From five HR systems to focusing on the planet

For the team at Circle Economy, Personio’s automation helped to create workflows that worked for them, removing the need for manual data transfer or follow-up. Because of this, the HR team has more time that they can use for more meaningful conversations with employees.

All employee data is now stored in one place that is accessible to employees and the overall productivity of the HR team has increased by 30%, thanks to Personio. This has made a huge difference not only to the HR team but employee productivity and results at large, explains Ruth: “As an HR professional, it’s really important that you don’t create what I call an ‘HR show’. People don’t need that: It’s just distracting them from getting on with what they need to do.” Here’s a taste of some of the processes they have completely streamlined with Personio:

Recruiting and onboarding: Circle Economy’s onboarding has become faster and less error-prone thanks to automation. New employees have a much better experience. The business was previously paying for a separate tool outside their HR system. Now with Personio, their recruitment is 80% more efficient: “It’s a great tool”, says Ruth. “The recruiting and onboarding features are amazing. As soon as we hire someone, I just add them on there and they’re in – their profile is created and all the information is already in there. Onboarding has also become more professional, all their details are going into one space that they can access,” says Ruth.

Performance and development: Previously the team used a different tool that offered lots of options but wasn’t particularly intuitive: “It's better to have the most important things than have a tool that's just overwhelming people. Quite frankly, it was a day job just to keep it updated. I like Personio much better than what we were using before.”

Reporting: The team can focus more on reports than they did before as it was “such a chore”, prior to Personio. Now it’s a process that takes only five minutes or less. Ruth explains: “Reporting with Personio is really useful. You just click in, select which fields you want and boom, there it is. We’re now able to see things that we just couldn't have previously. It’s so much easier.”

Employee self service: Previously, the team used to get emails or Slack messages to request an employee update, such as a change of address. This tended to float around and get lost. Now, employees are able to make that change themselves. HR are notified and payroll can be updated: “It’s far better than before. That makes a massive difference.”

When the team explored Personio Surveys for the first time, it was an immediate fit, shares Sumi: “Personio Surveys resonated with a lot of things we wanted and the templates in particular were really useful. Using Personio to build surveys was perfect as we don’t want people spending too much time on them.” The team is now able to create employee surveys in just five minutes.

By having their employee survey tool within a tool they already trust, it creates better, more honest feedback says Sumi: “With an engagement survey, you want people to be completely honest about how they feel about things. And by making it confidential with Personio, that makes the chances higher of people actually telling what they really feel.”

It wasn’t just the survey templates that helped, but Personio’s suggested questions also saved time. Ruth explains: “If you're having to devise your own questions, that takes a lot of time. How to ask a question is really important: Do we have an open question? How are people going to interpret this?” Using these has saved the team both money and time, says Ruth.

Gathering employee feedback in the same system wasn’t just more simple for the HR team, but it was a huge plus for employees too: “Employees don’t lose interest as it’s within the same system they’re using, so they’re just logging back into their account and leaving feedback right there. It’s very self-explanatory and intuitive”, says Sumi. 

Three elements of Personio Surveys have also helped to drive higher participation rates: Firstly, Sumi really likes that you can check the participation rates while the survey is ongoing. Secondly, automatic reminders for employees help to drive this participation rate without extra manual work for HR. 

Finally, the confidentiality offered by the system is “super important”: Employees now feel more able to be completely honest about how they feel about things, says Ruth: “Confidentiality is very important. Employees trust Personio. They've had a good experience with it. That really helps with getting people to fill in the questionnaires and share their ideas and opinions.”

A real benefit of Personio is the support, Sumi explains: “They have the greatest events. They’re always informative. I try to attend most of the product update webinars. There are also constant updates to the system. It's changed so much within two years. Feedback from their customers is taken really seriously and I absolutely love that.”

For Ruth, Personio has provided support during a time of change for the business: “The people who work for Personio, who are all lovely and helpful. They've got such a great team who have been a massive help for us. We're super grateful for all the help they've given us. As we're growing, we've got to be careful to remain very close to the employees and the business.” But mainly, it’s enabled them to do what is close to any HR professional’s heart: connect with their employees: “Personio frees up our time so we're not talking about data changes made in the system, we can have meaningful conversations about other projects.”

Having such an efficient system has even removed the need for once crucial meetings, says Ruth: “I've worked in HR teams where we'd have a meeting once a week just to make sure that everybody was on the same page and that we'd all got the information we needed. Now I feel like I trust the system to just handle that. If I need something, I can go and find it out.”