Compass Group Denmark

Compass Group achieved more structure and gained a better overview of its 3,000 employees: “The risk of error and use of resources has been reduced.”

In an industry involving regular business transfers and a high staff turnover, a more flexible HR system was needed.

“I quickly discovered that we didn’t have a clear overview of our employees and the terms and conditions under which they were employed at Compass Group. This made it obvious that we would benefit from an HR system that could create this overview and provide better insight,” explains Kristine Dyring, who was responsible for implementing the new HR system at Compass Group.

Kristine Dyring is People and Culture Partner at Compass Group Denmark. The company employs 3,000 people in Denmark and 600,000 people globally. Compass Group has has its head office in the UK and provides facility management services, catering and cleaning for both private and public companies.

When Kristine joined Compass Group back in 2017, she realised that change was needed in HR.

Less admin work for managers

Compass Group has recruited more than 1,000 new employees and managed more than 4,000 changes to existing employees in the past year. Its HR system therefore needs to be able to handle a large volume of new appointments, changes and resignations efficiently. This was the crucial factor that led Compass Group to start using Sympa in early 2018.

“The system is simple and intuitive. At the same time, it can handle a large volume moving through the system in an orderly and efficient way. It complies with the Danish Data Protection Act, works well for HR, for managers and undoubtedly for the individual employees. Sympa has lived up to our expectations on many levels,” explains Kristine Dyring.

She recalls that many of the tasks that can now be completed quickly using Sympa used to be slow and required a great deal of resources. Managers in particular have had a lot of admin work taken off their plates.

“Our managers could choose between 40 different contract templates before when we recruited a new employee. They had to complete, print out and sign the contract before it was physically sent to the relevant employee,” explains Kristine Drying.:

“When our payroll offices received the signed contract, the first thing they did was check to see whether the right template had been used and complied with the applicable framework. They would then proceed to enter information from the contract into their system, scan the document in and save it. The risk of making mistakes was greater in that process,” says People and Culture Partner Kristine Dyring.

“Today it is still the manager who sets up an employee and drafts their contract. However, the process is far more efficient and user-friendly now because they can quickly set up and approve a new employee, who then moves on through the system, without having to think too much about it. It has really cut down the number of errors and resources we use on employees and changes, and has removed much of the duplication of effort that happened at the start,” explains Kristine Dyring.

We have achieved better mutual communication

The vast majority of the 3,000 Compass Group employees are employed as chefs, cleaners or receptionists in the close to 600 companies which Compass Group services.

This setup increases the need for a shared platform that can create the basis for communication throughout the company.

“We have taken a quantum leap in getting information out to our employees today – all communication now takes place via an app. This is crucial for us as our kitchen, cleaning and service employees don’t sit in front of a computer frequently checking emails or the intranet. Communication has become more focussed and less random,” explains Kristine Dyring.

Communication in Compass Group was much more hands-on before with line managers printing out emails and physically putting them up in the kitchen or passing them round at morning meetings.

“Even though our employees are spread across the whole country, we have been able to create a shared culture and identity to a much greater extent by getting the same information out to everyone in Compass Group. We couldn’t have done this without a basic platform like Sympa,” explains Kristine Dyring.

Using Sympa to predict the future

Unlike before, Kristine Dyring and her HR colleagues can now find key figures quickly, for example, if a manager wants to know what the average salary is for a particular group, how many have joined the company in the year to date and when which employees have an anniversary or have their salary adjusted in line with a collective agreement. Key figures that took a long time to produce before and were surrounded by uncertainty.

Kristine Dyring wants to make even better use of this kind of data going forward, to predict trends, for example.

“The next step we want to take is to consolidate the information in Sympa and other systems even more so that we can predict trends to a much greater extent,” says Kristine Dyring.

Her specific aims are to predict what creates performance and the kind of manager who is best at engaging and retaining employees in Compass Group.

“With most of the data we have access to we can perform some qualified analyses that can help us predict the future. All we need to do is consolidate the data in an analysis tool and pass it on to management via a dashboard,” concludes Kristine Dyring.