Get it right and HR technology can be transformational, helping people professionals add strategic value to their organisations and achieve higher performance and a better employee experience across the board.
Here, two experts discuss getting the most from HR tech in 2023 – Sharon Green, experienced interim HR director and founder of Chiara Consultancy, and Nicola Hills, vice president of engineering at leading European HR software provider Personio.
Their conversation ranges far and wide, from the impact of the cost of living crisis on people strategy to the importance of managing the full employee lifecycle at every stage. They talk about onboarding, payroll and performance management, and the kind of speed, flexibility and consistency that an all-in-one HR platform like Personio’s can offer.
How can technology put
the ‘human’ in HR?
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What are the key challenges facing people professionals in today’s volatile and fast-moving business environment?
Two workforce specialists discuss how streamlining HR tasks can free up managers to focus on the more personal side of staff management – and why employees will thank them for it
Sharon Green: HR always has to deliver value to the business, so one of the key challenges for people professionals is identifying emerging trends that might go on to have an impact in business and HR terms. How is the cost of living crisis playing out for employees from a reward and financial wellbeing perspective? What’s going on in the market – is the business scaling up or contracting, for example?
A good HR professional is able to translate all those things and prioritise across the entire employee lifecycle, from attraction, onboarding and retention through to ensuring that – when the time comes – you can help people leave in a human-centred way.
Nicola Hills: When we talk to our customers, we find they are looking for tech to help them on two fundamental levels. The first is about making sure that the set of basic HR processes that have to be run well, are. Things like managing absences simply have to work, every time – there are massive consequences if they do not.
The second is about freeing up time for them to think more innovatively about where HR is going. At Personio we’re focused on making our customers’ lives easier by automating as many of those basic processes as we can – because the more we do that, the more time they have to spend at the strategic innovation level.
The country’s largest hotel brand, Premier Inn, operates across the UK, Europe, Middle East and Asia – and the use of Personio has been expanded in its German operation.
Premier Inn HR manager Cristina Antoniu had used Personio before and it had left a lasting impression. So it made sense to extend the software’s use to the rest of the Premier Inn hotels in its expansion in Germany.
Personio fitted the bill thanks to its flexibility and intuitive, user-friendly operation.
The software has allowed Antoniu to introduce standard, transparent HR procedures for all hotels using it. In addition, personnel data is smartly organised and accurately stored in one place.
“For me, Personio is a great all-round product,” says Antoniu. “We also appreciate the many functions and the continuous development of features and modules.
“I’m pleased that I can map all HR tasks with a holistic solution.”
“I felt super-supported,” says Antoniu. “Our key account manager, Jennifer, and the Personio team were always there for us and even approached us proactively with suggestions.”
Bedding in expansion plans
Cyted, a data-driven cancer diagnostic business based in Cambridge, needed to implement an HR system that would better support its plans for rapid growth.
Head of people Jack Wilson knew it was important that investors funding expansion could see time efficiency and cost control in Cyted’s processes and its substantial recruitment drive.
It was, of course, vital to ensure the HR team was still able to continue enabling employees in their work.
Wilson’s challenge was that employee data was stored in many different places, Cyted’s HR management system and recruitment system were not integrated, and onboarding tasks and processes tended to be long.
“Our people operations were very, very paperwork-heavy,” he recalls.
His solution was to introduce Personio – and this single platform brought Cyted’s HR systems and employee data into one easily accessible location, so onboarding and other HR procedures were quicker and easier.
Wilson says Personio has made his team more efficient and productive, and given them much more time to focus on strategic activities. “Things like hiring roadmaps to make sure that we’re recruiting the right people,” he explains.
“Personio helps us to be a sustainable business for our existing people and create a good example of healthy efficiency. I think that’s what the people team should be about.”
More time to focus
on strategy
SG: Companies do spend a lot of time thinking about their employer brand. But they tend to get very focused on attraction – getting candidates to apply for jobs – and on how their recruitment process stacks up against rivals.
Onboarding can end up being the moment when that love-in stops and the scales fall from a new joiner's eyes. But if you have thought carefully about the kind of experience you want to give employees, then technology can be a fantastic enabler – it can support your employee value proposition at all levels by making it faster, more personal and more consistent.
NH: In a world where people can change jobs as often as every two or three years, their onboarding experience can have quite a big impact. If you have two people starting at the same time and they are treated differently, that can lead to immediate problems.
For example, are their laptops available at the right time, and in the place where they will be working? Have they got the logins they need to access all the company systems? A consistent experience is something that our customers tell us they really value, and automation drives that consistency.
Great recruitment processes can be let down by patchy onboarding. How can technologies help get new hires up and running quickly?
SG: Effective performance management depends on ongoing conversations and feedback between managers and their team members. But sometimes the sheer busyness of work overwhelms our efforts.
Technology can’t have those conversations for you but it can really help with nudges – prompting employees to check in with their managers, and managers with their teams – and by recording progress. I often find that when HR is called into a sticky situation it is because people either haven’t had those conversations, or they haven’t got a record of them.
NH: We know that frameworks can really make a big difference to performance management. Personio provides best practice frameworks for the assessment process and documentation, as well as career development frameworks to maintain a high level of employee experience.
We provide a full record of all progress, because one of the biggest complaints we hear from employees is that their managers are always changing. Personio ensures all your employees have a consistent and well-grounded relationship with your organisation, not just with their manager.
What are the key elements of effective performance management, and how can technology help deliver them?
NH: With Personio, all your HR data is in one place – we call it having a single source of truth. That enables us to offer our SME customers the same kind of insights from data that big enterprises enjoy.
We also democratise data by providing analytics that HR professionals can easily interpret themselves – they don’t need a team of data specialists to do it for them.
Ultimately, that offers our customers – who are, like any busy organisation, trying to grow and make the most of their potential – the opportunity to automate everyday tasks and focus on the big-picture projects that drive businesses and people forward.
How does Personio democratise access to employee information
and data?
