Creating A Boost for HR

The company fritz-kulturgüter is unique, and it loves superlatives: “lots and lots” of caffeine, for example. Or, “lots and lots” of growth – fritz grows 20 to 30 percent each year. When it comes to HR, this has caused some issues – and been responsible for “lots and lots” of administrative work for the employees.

Besides the HR management of their headquarters in Hamburg, the HR team also had to deal with the expansion into international markets without a personnel database. This resulted in more work and longer hours for HR officer René Hantel and his colleagues: “Eventually we reached the point where we just couldn’t handle it anymore.”

Having lots of different Excel spreadsheets also made speedy reporting difficult. “In addition to the time our own work took, there were also some long waiting periods:  To track transaction data, for example, we always had to go via our external payroll service provider,” says René.

“We defined our HR software requirements and ended up comparing four shortlisted suppliers,” René explains. GDPR-compliant data protection was important to the HR team, as was top-quality onboarding and offboarding, which needed to be both digital and transparent.

As fritz does business in six European countries, how multilingual the different software options were was also a factor. Customisable access rights – for managers, for example – and sophisticated employee self-service options were also required. To put this into context: “Seventy percent of our employees work externally, and for them, the software needs to be as quick and easy to use as possible.”

“Personio offered more than just good value for money”, says René. The HR team wanted software with a clear ethos. “We liked Personio’s culture, spirit and, above all, its potential and future prospects.”

René and his HR colleagues can now concentrate fully on fritz’s growth. “For example, we use Personio’s templates for contracts and other HR documents and sign them using electronic signatures. On average, it only takes one working day for us to receive a signed employment contract back from a candidate,” says René.

Onboarding and offboarding is now faster, more efficient and of higher quality, and administrative work is also easier for the fritz team. “Personio is now our basic system for all personal data. This allows us to do less manual data management, reducing potential errors.”

René also saves time on reporting. He can now quickly deal with spontaneous requests from other departments. Customisable filters mean that illness statistics and the like can be created and saved with just a single click. The team uses the time this has freed up mainly for recruiting, process design and process optimisation.

A good, transparent process covering everything from recruiting right through the whole employee life cycle – that is what René particularly appreciates about Personio. He is also a fan of the Personio Community: “I use it to get inspiration and solve problems.”