Emma

Improving Employee Experience and Efficiency With Data

Industry: Consumer Goods

About the company: Emma’s mission is to awaken people to the full potential of sleep worldwide. They do this by developing the best sleeping solutions created and validated by a team of sleep experts. Founded in Frankfurt, Germany, in 2013, Emma now has a presence in more than 30 countries across five continents. Unsurprisingly, the company has been named as one of the fastest-growing companies in Germany and Europe.

Emma Hero Image
Hannah Boerner
Hannah Boerner

Team Lead Organisational Development

Emma Logo

The Challenge: Complex and Inefficient Processes

As a rapidly growing company in the sleep tech industry, Emma had already taken steps to digitise elements of its HR, having implemented Personio as their People Operating System in 2019. Through Personio, Emma has streamlined HR processes such as payroll, contracts, onboarding, and internal communication.

This brought new efficiencies to the organisation and created a single source of truth for employee data. With Personio, Hannah Boerner and her team can see at a glance who is on which team, who they report to, their salary, contracted hours, and how long they have been at the company. They can then mark an employee’s ‘Emmaversary’ each year. Personio became a common source of truth for a whole range of data.

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It is really our personnel software when it comes to all employee data… Our People Operations Team, for example, uses it for payroll, contracts and as a touchpoint between their work and the work of our recruiters.

Still one part of HR that was still to be optimised were the surveys. When Hannah Boerner first joined Emma, the organisation undertook team ‘barometer’ surveys twice a year to get a sense of what mattered to employees.

A further two times a year, each employee is assessed on performance and progression. These surveys were carried out using Excel, and Hannah estimates that she would typically spend up to three weeks at a time analysing the results.

In the summer of 2020, Emma started looking at alternative options to improve the employee experience and drive efficiencies for the HR team even further. Hannah reviewed extensively a number of employee experience platforms, including Personio Partner, Culture Amp. The integration between Personio and Culture Amp removes the need to manually upload employee data into the platform, enabling automated people workflows.

  • Surveys based on Excel sheets

  • Complex and inefficient processes

  • Too much manual, time-consuming work

800
800
employees
5%
5%
employee engagement score increase
75
75
languages spoken
“The combination of Culture Amp and Personio really makes our life and work easier.”

The Solution: An Efficient and Integrated Employee Experience

With Culture Amp onboarded every night at midnight, the employee experience platform synchronises with Personio. This means that Culture Amp operates using the most recent and up-to-date employee data. A former time-consuming process has developed into an automated people workflow.

Hannah and her team don’t have to manually input the details of new joiners or changes to a person’s role such as a promotion, team change, or reporting structure as they now have a single source of truth across both platforms. Hannah estimates that this synchronisation saves her an hour a week, removing the risk of human error. 

Having these automated workflows in place, Emma’s HR team even had the time to take Personio’s custom reports a level deeper: “We created our own reports looking at things like internal development, employee milestones, and how teams grow and develop in terms of headcount. It has all the information we need, when we need it.” 

And also in Hannah’s own work in organisational development, Personio was invaluable. “I need to know who is in which teams for feedback cycles, levels of development and more… It continues to be my source for preparing, generating or analysing reports of all kinds.”

Pandemic Support

The People and Organisation team also used Personio's Culture Amp integration to run a series of well-being surveys during the pandemic. The goal was to understand how people were feeling and identify how Emma could support its employees, especially those who were struggling with the isolation of working at home.

The early surveys focused on social connection, how employees were coping with managing their energy and maintaining a healthy work-life balance. Subsequent wellbeing surveys allowed Emma to adjust the support provided in line with changing requirements.

While the physical sessions were no longer needed, managing energy levels and achieving a positive work-life balance had become bigger issues. Emma shifted focus and put additional measures in place to address these new concerns by providing, for example, guidance on how to set up a daily routine.

Their Favourite Part of Personio

When it comes to the biggest returns on investment since digitising the process, from Hannah’s point of view it’s the number of working hours that have been saved and the depth of insight being gained. 

“Personio and Culture Amp positively impact every single person at Emma,” concludes Hannah. “Personio’s single source of truth on employee data filters across the entire organisation. We’re excited at the prospect of what else we can achieve moving forward.” 

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