6 Clever Ways That Personio Saves Our Own HR Department Time

As is the case in many HR departments, Lauren’s team before she worked in Personio relied heavily on spreadsheets to store data. This process quickly became time-consuming: “Spreadsheets were very hard to maintain and it got very messy to keep different spreadsheets up to date.”

Lauren notes another huge problem with using spreadsheets – they provide zero transparency for employees, meaning that HR often have to take time out to send information, such as remaining vacation days, to employees.

Personio on the other hand enables employees to update their details at any time and HR to quickly gather the data they need for HR analytics and reports. Lauren explains: “Personio has allowed me to be able to pull reports in seconds, access employee data, review employee salaries and much more. It makes my day-to-day role a lot more efficient.”

The reality is that a huge amount of HR’s day-to-day work involves being the backbone who approves documentation and requests. But being this backbone doesn’t need to take up large chunks of their day.

Lauren’s team works daily with Personio to minimise this: “Our day would usually begin with approving employees’ sick leaves, checking certificates and approving hours worked by our employees.”

Fortunately, with Personio’s workflow engine, this can be done in one click, which makes the process about 25% faster than if they were to do it manually. This will automatically document the request and notify the employee that it has been approved, saving the need to write emails and upload documents.

Not being able to find the right files can slow any employee down. For Lauren’s team, this is where they have saved the most time: “We wouldn’t be able to do our job without Personio. It allows us to have access to the data we need on a daily basis to carry out our roles.”

For example, their team is able to check the organisational chart to see in which team and department each person sits. And with , “different stakeholders can have access to the information they need such as pulling reports on their team’s salaries.”

For employees, it allows one source of truth for all their information to be stored: “Documents are stored automatically in their profile so they don’t have to save documents to a folder of their own.” This means that important files never go missing and it no longer becomes HR’s job to resend them, saving even more time for employees and HR alike.

Not only does this increased visibility help to ensure stakeholders can access the data they need, it also makes sure they never have to rely on incorrect or inaccurate information. “Personio saves us time daily,” shares Lauren. For example, instead of updating different spreadsheets for many stakeholders, they simply put all the updated information into Personio.

Critically, Lauren explains that this allows all stakeholders to see any updates that have been made to the system. Not only does this remove the margin for human error (such as forgetting to update one of many spreadsheets or inputting data incorrectly), it always keeps stakeholders in the loop of any important changes to each Digital Employee File

That’s not even to mention the time that this automatic updating across systems saves HR teams such as Lauren’s: “I would say that we spend 25% less time having to do data keeping, manual updates, record keeping and manual approvals.”

Creating a quick, smooth process way to request and approve leave work is essential for overall employee wellbeing and ensuring HR teams have time for strategic work. Unfortunately, the average 3.9 holidays that are taken by each UK employee every year involves seemingly endless approvals. But it doesn’t have to be like this, as Lauren explains:

“My team uses the absence management dashboard a lot in order to keep track of who is on leave at any given time.” This also gives the team the ability to approve all outstanding leave requests in one click and to take any necessary changes such as adjusting payroll.

Even more importantly, Personio’s absence management system saves time for each and every employee. There’s never a need for employees to reach out to their manager or HR about their leave: “Personio allows employees to book leave requests, see their leave balances and be able to plan their time off via the system.”

Review, approve and track absences from one place: Personio

Seamless absence management that scales with your headcount. See how Personio can manage every type of leave for your organisation today.

Absences with Personio

It doesn’t take many employees to start to make data maintenance a headache for HR. One of Lauren’s favourite features avoids this: “Personally, I use the import feature the most which allows me to do bulk-imports of data.” The result? “I do not have to individually update each employee’s profile one by one.” Needless to say, it’s a huge time saver for Lauren.

Harvard Business Review recently listed employee experience as one of the top ways to improve retention during the Great Resignation (or as we like to call it, ‘the Great Re-evaluation’). As all good HR professionals know, employees have higher expectations of their workplace and consequently, of their HR experience, which should be customised.

Lauren’s team has used Personio to create this for their employees using the function in the backend: “This allows us to decide what each employee can see in the system, such as their exact parental leave entitlement depending on the specific country.”

Ready for your employees to unlock the time they need to drive business goals? Book your free demo now to find out how we could accelerate your HR processes, company-wide.