The search for a modern, flexible platform to uplevel visibility across a global, fast-changing organisation

When Rasmus started the search for a HRIS, he found that most of the tools on the market felt too big, complex, and inflexible for Manyone’s unique set of needs. User experience and flexibility across multiple geographies were high on the priority list, but creating a single source of truth to support Manyone’s increasingly complex operating model was of paramount importance.

“We knew we weren’t ready to get a large Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) tool suite, because we felt that it would harm our culture,” Rasmus says. “Our organisation has built a culture based on real needs. We had no use for a Swiss Army Knife HR product that claimed it could perform all of our core HR processes, because we knew it wouldn’t do them well."

“We also didn’t want to rely on one platform for everything, when we didn’t know how our needs would change in the next two years.”

With a constant influx of new teams, Rasmus was looking for a lightweight platform that could unite Manyone’s soaring amounts of People data. It needed to keep everyone aligned on how the company was evolving, but give teams autonomy to manage their own processes.

“We knew we needed to standardise our systems across the whole company — and that had to start with our People data. Our teams are our most important assets, and not having visibility over our People data didn’t just impact us — it directly impacted our employees and their ability to collaborate. Our biggest priority is making sure that our teams can begin working together on client projects almost immediately.

“Our teams are our most important assets, and not having visibility over our People data didn’t just impact us — it directly impacted our employees and their ability to collaborate.”

“Because we’re a decentralised organisation, our People operations has an added layer of complexity — it’s not just a single small team handling our People data for the whole organisation. We needed a platform that could enable our global teams to manage their own People processes."

“We’re also an organisation that designs services and solutions for our clients. We needed a product that felt modern and looked great — it had to be efficient and enable our teams to get the job done quickly. We needed something mobile and flexible, that wasn’t slowed down by legacy features."

“Ultimately, we wanted to work with a platform that we could grow with. We asked ourselves, ‘could we put our most valuable People data here?’ — and we knew we wouldn’t get the same experience with a bigger provider."

“Humaans delivered in a way that the other platforms simply couldn’t.”

Uniting global People processes and data with custom integrations

As Manyone continues to scale, Humaans has become firmly embedded in the organisation’s core processes and alignment effort. The platform has been a key player in uniting their distributed datasets — an achievement which Rasmus attributes as the single biggest win.

“As a company operating in so many different global locations, having a standardised way to input People data has become even more critical as we grow,” he says. “All of our local teams know exactly what data we need from them as the global team. Our local People people and team leads get value from having a single source of truth on their team members, while our legal and finance teams are happy that we have all of our employee agreements and documents under control and in one place.”

As a strategy-design organisation, the team at Manyone spend all day using their creativity to build innovative experiences for their clients — so it’s no surprise they took the same approach to their HR stack, too. Manyone used Humaans’ open API to build a custom HRIS experience that responds to their unique needs — bridging the gap between employee absence and payroll.

“We know that Humaans is a single source of truth that we can trust. It just works without our employees noticing it — it’s a testament to a great system.”

“Humaans’ open API was very important for us, because we have tools that help us with project planning and resource planning. We need visibility on who’s working on which projects.

“Previously, some of our offices logged absence information in that system, but it wasn’t connected to our payroll. Our bookkeeper would have to go through absences manually and input them into the payroll system. Creating a custom integration has enabled us to reduce this manual workload and increase visibility across our local teams.

This visibility has trickled into the employee experience, too.

“We have 60% more people now than we did a year ago. We’re moving fast, and we see new names every day — and lots of our team members have never even met. Having that directory provides a snapshot of who we are, where we are and how many of us there are.

“We know that Humaans is a single source of truth that we can trust. It just works without our employees noticing it — it’s a testament to a great system.”