Life before Personio: Filing cabinets and missing data
“Before Personio, it was awful – it was really, really bad, honestly”, laughs Nina. Coming from the IT industry, Nina was used to a more forward-thinking and efficient approach to HR. When she arrived into British Rowing, a lot of things were very manual: “You still had filing cabinets with documents in there, which I’ve never seen before.”
She also noticed a lot of things unnecessarily taking up a lot of time: “For me it was a lot of duplication of work because I had to do something and then someone would ask for the same thing. You didn’t know what people needed or how to be efficient about it.” There was also, as you can imagine, a lot of heavy lifting and digging for data due to not having the proper tools and systems in place.”
Unreliable data made decisions difficult
One of the team’s main HR challenges was that their HR data wasn’t clean, making both day-to-day operations and strategic decisions even more challenging: “To make strategic decisions, you need to have the right information and the information was spread out and I had doubts about how safe and secure it was because of where it was stored. A lot of challenges just come from the mess of not having things centralised or efficient enough.”
Similarly, without automation, there was a lot of ‘leg work’ that actually get anything done so time available quickly became a challenge for their one-person HR team: “My biggest challenge was there was just one of me and it was too inefficient to actually do things well and be informed about what is it you actually need to do.”
Slow, risky recruitment processes
But the most time-consuming process of all for Nina was recruitment, a long process that people often underestimate. Nina explains: “It’s not just the candidate journey of setting up interviews or keeping track of who you’ve spoken to and who to bring forward, but it’s trying to get feedback from managers and giving it to candidates that’s so time-consuming.” Before Personio, Nina had to push back on recruitment tasks and delegate responsibilities to line managers as she didn’t have time to do it all herself.
While communication with candidates was time-consuming, it was something you needed to get right says Nina: “It was the biggest time sink but also the biggest risk in terms of the employee journey because when you mess up sending an email to someone, say the wrong name or reject someone who should have been brought forward, it’s not a good look.” Automating this element with Personio has been the biggest help for British Rowing, says Nina.
“We have definitely saved on recruitment costs because now with all the job boards we have included in Personio, we are not paying for those or recruitment agencies anymore. Personio was kind of groundbreaking for us to come in and build things around for our candidate journey.
- Nina Johansson, HR Manager
Putting Personio in place
Smart integrations and implementation
Not long after she started, Nina initiated the search for a better HRIS: “I knew it had to be done when I came in and saw the amount of work and how manual it was to do it.” Their old system was used mainly just for absence management. “Especially if we want to be that robust organisation fit for the future, we cannot keep doing things manually. You need to look at automations that mean you can put your effort somewhere more useful.”
Their system had to fit in with Google Calendar and Google SSO. From there, Personio formed their tech stack foundation: “The systems we are sourcing, we’re more looking to integrate with Personio rather than the other way around. Personio has been a success for us so we want to find systems to fit with that.”
It was also crucial that the system could accommodate for their complexity of roles, from 9-5 Monday to Friday to more ad hoc coaches: “We had amazing implementation managers to help us find that kind of workaround. Because the system is so good to configure, we found a way to accommodate all of our different roles.”
Life with Personio: Vital time to focus on DEI
Personio’s automated workflows mean that the system can do all of this admin work for the team, automatically notifying managers and telling them what to do so that the HR team doesn’t even need to be involved in any of it: “I just trust that it’s happening. It’s helped me so much because I can actually focus on the most strategic work that I need to do. I don’t have to manage day-to-day ad-hoc queries, the system just manages all of that.”
Adding automation to the entire employee lifecycle has enabled Nina to do more strategic work such as:
Establishing job grades and salary bands
Addressing their gender pay gap
Starting and driving a DEI action plan
Looking at how they support their volunteers
Improving their benefits and rewards
“Honestly, any strategy-related topic, we have only gotten the time to actually work on because we don’t have to deal with the day-to-day. It’s just so much easier knowing that they’re happening and we can focus on the big pieces,” says Nina.
And the benefits of Personio have been felt across the business, shares Nina: “ When we first implemented it, I told one of my colleagues he would be automatically notified of new starter information that was previously manually collected and he was so relieved and thrilled to have that kind of process in place to help him with that. It’s been very similar for the finance team for being notified of new bank details.”
Here’s a taste of some of the processes the team at British Rowing have completely streamlined with Personio:
Recruitment: “We have definitely saved on recruitment costs because now with all the job boards we have included in Personio, we are not paying for those or recruitment agencies anymore. Personio was kind of groundbreaking for us to come in and build things around our candidate journey.”
Onboarding/offboarding: “From recruiting, employees go straight into onboarding journeys, which I love. Being able to create so many different journeys for each person you can really make it personalised. The onboarding journey is crucial for people’s success in their job role long-term so that has been a really massive help.”
Performance & Development: “It’s been really good because we can pull data from every performance cycle across the business into one place. It’s so much easier to see who’s done what and it’s standardised so we know what kind of questions are coming through. Plus we can get both peer-to-peer and bottom-up feedback.”
HR analytics: “The reporting has been very useful. It makes it a lot easier for me to get buy-in from my senior management team or the board for things we need to invest in – it’s so much easier to tell a story when you have the data to back it up. The work is done for me, I just need to know what it is I need to share with them.”
And their favourite feature… Everything?
“Can I say everything?” laughs Nina. More specifically, she really likes the way Personio looks: “It actually helps me to get buy-in from the different generations we have in the organisation. It’s nice, straightforward and easy to use. When it’s too complex, people lose interest and they’re not going to use it. It has a good layout and is just very user-friendly.”
It’s so easy to use that Nina has been recommending it to others in her industry:
“Honestly I’ve already recommended it to someone else in an NGB I’ve been connected with, on the recommendation that Personio can actually facilitate for small organisations but it can also grow because of the flexibility it has and how we can customise it.
- Nina Johansson, HR Manager
