How Pento uses Humaans to scale a great remote-first employee experience

Pento is a cloud-based automated payroll service that equips organisations with a quick, user-friendly way to manage payroll in-house without the need for an external provider.

Counting fintech unicorns including Pleo and Starling Bank among its customers, the organisation was founded with a mission to make payroll processes more flexible, transparent and accessible — for everyone.

2021 was a whirlwind year for Pento. After two successful fundraising rounds, the organisation now has its sights set on big growth over the coming year, with ambitious goals to near-double their headcount.

But as a remote-first company with employees spread across 18 countries, Pento knew that they needed a HRIS that was flexible enough to scale alongside them, increase operational efficiency, and create a great employee experience for their whole team. Jonas explains why Humaans is a critical part of this goal.

Humaans has been a really great partner for us as we scale. It feels so aligned to the experience we want to deliver both for our employees, and our customers.

— Jonas Bøgh Larsen, CEO and co-founder, Pento

Pento at a glance

• Headquarters: Copenhagen, Denmark and London, UK
• Additional office locations: Remote-first with an additional office in London, and employees from 18+ nationalities
• Sector: Fintech
• HR tech stack: Humaans, Teamtailor, Notion, Slack, Leapsome, Hofy, JumpCloud, DocuSign, Pento

Key results

• 60% decrease in time spent on manual admin
• Whole-organisation data reporting completed in minutes, not hours
• Increased whole-organisation operational efficiency

Navigating operational blind spots while creating a remote-first employee experience

“We founded Pento as an intentionally remote company,” says Jonas. “That was easy when it was just Emil and I. But now, we have over 80 employees across 18 countries globally. We realised pretty quickly that if we wanted to provide a great remote-first experience, we needed to create more efficient processes that scale with our company.

“One of our biggest challenges was that we had limited visibility and reporting ability over key organisational data. We had to export our data manually and format it in spreadsheets. There was no uniformity — reports took hours.

“Another key challenge was our lack of People processes for things like employee PTO, onboarding and sick leave. This created a huge manual admin burden and could take up as much of 60% of our weekly workload. As our team scales, it became clear that we needed a better way of collecting this data to drive better decisions at scale.”

As the team grew, Pento’s existing challenges increased the likelihood of blind spots — both in resourcing ability, and employee data. But it was also trickling down into Pento’s employee experience.

Your employee’s first impression of your company is everything. If their onboarding experience is disrupted due to inefficient processes, it damages their experience of your organisation.

“We had no visibility of how different parts of the onboarding process connected together, and which stakeholders needed to be involved. This placed a huge time burden on our People team. But from a hiring perspective, it also presented a real risk to our employee experience.

“Your employee’s first impression of your company is everything. If their onboarding experience is disrupted due to poor processes, it damages their experience of your organisation. And in a remote-first culture, your new joiner can’t just turn around in their chair and ask a colleague. That’s a problem.”

The case for a flexible, responsive HRIS with market-leading integrations

The hunt for a better way of managing People processes was on. Jonas knew that Pento needed a HRIS that could handle the complexities of a remote-first organisation. Integrations with other market-leading products were a particular priority.

“We’re very specific when it comes to our tooling,” he says. “Our goal as an organisation is to build a best-in-class product that interconnects with the leading tools on the market. We wanted the same from our HRIS. We needed a tool that could integrate with our existing HR tech stack, and act as a core layer for employee data and People processes.”

“We also wanted to work with a product that could flex with our evolving needs as a business. Humaans integrates seamlessly with our entire ecosystem, and the team is deeply responsive to the evolving needs of their customers.”

Creating a positive experience and environment is crucial for us at Pento — right down to the technology we use. Humaans is super easy to use, and provides a repeatable experience employees benefit from in every part of the employee lifecycle.

User experience and employee appeal were also key criteria, according to Jonas: “Creating a positive experience and environment is crucial for us at Pento — from how we communicate and collaborate and our culture right down to the technology we use.

“As a tech business, our employees love using intuitive and well-designed products, so culturally, picking a HRIS that worked for everyone was important to us. Not only is Humaans super easy to use, but it provides a repeatable experience employees benefit from in every part of the employee lifecycle."

Improving visibility, operational efficiency, and employee experience at scale

As Pento continues to scale, Humaans has become an essential part of their HR tech stack that helps them drive increased visibility across the whole organisation — plus, it’s saving everyone time, too.

“Implementing Humaans has significantly increased our efficiency and visibility on our processes and data,” says Jonas. “We can see data on our growth and turnover at a glance, and we can produce accurate custom reports in minutes, not hours, with Humaans Insights. Our People team has reduced their time spent on admin and operational processes by over 60% — so they can spend more time on strategy and building a people-first culture.

“We also have a better oversight on our gender pay gap and how much holiday our employees are taking. We know our team is very committed and put a lot into Pento — but we also want to be able to get ahead of people not recovering or taking time to relax so we can prevent burnout.”

Humaans has been a great partner for us as we scale. It feels so aligned to the experience we want to deliver both for our employees, and our customers.

This is translating into big wins across the whole employee experience for existing team members, too. From team offsites to birthdays, and company swag, Pento has much more visibility on the smaller touches that drive long-term employee loyalty.

“As our organisation grows, we believe that it’s even more important that new team members feel fully equipped from day one, especially remotely. At Pento having a structured process for each function that Humaans provides has enabled us to repeat a perfect process for each new hire, without the manual burden.

“Humaans has been a great partner for us as we scale. Now that Humaans integrates with Pento, we know that we’re delivering an employee experience that’s aligned with the one we want to deliver for our customers.”

---

Humaans and Pento integrate together to make it easy for you to manage HR and payroll, maintain a single source of truth for people data, eliminate double entries and get real-time access to employee and payroll information. Find out more here.

---

Simplify your people operations today. Book a free demo to learn how.