byrd technologies GmbH is a fast-growing e-commerce logistics and fulfilment company that aims to revolutionise the logistics industry. Their goal is to become Europe's number one e-commerce fulfilment provider by offering state-of-the-art solutions for online shops of all shapes and sizes. Their scalable fulfilment services enable online retailers to grow their business and fulfil their potential.
COUNTRY
Germany, Austria, France, Great Britain, Spain
SOLUTION
Digital HR, Recruitment, Time off, Reports & Analytics
NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES
102
INDUSTRY
Logistics
PROJECT HEROES
Julia Schembri, Director Human Resources
The challenges
As a young, agile startup, byrd is undergoing a rapid growth phase. In the last two years alone, the company has grown by eighty employees. The small HR team was facing the overwhelming challenge of meeting these increasing demands. In addition, HR management manually managed time off and recorded hours using Excel spreadsheets, and employees had to contact them individually. This led to long coordination loops and problems with holiday handovers, for both warehouse and office workers. Due to this high workload, some projects had to be postponed.
When the company reached a certain number of employees, byrd saw a need to formalise HR and make it more professional and manageable. Employee documentation would be handled through direct, digital HR management, with the highest possible degree of automation. The expectations of Kenjo were that it would provide a scalable solution that would grow with the company and not balloon into an extensive IT project.
Growing together with Kenjo allowed us to provide a lot of valuable feedback and made us feel heard and valued as a customer.
JULIA SCHEMBRI, HEAD OF HR
Joint feature development
Kenjo handles all HR administration for byrd in one place. In doing so, employee documentation lives in the cloud. This allows employees to record their own hours, access personal documents at any time, upload new documents and request time off. Managers track and approve outstanding holiday days as needed. With just a few clicks, HR management now creates job references, logs employee confirmations and can respond to individual employee requests and needs.
For byrd, it was important to work with HR software that was agile enough to respond to their needs and could actively incorporate suggestions for improvement. With this in mind, byrd is actively shaping the evolution of new Kenjo features and some of Julia's ideas on competency assessment and anonymous feedback have already been adopted. Julia emphasises that "the continuous improvements and adjustments of the updates provide tremendous value."
A helping hand for managing reduced hours and remote working
Like many other companies, byrd had to put its workforce on reduced hours last year as a result of the Coronavirus pandemic. Before this can be applied for in Germany, however, employees are first required to use up their remaining leave. This is where digital time off proves to be a huge asset, helping employees to manage their leave and sick days, even when working remotely. Managing time off in each team is self-explanatory and, above all, can be viewed at any time and on any device. Julia is particularly pleased that "you don't have to be an HR professional to use the tool. Other HR softwares often seemed so complicated that no one in the company wanted to use them."
By reducing the workload on routine HR management tasks, byrd's HR department freed up time to focus on their actual people work. The HR team is also pleased with greater flexibility within the company for processing leave requests regardless of location or time, which also makes it easier to work from a home office. Plus, they’ve found it easy to use without hours of training, which is a big bonus.
Further joint development of Kenjo features
Help with reduced hours (German Kurzarbeit) and remote working
Positive adoption among all employees
I have worked with many HR software programs, but Kenjo is the first tool that combines everything.
JULIA SCHEMBRI, HEAD OF HR
