Michelle knew she wanted to implement the right HR platform early on; one that could grow with the team instead of holding them back. “It was not a long vesting process because I’ve worked with a lot of the other software on the market, so I knew what I was looking for and what was not going to work for us as we scaled,” she said.

With their old HR system, they had to manually reallocate and take down balances for each employee’s holiday accruals and rollovers every year, which was typically a day of work. This year, with Personio’s automation, it only took them about 20 minutes to make minor adjustments.

Now, their team can use that saved time to focus on what matters. “If the team can spend an extra hour a day talking to the other humans in Wefarm, that is much better value than spending an hour doing admin every day,” said Michelle.

Using Personio has also increased their business security. Instead of dealing with disorganised spreadsheets and worrying about human error, they use Personio’s visual onboarding and offboarding checklists to confirm that important tasks have been completed, which is a must-have for a company that’s developing its teams as quickly as Wefarm.

“My goal is always to automate as much as possible,” said Michelle. “It’s fundamentally against my belief of what work is if you hire someone to do repetitive admin because you can’t be bothered to automate it. It doesn’t give people ownership or autonomy.”

Michelle also said that Personio has made working as a remote team easier. The built-in calendars allow everyone to see their local holidays, and the People Ops team can also add new holidays and countries to the global calendar as they grow (they’ve added three in the past month).

One of Michelle’s concerns was that team members weren’t using their original HR system. Managers couldn’t get what they needed out of it, so they gave up on it, and employees would only use it to request holidays. Moving from their old system to Personio wasn’t just about making things easier for their People team. They wanted to bring in a system that all team members would and could use with ease.

According to Michelle, the transition went smoothly. They were able to consolidate the standard eight-week schedule, and their team members only had one or two questions during the transition. Most employees were signing in and using it on their own, right away.

It’s a small thing, but Michelle said employees were especially excited about being able to see how much holiday they had left, which is something their old systems didn’t do.

Michelle describes Personio as “the grown-up start-up version” of other HR software she’s used in the past. “If you’re genuinely a start-up and it’s more about it looking flashy, and you’re just in the UK, there are start-up tools that are fine,” she said. “But if you actually want to start looking at the numbers, data, and reports in the background, Personio will scale with that.”

Knowing that Personio is investing in further development means Michelle doesn’t have to worry about switching systems again in a year. “We have a shared vision of the future,” she said. “You are building a lot of that stuff, and I can see you’re working towards it, and that’s where I want to be. I would love to have everything in one place; it makes everybody’s life easier.”