The early-stage startup, ANYMOVE, is a 100 percent digital electric car rental determined to move the transformation from car ownership to sustainable mobility forward. Based in Berlin, the company currently has over 45 completely remote employees around the world and continues to grow steadily. The team is committed to a people-first company culture and healthy work environment that empowers personal growth in alignment with achieving business objectives. As a small and scaling company, they needed an intuitive HR platform that could automate processes and save their small people and culture team time by breaking the cycle of spending 30 to 40 hours a week just on admin tasks and paperwork. ANYMOVE’s HR had used Bob at a previous company, loved it, and recommended the platform to company leadership. After seeing the powerful capabilities of Bob, they were convinced. Now, they use Bob to automate people processes and save up to 13 hours a week in admin time.
Saving time with robust HR automation
ANYMOVE struggled with improvised onboarding and performance cycle processes. They wanted to drive processes forward from a people perspective “instead of being caught in a cycle where you work 40 hours per week and 30 hours of that time are just administrative tasks creating paperwork. We wanted to reduce that as much as possible,” said Pascal Frühling, the company’s senior people and culture business partner. It was important for the company to find a platform to help them optimize operations and make “the work of the people team easier through automation or templates.”
Structuring company-wide people processes with Bob
Today, ANYMOVE uses Bob to create onboarding templates and automate workflows, boosting efficiency. They use Bob’s task lists to easily create onboarding workflows and employee lifecycle check-ins with automatically triggered emails, questionnaires, and 1-on-1 meetings.
One of ANYMOVE’s favorite things about Bob is its ability to trigger tasks automatically. Once the onboarding process begins, Bob triggers 1-on-1s at different stages of the employee lifecycle and schedules feedback meetings on performance every six months.
The result? ANYMOVE’s HR doesn’t need to think about which account to open up, what tasks to assign, or when to schedule check-ins. All the information is already there in Bob, freeing the people team to focus on helping other departments.
Bob’s automation saves the people team tons of time, reducing pressure and increasing the team’s work-life balance. Before Bob, HR team members often worked 45 hours a week or more to complete everything. “Now, there are weeks when I work just 35 or 32 hours just because [Bob] is so efficient,” Frühling said. “You can get all of that info yourself. With an Excel sheet, it’ll just take you 10 times as long.”
Managing a growing, decentralized team was getting complicated
Before Bob, ANYMOVE’s HR team manually handled everything from recruitment and onboarding to time off and compensation with Excel spreadsheets. They needed a powerful and customizable HR platform that could serve their small, decentralized team and adapt to their needs as they scaled up and expanded across multiple geographies.
Localizing German policy and report management with Bob
ANYMOVE’s people work remotely from different locations across Europe, but most of the team is based in Germany. Since the company is so decentralized and growing steadily, it was their top priority to find a system that would allow them to easily tailor their people policies to comply with German law and to effortlessly add policies for new geographies as they grew.
When searching for the right HR platform, they paid special attention to platforms’ ease of use and ability to provide localized support. “The best example would be the vacations,” Frühling explained.
“In Germany, if you’re starting in the first half of the year, you’ll get all of your vacation allowance by the end of the six-month mark. But if you start in the second half … you can’t complete six months until the year is over, so you’ll only get a partial allowance.” Bob can do both.
ANYMOVE created two policies in Bob: one for people starting in the year’s first half and one for the second half. These capabilities significantly reduced the HR team’s administrative work. Before Bob, the team manually adjusted people’s vacation policies. Now, they quickly create policies for team members in different countries with various leave laws.
Today, ANYMOVE uses Bob to manage all their people data from one centralized location and stay compliant in multiple countries. Even as they continue to grow, Bob helps the company keep processes simple, fast, and easy to manage.
Streamlining data collection and analysis for company leadership
When ANYMOVE was shopping for the right HR platform, they knew they needed a solution powerful enough to help them drive the business forward from a people perspective as they scaled.
They were looking for a robust platform that could collect and analyze data on everything from turnover and retention to diversity and productivity. It was equally important for the solution to be easy for non-HR stakeholders to use in their daily flow of work. Bob delivered.
Gaining deep insights into people data with Bob’s analytics
Although the people team are Bob’s “power users,” managers and finance team members also use the platform regularly. Every data point is critical. As an early-stage startup, company leadership relies heavily on accurate and easily accessible people data. They use the data and insights they pull from Bob in their fundraising efforts to demonstrate the company’s positive trajectory in presentations to their investors.
Finance relies on Bob’s people data (e.g., turnover and retention) for decision-making processes and cost predictions. Bob’s turnover calculator helps them track and calculate the company’s turnover stats per quarter or month.
Compensation data helps make decisions about raising salaries and gauging new hires’ compensation against the company’s status quo. This helps them ensure their people feel valued and avoid attrition. The data is particularly beneficial now as the company navigates recruitment challenges alongside significant job market shifts and rising wages.
Bob also provides invaluable insights into diversity hiring: How many team members are women? How well are cultural minorities represented across their workforce, and how many are in leadership positions? ANYMOVE leaders use this data to adjust their hiring strategy and make the hiring process as unbiased as possible.
Bob’s data also strengthens the people team’s credibility and demonstrates the HR function’s positive impact on the company’s financials. “[People teams] are often viewed like a cost factor and always costing things,” he said. “But if you can prove, for example, that by lowering turnover by a certain percentage, you’re actually net positive on the impact of your company, that’s something that increases the stand of the people team.”
Main takeaways:
- ANYMOVE’s HR team saves up to 13 hours a week with Bob’s automation
- Customizable Time Off policies in Bob enable ANYMOVE to comply with local laws across Germany and other geographies as they grow
- Intuitive dashboards make it easy for the finance team and managers across every department to use Bob in their daily workflows
- Bob’s analytics enable ANYMOVE’s HR team to easily incorporate insightful data into presentations to investors
