Helping people eat healthier with faster HR

Before Personio, HR processes were “very manual — in fact, they were all manual”, says Fran. There were Dropbox folders for each employee with their letters and contracts. Their people data was held in various different spreadsheets:

“To be honest, it was all a bit of a mess and kind of all over the place”, says Fran. “Life before Personio was just a lot of administrative and operational processes and it was difficult to find the information we needed. We did most things through a people tracker we had to build in Excel”, explains Fran. 

• Recruitment: “Recruiting just wasn’t as professional as it could be and we weren’t showcasing the brand the way we wanted.” The team didn’t have a standardised process or centralised candidate information, were spending a lot on agencies and weren’t able to look back on previous applicants.

• Onboarding: “Whenever we onboarded a new person, we had a checklist that was just a Word document of things we needed to do. But every single time, we would have to send emails to managers or the new employee to ask them to fill in quite a lengthy new starter form which was offline and had to be uploaded.”

• Employee experience: “Some people would have an amazing experience where we got everything right. For others, it might have been a bit inconsistent, depending on the manager and what was going on at the time. It was very time-consuming having to recreate the wheel every single time somebody new joined”, says Fran.

• Personnel data: “When I started, we didn’t even have a complete list of employees and their data in one place. If we ever needed to run a report or create an org chart, we would have to start from scratch and then check all of the data every single time to make sure we’d added or removed the right people.” 

• Performance management was done very manually: “Our performance data was in Word documents and some of it might be saved and some of it might have gotten lost or forgotten about.” End-of-year reviews and catch ups with managers relied on individual managers, so employees were getting an inconsistent experience.

Having the right HR solution was so important for Fran that she talked about it in her interview process with Deliciously Ella: “To be honest, I wouldn’t have taken the role unless it had been part of those early conversations because I knew from previous experience it’s so crucial to have a good HRIS. Otherwise you just spend all your time doing admin, introducing processes and making sure stuff gets done. If it’s in the system, you can see it at a glance.”

The main requirement was to have all of their people data in one place so they could run reports and create org charts — with three sites, it was important to enable people to look someone up, see what they do and where they fit in the organisation.

While the team offered training, employees didn’t really need it, says Fran: “It’s really intuitive and easy to use for everyone in the business. People could just go in and figure it out. We’ve got everything in one place which is amazing. It does multiple things and we don’t need loads of different systems which can be expensive and confusing.”

Fran says that the implementation process was great, though she has done it a couple of times: “The fact I’ve implemented it in three different organisations would suggest that I’m a big fan of Personio. It’s worked really well for me in all three companies. Each time, I’ve looked at similar systems but I’ve always ended up landing on Personio.”

For her small HR team of two, Personio has been a game-changer: “Having automated HR processes makes a massive difference on what I do day-to-day. In people roles, we can often get bogged down in admin and not have time to do the stuff that’s more transformative and will actually add value to and help the business grow.”

Personio’s automation enables them to focus on the big-ticket items for Deliciously Ella: “It’s just invaluable if we want to actually carve out any time to do learning and development or drive our culture or improve our employee experience." She explains: "The only way to do that is to be super efficient in all of your people processes and operations. It’s made us a lot more credible and professional as a function”.

As a result of Personio, the team have been able to focus on:

• Building an amazing employee experience

• Making sure they have the right benefits in place

• Doing a much more in-depth engagement survey

• Creating a high-performance culture for the business

“The list goes on but there’s a huge amount of stuff we would never have been able to do if we didn’t have an HRIS like Personio supporting us”, says Fran.

Recruitment: “We save about half of the time we would have spent on it. We’ve got a better breadth of candidates and they’re in one place so we can just go in, click an arrow and go through them which has saved us a huge amount of time."

She adds: "We’ve also been able to put in standard job description and email templates that are hugely helpful. That’s a good 5-10 minutes per applicant, and we get hundreds of applicants for most of our roles.”

It’s also enabling the team to build a talent pool from high-potential applicants: “The other amazing thing is if we have other candidates who were nearly there, we can easily keep track of them in case another opportunity comes up further down the line. It’s been really transformative so far”, says Fran. 

Onboarding: “It’s so much easier because we are able to put in different steps for all of the different people involved and it sends out automated emails and reminders to let them know what they need to do”, shares Fran.

“We were also able to build emails and contracts in Personio so in a matter of seconds you just plug in the information that’s different for the person and then off it goes. We’ve been able to make it feel really special and specific to Deliciously Ella.”

And of course, this drives value quicker for the company: “Our onboarding process is a much better experience for everybody who now joins us. We’ve only had positive feedback and it’s increasing the chances of people doing well in their first 3-6 months but also really flying and passing probation and adding value quicker.”

Performance and development: “Personio helps us focus on having good performance conversations because all that admin is taken care of, which makes it so much easier. Now employees go in, fill in a form, click submit and it’s done". As a result, they’ve been able to do some great training and coaching with managers: “Embedding that cycle of high performance has been really crucial.”

Continuous feedback has driven performance across the board: “It’s great for employees because they are getting regular feedback, they know how they’re doing and hopefully it motivates people to reach for more. It’s also brilliant for the business because obviously we want everybody to be performing at their best.” 

Reporting: “Before Personio, if I wanted to build a report I would have to go to our people tracker in Excel. It took ages and was missing data that we had to go ask people for. It could take a few hours depending on complexity. Now I can go into the reporting function, click a button and the answer is just there and I’m really confident it’s correct.”

Personnel data: “One activity that’s easier to organise is our in-house team events which we do a lot of. Now that we have close to 80 employees across three different sites, we get the employee to fill in key metrics when they start such as dietary requirements or allergies we need to be aware of and it’s all done automatically.”

For Fran, what she loves about Personio is its simplicity: “It’s so easy to use. It does everything we need it to do. It looks good and it’s a nice experience for employees and managers to use. It just makes my life and my team’s life a lot easier.”

And for Jen, who, like a lot of their employees, had never used an HR platform before, it’s been a huge success: “We’ve had really good feedback from the whole team and it’s easy to navigate around and troubleshoot things.”