Simon De Baene, co-founder and CEO of GSoft
Stephanie Ricci contributed to this story.
Simon de Baene was working at a CGI call center when he felt like something needed to change.
At the time, Silicon Valley was booming with exciting, new, and colorful offices embellished with slides, bouncing balls, and puppies. The West Coast trend further made him realize that being constrained in a boring gray cubicle was stopping him from reaching full creative potential.
“We wanted to bring a breath of fresh air into the tech industry in Quebec,” said Simon De Baene, co-founder and CEO of the software company GSoft.
“I felt that building a business was a nice way to express your creativity and ambition,” he continued. “I had a lot of respect for CGI, but I wanted to do something different.”
During his first year of studies at Montreal’s reputed engineering faculty École de technologie supérieure, he launched his own service business with his long-time buddies, Guillaume Roy and Sébastien Leduc.
Gifted in programming, they began developing custom software “for anyone who wanted to pay us to build stuff for them,” said De Baene. Soon enough, the talented trio earned a foothold in the local tech market.
Sixteen years later, what was launched in a small apartment grew into the go-to tech company for enhancing the employee experience. GSoft products are used in 110 countries and 35 industries, bringing in over $100 million in recurring revenue.
The company's first product to hit the market is ShareGate, a tool that helps companies succeed in the digital age by migrating to the cloud and making the most of Microsoft 365 and Teams. Then came Officevibe, a platform that helps managers engage, align, and grow their teams.
The onboarding solution Softstart, GSoft’s latest addition, was introduced earlier this year to help new hires belong right from the beginning.
Combined, the company's three incredibly user-friendly products related to the employee experience at different levels, driving the change in making “work simpler, kinder, and faster.”
Accelerated by the pandemic
The pandemic made the world move in GSoft’s direction, and yet, it hit them by surprise like everyone else.
Only months before offices across the world were shut down, the company had just completed the multimillion-dollar renovation of an impressive and dynamic 100,000-square feet office in Montreal’s landmark Nordelec building.
“Going remote-first work was the best way for us to experience all the problems that a company may encounter. It's just not that our products were not relevant before, they're just much more relevant now,” De Baene said.
“In two years, we evolved like if it had been 15 years,” he said.
Reinventing Onboarding
Softstart positions itself as a viable solution to the market’s war for talent.
It’s getting increasingly hard to retain employees who are leaving companies faster than they can be replaced, reported McKinsey & Company. In March 2022, the job openings in the U.S. exceeded the number of new hires by 4.6 million, making staff retention an all-time priority across industries.
While getting the legal paperwork and office tour is important, the traditional onboarding experience is not necessarily effective in capturing employees or getting them excited about their purpose within the organization.
“If you miss your onboarding, there's a good chance that the person will leave much earlier than expected,” said De Baene. “It's a matter of being more intentional and bringing all the structure that makes the experience more natural, flawless, and engaging.”
Now, De Baene has shifted his focus to working with the company’s innovation laboratory, GLab, on expanding its product portfolio and continuing to rethink the opportunities of today’s working world.
