Global Employment
Payroll
How Lano enables Hygraph to hire & run payroll for their remote-first team
Hygraph, a global SaaS company HQ’d in Berlin, uses Lano to ensure compliance and efficiency with HR processes from onboarding new employees to managing payroll and payments.
<2
Weeks between new employees signing offers to being onboarded
~80
Hours saved per new employee due to compliance and regulations
10
Countries where Hygraph employees are located & managed with Lano
"After evaluating several alternatives that operate their own entities, we chose Lano for their local partner network and expertise with compliance and payments."
Gargi Mahapatra
People and Culture Lead @ Hygraph
About Hygraph
Founded in 2017, Hygraph is a federated content platform based on GraphQL, enabling teams to deliver content to any endpoint via API. From the beginning, Hygraph's culture has emphasized being a remote-first company to grow a global team.
While the company has a physical headquarters in Berlin Germany, around 50% of the company works across 10+ countries. Over the past year, the team has grown considerably, with plans to double in size by the end of 2023.
Hygraph aims to source the best talent from anywhere in the world and wishes to provide their employees with similar benefits no matter where they are based. With a mission of building a globally distributed workforce, there were clear challenges to ensure that all processes ran smoothly and compliantly from hiring, to managing contracts and benefits, to overseeing payroll.
Challenge
Needed a global employment solution to scale
In order to realize their goal of building a compliant, globally-distributed team, the Hygraph team knew that it was not a viable option to open new entities in every country, and wanted to have a more flexible workforce that would scale naturally with the company.
Another challenge was how to best handle the specific labour and tax regulations that each market had. It was implausible to expect the HR team to keep track of every change in regulation for every country and if there were any implications of these changes on their employees.
Initially, Hygraph evaluated several options for Global Employment platforms. After evaluating other solutions that typically operate with their own entities, Hygraph was not satisfied with the initial service that they provided and was skeptical about how that relationship would grow in the future. They needed a trusted partner that could be the go-to contact for all topics around hiring and paying employees abroad and questions that naturally arise from those processes.
They wanted to provide a fair and consistent experience as an employee — offer the same or similar benefits to each employee. So it was essential that the Global Employment partner had a good overview of how the company approaches remote work regardless of the country. It was critical that the partner had access to deep knowledge on the country’s current regulations and had large amounts of experience operating in those spaces.
Solution
Global Employment and Payroll in 10+ countries
Hygraph chose Lano’s Global Employment and Global Payroll solutions to help standardize and optimize the HR processes. They were convinced by the high standard of service and the country coverage in 170+ markets. Hygraph knew that it would not just be a one-time solution, but rather that they were building the foundations of a relationship for many years to come.
“We are using Lano for our full-time contracts. For employees from different countries, Lano does the payroll. Lano also takes care of expense management and also makes sure that the employee benefit expenses are paid out to them. So everything related to payroll, benefits, payout in general is taken care of by Lano.”
– Eray Yalçındağ, VP of Operations
The global reach with Lano's partner network was a key reason why the team decided to use Lano. The local partners are experts in local laws and compliance, and have been well-vetted to ensure that they meet high-quality standards. For instance, within two weeks, the team was able to hire a new team member in the Philippines, a country where they previously did not have any experience. The Global Hiring Guides gave the team a comprehensive overview of what to expect from hiring someone in this new market but avoided the headaches around non-compliance.
“I got the quote within 48 hours; it was quite quick. This was also a very special case because we had only 10 days from the day when the candidate signed the contract until his first day of starting with us. It all went smoothly, thanks to Viktorija and Carolina’s help and thanks to Lano’s local partner network.”
– Gargi Mahapatra, People and Culture Lead
With labour and tax regulations changing often, Lano ensures that Hygraph is kept up to date on any changes and provides clarity on how those changes to regulation could affect their employees, or not.
To help simplify processes around payment, expenses, and reimbursements, the team now uses the Global Payroll solution as well. It makes it simple to manage payslips for foreign employees, pay the employees, and have a simple overview of expenses in a single dashboard. Hygraph no longer has to spend large amounts of time manually running payroll for each employee in a different country but now can conduct this entire process from within Lano, saving the team time and headaches. On the platform, the Hygraph operations team can see which invoices have been requested, which have been approved by HR, and whether or not they have been paid out. Having all of this information in a single place helps ensure that the information is up to date that invoices are paid on time without back and forth needed between the departments.
Results
Manage payroll data for all foreign employees in one place
Hygraph manages the hiring, HR and payroll processes of employees in 10 countries with Lano. The biggest outcomes from adopting the new approach include faster, more efficient processes, intuitive onboarding, and the ability to hire new employees quickly and compliantly.
Since taking on the Employer of Record approach to global hiring, the Hygraph team can meet their aggressive hiring timelines with ease. The team was able to hire and onboard talent in a new market in less than two weeks. Because of Lano, Hygraph did not need to do extensive due diligence around the partner and could be confident that they would receive a high quality experience. The high level of service and experience enabled the employee to start their new job at Hygraph on time, within two weeks after signing the contract.
Lano’s platform acts as a single source of truth for all expenses and payroll for the foreign employees. This makes it easy to have a simple overview of upcoming expenses and ensure that approved expenses are paid out in a timely manner. Creating a single place for payroll has greatly improved the process for Hygraph who manages employees in 10 countries.
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