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Three days back every month: How Bailey & Jones built a better foundation with Employment Hero
70%
reduction in
manual HR admin
3+
days saved monthly
through automation
85%
faster document turnaround with templates and e-signatures
Company
Bailey & Jones
Industry
Construction
Employees
100
Location
UK
Favourite Features
About the business
Bailey & Jones is a high-end residential construction company operating across London and the countryside. As their workforce expanded from 3 to over 100 staff, including off-site contractors, their legacy HR processes quickly became unsustainable.
The challenge
When Ewa Mika joined as Workforce & HR Manager, the company’s people operations were running on spreadsheets, OneDrive folders, and manual forms. HR tasks were clunky, repetitive and reactive, leaving no time to focus on building better processes.
Key challenges included:
- Disconnected systems with no automation or visibility.
- Manual onboarding, offboarding and leave management.
- Compliance risks from expiring documents or missed reviews.
- Limited access for employees to view contracts, documents or leave.
- Excessive admin burden with no time for strategic HR work.
“70% of my workload was just manual admin before Employment Hero. My week was chaotic, and the spreadsheets just weren’t working anymore.”
The solution
Bailey & Jones implemented Employment Hero to replace their manual workflows with one seamless Employment Operating System, saving time across the entire employee lifecycle.
New hires now complete onboarding tasks digitally before day one, with policies, contracts and personal information captured upfront. Offboarding is structured too, involving IT, marketing and procurement automatically.
“Handing someone an A4 form on their first day felt so outdated. Now everything’s digital and nothing slips through the cracks.”
Ewa now creates documents using templates and e-signatures. What used to take 20 minutes now takes three, and smart reminders track things like visa expiries and probation reviews.
“We send out policies and letters in minutes now, and built-in reminders are a game changer. We stay compliant without scrambling.”
Employees now access everything themselves via the Employment Hero Work app, from payslips to policies to booking leave, cutting inbox clutter and giving Ewa hours back each week.
“I had to update our annual leave calendar and spreadsheet manually, send all invites, reminders and remaining balance calculations. It was exhausting. With Employment Hero, it’s all automated, saving me so much time.”
The ROI
Since switching to Employment Hero, Bailey & Jones has transformed its HR operations, cutting down manual work, improving compliance and freeing up time to focus on business-critical initiatives like health and safety training.
- 70% reduction in manual admin workload
- 3+ full days saved each month on onboarding, leave and HR documents
- 20 mins → 3 mins per HR doc using digital templates and e-signatures
- Improved compliance, with automated visa and contract expiry reminders
- Higher employee engagement, with mobile-first access to all HR tools
“We’ve gone from sending forms and invites manually to slick digital processes. People can access what they need themselves. It’s brilliant.”
Why it matters
Employment Hero helped Bailey & Jones move from spreadsheet chaos to HR clarity, freeing up time, reducing risk and giving their workforce the tools to self-serve.
“It’s freed up so much of my time. Now I can finally invest in strategic work, like health and safety and training… things that actually move the business forward.”
Jump into Employment OS.
Employment doesn’t have to be hard. Streamline every step of the employment lifecycle so you and your team can run ahead.
Frequently Asked Questions
This is the exact problem Bailey & Jones’s HR Manager, Ewa Mika, was facing. 70% of her workload was manual admin, and her week was “chaotic.” The platform is designed to solve this, not add to it. By replacing her spreadsheets, Ewa saved 3+ full days every month and can now focus on high-value work like health and safety, not “exhausting” admin.
While Bailey & Jones is in construction, their challenges are universal for any UK business with a growing, distributed workforce: manual onboarding, tracking leave, and managing compliance. The platform solved this by digitising their processes and using smart reminders for visa expiries and probation reviews—a critical need for any company managing compliance, regardless of industry.
Bailey & Jones saw their ROI in time, efficiency, and compliance. They cut their manual HR admin workload by 70%. This translated to 3+ full days saved every month and reduced simple tasks, like creating HR documents, from 20 minutes down to just 3 minutes using templates and e-signatures.
Bailey & Jones used Employment Hero to solve major compliance risks. Ewa highlighted the built-in smart reminders as a “game-changer” for tracking visa expiries and probation reviews. This automation ensures they stay compliant with UK employment regulations “without scrambling.” The platform also gives employees self-serve access to payslips, policies, and leave balances via the Work app, further reducing compliance and admin friction.
Bailey & Jones is a perfect example of a business that outgrew its manual processes. They scaled from 3 to over 100 employees, at which point their “spreadsheets just weren’t working anymore.” The platform is designed for businesses exactly like this—those who need to ditch the paper forms and build a scalable foundation for growth, whether you’re at 25 employees or 125.
