The newspaper La Verdad ran a feature on the birth of our HR software and the idea behind it: bringing back a close relationship between the company and the worker without giving up on legal compliance or technology. Here are the key points of that conversation.
How Humano was born
Humano started as a spin-off of the Murcian engineering start-up Agencia Creativa, a team of engineers, designers and business consultants dedicated to building software solutions. The project was prototyped with an in-house methodology based on design thinking, starting from interviews with HR directors to truly understand their challenges: attracting talent, going digital, adding value to strategy, improving Corporate Social Responsibility, and managing change, leadership and motivation.
That research led to the diagnosis that still shapes the product: legal HR compliance and company culture were disconnected, and that broke the employee experience, especially during onboarding and offboarding.
A modular SaaS that brings it all together
Humano is a SaaS split into micro-SaaS modules, so each company activates only what it needs. Back then it already combined a job portal and an employee portal, instant messaging via push notifications, an activity and news calendar, a document manager holding all the worker’s data, payslip and contract access, holiday and sick-leave management, and presence, clock-in and absence modules.
«We had seen tools emerge that solve very specific HR points. We saw the value in solving them all within a single environment and a single experience», explained Antonio Pérez Franco, Humano’s project manager.
Company culture and compliance, in one place
Humano’s bet was (and still is) to strengthen company culture so employees feel part of a community, while the company complies with labour regulations and gets useful information to make decisions. A worker can discover the company and apply for a vacancy from the job portal, sign their contracts in the app with a fully digital onboarding, and once inside receive their payslip, news and personalised documentation, request holidays and clock in from their phone.
From the field to other countries
The first rollouts came in organisations with large workforces spread across several sites, where building a common culture is hardest: for example, companies in the agri-food sector, with very large workforces, demanding regulation and many nationalities and languages. To fit there, Humano connects automatically with the main workforce-management and payroll programs, such as A3 Nóminas and Sage Murano.
One detail that defines the project: it was «slow-cooked» over three years and funded by its own customers, with no grants. And even then it was already looking further ahead, aiming to consolidate the SaaS and grow in Spanish-speaking markets such as Mexico.
Original article: «Un software de formato Humano para fortalecer la cultura corporativa», published in La Verdad on 27 October 2021.