it, including:
- Does this mean you are reducing employee compensation to 80% of what it was previously?
- Does this mean that employees just work longer hours from Monday to Thursday to compensate for the reduction in one working day per week?
- Do your working practices have to change in order to facilitate this transition?
The response here is very simple. We are not changing any employment conditions for our employees. They will still receive the same compensation in terms of salary and benefits, which include competitive salary packages, unlimited paid time off, equity ownership and quarterly stipends to purchase services and materials that equate to better working from home setups.
Employees are also expected to not work longer hours Monday through Thursday, however we are asking them to work smarter during those days. We have encouraged people to heavily scrutinise the meetings they have in their calendars and decide if they are really necessary or could be replaced with a well written message in Slack.
As a business we want our employees to do their best work, and we think having at least two days a week free of meetings to focus on deep work will end up resulting in a major boost to productivity. We are embracing asynchronous work tools to enable staff to be more productive at times that suit them as again we are focused on the results, not how we get there.
One of InDebted’s key values is ‘Transparency breeds trust’, and so we wanted to be upfront to our clients, employees and stakeholders about what we are doing.
Our ability to be able to offer this initiative to our staff would not be possible without the foundations we have built at InDebted. We are a product company that has built an amazingly scalable technology platform that does most of the heavy lifting in our organisation. We have been able to build this platform because we have some of the best engineering and product minds from around the world on our team working with our modern tech stack.
This is a big step for InDebted and one that we are excited about. We don’t have all the answers but we will take feedback from our employees, measure the results and iterate along the way.
Using InDebted’s global footprint to improve customer service
The reason we’re able to move to a 4-day workweek is thanks to the power of our technology and debt collection platform. Today, more than 93% of all money that InDebted recovers for its clients doesn’t involve any human interaction whatsoever. Customers are sent electronic communications by InDebted and these customers overwhelmingly choose to self-serve their accounts online, at a time and place that suits them.
That said, we do have customers that reach out to InDebted and want to speak to one of our customer service team members about their accounts. This often happens outside of normal business hours.
So we’re moving to a 24/7 customer service model. All of our employees will still work to a 4-day workweek, but we are organising shifts for our customer service teams around the world to enable even more coverage than before.
InDebted’s customer service team will be able to respond to our customers any time of the day or night no matter where they are based in the world. This is a huge milestone for our business and is made possible by our established global footprint and our wonderful team members who care deeply about helping our customers on their debt free journey.
What’s next at InDebted
The amazing products we build and the service we deliver to our clients and their customers would not be possible without our talented employees. We are hiring for the best of the best in engineering, product, customer service and other roles at the moment and building an amazing, global team.
If you have read this article and want to be part of a mission driven company that is making a genuine difference to millions of customers around the world and also investing in their staff at the same time, then please get in touch - we want to hear from you!
See all of our open job opportunities here - https://www.indebted.co/careers
