HR and people management platform Employment Hero has announced its expansion into the UK market, following impressive growth and success in its home market. Looking to empower small businesses and their employees as they transition into a new way of post-COVID working, the company has also announced its expansion into Singapore, Malaysia and New Zealand.

Celebrated as one of LinkedIn’s Top Australian Startups for 2020, and listed in Deloitte’s Technology Fast 50 in 2019, Employment Hero has gone from strength to strength over the past year and has revealed ambitious plans for the UK and the other key international markets. 

Founded in 2014, Employment Hero is an end-to-end people management OS (Operating System) that enables smaller businesses to recruit, hire, onboard, engage, develop and align their teams remotely. This is particularly relevant now, as employers’ increased responsibility of the care for their employees extends from the traditional workplace to homes, from company drinks to lunchtime livestream PT sessions, and the expectations of ‘Total Employment Care’ becomes a reality.

Similar technology is commonly supplied using multiple vendors to larger businesses, but not available, affordable or accessible to smaller ones, until now.

Due to the pressure and change COVID has put on SMEs’ HR function, Employment Hero has seen a 56% increase in sales since the start of the pandemic, which has led to a 44% increase in staff for the Sydney-based company.  With the HR function on overload and an increasing demand for ‘Total Employment Care’, despite dwindling teams and budgets, the company believes that now is the right time to expand into new markets and offer a solution.

More than 5,000 small to medium-sized businesses are currently running Employment Hero’s OS, collectively managing over 200,000 employees, with automated solutions for employee management, payroll, workforce management and employee benefits. It was created to take the hard work out of people management so employers can grow their teams and businesses with confidence.

Ben Thompson, CEO and co-founder of Employment Hero, said: “Our mission is to help make life easier and better for SMEs and so they can compete with bigger organisations. With COVID-19 globally impacting millions of small businesses and also setting up new opportunities for SMEs, we feel that there has never been a better time to launch our offering in the UK.” 

Employment Hero’s Australian business users report an 80% reduction of time spent on people management and a 60% reduction of time spent on payroll processing.  

Earlier in the year, Employment Hero also conducted a Remote Work Survey and found that 92 percent of employees would continue to work from home regularly if given the opportunity. Hybrid working models are the way of the remote-first work future, and small businesses cannot afford to be left behind. The Employment Hero platform will empower SMEs to future-proof their workforce and understand this new way of working without sacrificing the feel of a small business culture.

According to the Federation of Small Businesses, SMEs make up 99.9 percent of total businesses in the UK and over 80 per cent have been affected by the pandemic crisis. “Similar to how we pivoted to help more Australian SMEs get through the COVID-19 crisis, we want to offer UK small businesses the same kind of support,” Thompson added. 

Thompson continued: “Of the 99.9 percent of mentioned businesses, these largely don’t have access to the right tools to make that process easy or offer more meaningful benefits to their staff, let alone prepare for the remote-first work future. Employment Hero offers these tools and levels the playing field for all businesses to compete.”