Success Story - Personio

Personio Achieved:

Personio’s workforce has grown tremendously. Since 2015 their organization has grown to more than 600 employees. Personio is focused on building a benchmark software product for digitizing HR processes. This is what they try to do best and want to get better at every day, since day one. The second success pillar is their management framework that supports and ensures they are able to do that with speed. Personio has a team structure and goal setting systems tailored to the goal to build a digital platform product in an iterative and highly customer focused manner. And thirdly, the bedrock is the Personio team which contributes to the company’s success on a daily basis.

Personio’s key questions as an organization are 1) How to attract new talents? 2) How to host the great talents that they have, not only with a job opportunity that satisfies their team members professionally but also with an environment that recognizes and supports their humanly sides. Personio really cares about this a lot. Why? Because they know that building the social capital in their organization is the mortar between the bricks of Personio. So they tried to instill a professional but humanly connected and open communication culture as they scaled. With more than 350 new joiners in the past two years, a major challenge for them was to integrate the folks into the company quickly. Personio was looking for a solution like Wellbeing Warrior to help with the onboarding experience and continuous integration process for new joiners, as well as helping existing team members with easy ways to connect.

With Wellbeing Warrior Personio offers their coworkers meeting formats to connect with each other, in a personal and meaningful way.

At Personio team members are encouraged to take time for networking and personal exchange with colleagues. For this purpose, they introduced their Coffeebreak initiative with Wellbeing Warrior. At Personio the conversations are not framed to be strictly work-related, by saying do talk about work. Instead, folks decide whether they want to connect more professionally or personally. For most folks, a combination of both is most natural. In 2020 more than 200 Coffeebreak chats took place between Personio employees. Team members can opt-in and out digitally and then simply follow the automatic invitation for the coffee chats. This ensures the meetings happen. The Coffeebreak chats took place at a participation rate of 84%, with the digital initiative solution in place.

Related to the onboarding of new employees at Personio Wellbeing Warrior automatically assigns and connects a new team member with one existing team member. The new employee is immediately introduced to a person for their ongoing personal support.

The buddy connection makes sure new folks have a point of contact other than HR, that can help to direct them within the organization. This is beneficial for everyone involved. The HR staff is left with a more manageable workload of answering new employee’s questions, the new employee feels supported from within the operations, and our buddies love to explain aspects of the Personio culture to our new staff.

Having the digital support by Wellbeing Warrior to establish these connections is very valuable for Personio. This was the case before the COVID-19 pandemic. But almost became a requirement in the more remote working set-up that they have established during the pandemic since 2020. Wellbeing Warrior helps Personio to make their staff feel connected particularly during this shift to an online-first working environment.

Personio’s People team learned how much employees are eager to connect across the organization they are working in. But if not supported, people are most likely to stay within the boundaries of their team. Taking the time to introduce the Coffeebreak initiative and also the Wellbeing Buddy program as part of the aspired working culture is really crucial.