New in Humaans: Workflows

Today we're excited to announce the launch of Workflows in Humaans. This is our biggest release to date, and it includes a set of features designed to help businesses move fast when managing people processes.

When we announced our $5M Seed round early this year, we shared our ambition to help teams operate collaboratively while maintaining a central record of employee data. Customers are at the forefront of how we build technology (and why) at Humaans, and after hundreds of conversations, it became obvious that managing people processes represents one of the biggest burdens for organisations scaling rapidly. We set out to solve this.

Today, Workflows are already helping growing teams set up processes such as pre-boarding or onboarding with 1 click, and more sophisticated organisations to create custom workflows tailored around their needs to collaborate cross-functionally.

Let's learn more about how this all works.

Why Workflows

It all starts with onboarding. When talking to companies about the opportunity to partner, the vast majority mention that managing the employee onboarding process is one of the most challenging aspects they're going through.

Onboarding is fragmented across multiple tools, tends to be manual and is a slow process – as well as impacting business efficiency, this ultimately impacts the employee experience.

We observed that the demand for companies to retain top talent is intensifying, making employee retention a top priority. And yet, companies often spend very little time onboarding new hires – this is because of the lack of time and tools. With 1 in 5 employees leaving within the first 45 days of employment, a high quality onboarding process in place is paramount.

But onboarding is only the beginning. There are similar patterns in a multitude of HR and people processes, and we designed a flexible mechanic that can accommodate how large teams operate and scale.

The Humaans way

Ease of use and simplicity on the outside and powerful engines on the inside are part of the guiding principles we adopt at Humaans to drive change.

The most effective and ambitious teams we worked with use modern project management tools structured around tasks. However these tools lack the softness and nuances needed by HR and People Ops teams – and often don't fit culturally. Tasks are simple to follow and easy enough for everybody to understand. But, even within the same organisation, you end up with a variety of tools used by a variety of teams; it gets messy quickly.

We incorporated a task based approach in Humaans to enable you to access a familiar way of working, but providing quick access to a wealth of people data you need to run people process – already part of your HRIS in Humaans – and with a softer design to elevate the employee experience.

Bobbi Nicholson (VP People at memmo.me) is setting a solid foundation layer to support the company as it experiences explosive headcount growth, and shared about the impact of Workflows as well as helped educate our thinking.

At memmo, we use workflows for fundamental people processes where tasks need to be completed relative to an individual, like onboarding and offboarding. Workflows make it quick and easy for us to allocate tasks to the right people; we set up the workflow once, add an employee with one click and it's ready to go.

She goes on to explain how workflows can support teams in breaking daunting processes into simple actionable tasks:

We particularly love the smart fields, where you can set up a task to be allocated to the manager and the workflow will automatically assign it to the right person. Workflows make it easy to break processes down into simple steps, too, so we've been able to set up a core onboarding that's the same for everyone, then layer role-specific workflows on top. It means we can keep things simple and avoid duplicating work.

And why it's important to remove friction:

Joining a company can be daunting so we want the onboarding experience to feel as frictionless as possible. With workflows, employees can see clear tasks to complete with all the details they need in the same place; all the documentation is linked from the task. Plus they get the satisfaction of ticking off their tasks and knowing they've covered everything they need to in their first weeks. We've had great feedback from new starters about how organised and straightforward this feels. memmo is growing so fast that improvements to our onboarding have a huge positive ripple effect.

In summary, our goal with Workflows is to enable organisations to:

• Set up people processes in the fastest possible way;
• Enable teams, managers and employees to work collaboratively across any given process;
• Leverage centralised people data and feed it into any new and existing workflows;
• Provide a central view around progress within each workflow to ensure alignment;
• Enable teams to access predefined workflow templates and create any custom ones;

Template library

There are organisations that already have clarity around how they'd like a specific process to be structured. Others need a helping hand and could benefit from learning the best practices. And then there are others that just need the velocity of a 1 click set up.

From today, with the Humaans template library, you can access 7 templates in addition to having the ability to create custom workflows from scratch: Offboarding, Onboarding, Onboarding (Technical), Pre-boarding, Promotion, Salary Adjustment and Training.

These are all wildly popular processes that we prioritised based on customers needs and we're looking to expand our library in the coming months.

My Tasks

Together with the ability for Admins and Owners to create and manage workflows, there is also a new view for the entire organisation to keep track of the tasks assigned to them, ensuring that the right people are informed of the work they need to complete at the right time.

What's next

Workflows is available today for all our Growth and Enterprise customers, and we have already kicked off the development of new exciting enhancements bringing this to the next level of sophistication.

You can expect more on the automation side, more custom connectors and triggers with products and tools you're already using, and more.

---

We hope you enjoy Workflows as much as we loved crafting it for you and if you're not a Humaans customer yet, but want to try it and see this in action, get in touch or book a demo today!

---

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