Why Back is joining Personio
In 2019, I noted when we introduced Back to the public: “In recent years, we’ve seen workplaces become more and more complex. The war for talent, remote working, and a new way of communication create a new reality for many companies.” Little did we know how an upcoming global pandemic would make this observation even more fitting over the following years.
Our founding team had a clear vision of how we could ultimately deliver on the promise of business software: help us focus on what we do best — the value-adding work itself. To achieve this, our employee experience platform automates key people processes through conversational ticketing, knowledge management, and workflows.
For four years, our team has been working relentlessly on this core mission to enable teams to focus on value-creating work by automating routine processes and requests. During this time, we worked together with the best HR teams worldwide. We partnered with category-leading global winners like Statista and Soundcloud and fast-growing companies like Choco, Loom, or Dance.
Today marks the beginning of a new chapter for us, as we’re announcing that Personio is acquiring Back. Together we want to enable better organizations. Our team will be joining Personio, and we’ll work to bring our solutions to Personio’s over 6,000 customers.
I want to highlight why we decided to join Personio and what it means for the future of HR software.
There is no doubt that there is a massive pain in the market that is slowly being addressed. We’ve seen new platforms which connect employees and tools across internal processes. New players like Moveworks and established players like ServiceNow have been capitalizing on this problem. Enterprise HCM vendors like Workday and Oracle are trying to fend them off in a fight for leadership over enterprise workflows.
The problem is obvious. Today’s organizations are more distributed, use new ways of communication, and their people processes are fragmented between a growing number of business applications and teams. Leaders have realized this and are pushing to put in place solutions to solve two goals:
On the one hand, they see significant efficiency gains in teams involved in those processes, from HR to IT and finance. But also, they create a simpler employee experience that fits today’s expectations. This, in turn, has been shown to increase employee engagement and retention.
While the underlying problem is the same, there is one big difference in how enterprises and smaller companies tackle this problem. While huge organizations have the capacity and budget for dedicated integration work, smaller companies have not. This is why the SME market had no real solution for a long time. Until Personio announced their vision of People Workflow Automation.
We’ve been working with Personio as one of its integration partners for several years. In fact, we were one of the first vendors on their marketplace. Through the joint work and our shared customers, our team realized that a fully integrated approach to workflow management within a people platform would result in a much better experience for our customers and their employees. There are three key reasons why this is the right next step for Back, and exciting news for the whole market.
First, our offerings so far have been complementary but still connected through a shared vision. People Workflow Automation enables HR teams in SMEs to work across teams and tools by transforming fragmented people processes into automated workflows. Personio has already made significant progress towards this unique vision of HR technology, and we’re excited to expand in that direction.
Second, the integration of Back into Personio will make it even easier for SMEs in Europe to adopt automation across any company stage. HR teams are too often limiting the number of new platforms they implement because of a lack of implementation resources and to avoid overwhelming employees with new software.
That means automation is being addressed way too late: Usually, when the pain has gotten so big that employees are churning, both in HR teams but equally across the organization, because of frustrating processes and experiences. By removing the need of having to buy and put in place a dedicated solution, PWA helps teams address problems earlier, in a platform that scales with their growth.
Last but not least, integrating our technologies into an HR platform like Personio will enable us to build a better product. We will create deeper links between the employee experience layer and the records and data that Personio manages. We’ve seen the potential of what’s possible through our joint customers and their continuous feedback and are excited about our upcoming releases.
But I want to point out that we would only have agreed to any acquisition offer if we believed in a great future for our team. What Hanno, Roman, and their team have built is exceptional. Our substantial overlap in how we work was a driving force in finding a common path together. I admire how they think about culture and act as leaders — which makes Personio a great place to work.
In the next few months, we will continue to deliver on the promises we set out:
- Made to save time. We will continue to make it easy for HR teams to automate repetitive work, from simple questions to complex processes.
- Connected to your favorite apps. We will continue to leverage employee darlings like Slack and MS Teams, and leverage business integrations from Personio’s growing marketplace of 100+ partners.
- Designed for everyone. People processes often involve other teams, like finance, legal, workplace, or IT. We will continue to allow HR to go beyond HR to make sure work flows seamlessly.
With today’s announcement, there are really exciting times ahead of us. With Personio we will continue building workflows that bring fragmented tasks together to drive productivity across every aspect of a business by removing delays and ensuring opportunities are not missed.
