- Welcome to HR tech talks.
A video series that goes behind the scenes
with HR professionals to
share valuable insights
and best practices when
selecting and implementing
new software.
I'm Dave Rietsema, founder
and CEO of HR Payroll Systems,
a free web service that
makes finding the right HRIS
and payroll software for your
business a whole lot easier.
In today's episode, I'm
speaking with Mary Dale,
the VP of HR at Convivial Brands,
and former CHRO at Metron
Integrated Health Systems.
Here's our discussion.
And so just to start off,
can you tell us a little bit about Metron,
the number of employees, number
of states that you were in
and some of the challenges-
- Yeah
- And experiences.
Challenges you've experienced
from an HR perspective
that could be eased through an HRIS?
- Yeah so, when I joined Metron
Integrated Health Systems,
they had multiple locations.
There were specifically seven
and they were looking
to acquire additional.
So, one acquisition,
and then they had eight.
With that being said,
each location had their
own federal tax ID.
And there was around 850 employees across
the State of Michigan.
And, when I joined the organization,
they were going through a
lot of change management
to prepare for growth.
And part of that growth was
not only looking at ways
to do things better and more effectively,
but ways to reduce some of our cost.
We had exorbitant spend that
was very difficult to maintain.
We didn't have a big budget to spend money
on expensive softwares with what have you,
as well as to add additional
HR resources to do the job.
And so, as we were looking
at some of the goals
of the organization in the
first year that I was there,
a couple of things that
they were looking to do were
to maintain some continuity
amongst all eight locations.
They were in different
communities, different counties,
spread out across Michigan,
and one thing that we found
is that from a recruitment standpoint,
there was no continuity,
everybody was working
independently on paper
or having people fill
out paper applications.
So they weren't using the same system
to pull together notes, so if,
if one location that happened
to be 15 miles from another,
were calling the same candidate,
they would have no idea
that a call was already
placed to that candidate.
We were also behind the
market in regards to
our total rewards and
compensation program.
And so, one of the goals
of the president owner,
who is my boss,
was to basically redo our
entire compensation philosophy
and structure, and then finding a system
that would help us maintain that,
not only from making sure
that when we hired people on,
our wages were not
falling below the minimum
or going over the maximum
and so creating those
red circle opportunities.
But also, we wanted to
ensure that we could
implement a pay for performance model
where individuals could
go through a review,
they could have a 360 review,
they could do a self review.
and all of those scores
would tie to our budget,
which then would basically dictate
what their increase was.
So that was one thing
that we were looking at,
how are we going to do this
without manually calculating
800 plus people's salaries
and growing as we continue
to open new locations
and expand our reach
within the organization.
- And so, what would you say besides that
was a driving factor?
Did you have bad customer
service with your current vendor?
- Yeah, so our current
vendor, we would call
or put in a help desk ticket
for different features or problems,
and there were times
where we didn't hear back
for four to five months on that issue.
And, in addition to
that, we had implemented
every possible upgrade and
potential add on product
that they had said, if you implement this,
or we just, you know, came
up with a new feature,
if you implement this,
and we did all of that,
but we still weren't getting
the results that we needed,
but yet we were spending the money.
And so, it was getting
growingly frustrating
because as you're calling
and calling and calling
and you're going we have
a serious problem here
when it comes to trying
to do our ACA reporting
or our EEO reporting,
and this information is
not capturing accurate,
we are going to have to
go in and manually do
a lot of this work and
they weren't doing anything
to help us resolve those issues.
- And so, you decided that
you needed to make a change,
customer service was an issue,
you had implemented all these things that,
that weren't doing the trick.
So what was your first step
in going through this process?
You make the decision and then what?
- Really determining what
budgetary constraints,
or what the budget was.
The next thing was looking at
any technology constraints.
So, was the implementation going
to involve other team members?
And if it did, you know, talking through
what their availability was,
would you need any outside consultants
from a technology standpoint?
Did we have the broadband or,
I'm not a technology person,
but are there things that you need to use
from server perspective that
would require you to buy space
or is it hosted in the
Cloud or on the internet,
so, where that software would
be hosted was a big deal,
I guess, for both the company,
but also our IT constituents.
Looking at our time constraints,
what other goals do we
have as an organization
that implementing a system
would interfere with,
you know and, were they things that
we would be able to manage both.
And then, once we did that,
then we were able to start to
evaluate, you know, what
vendors were out there
that we could start taking
a look at, you know,
this is where our needs are, and this is,
here are the vendors that
we're finding meet or have
different modules in their
system that look appealing
just from first glance that
we can start to take a look at
and provide them with an RFP.
And so, we went through
kind of that first analysis
internally about what we
could and could not do.
The other thing we were looking
at is training, you know,
how long would the system
implementation rollout take?
How long would training take?
Because you can roll it out on January one
to begin use it in January one,
but there's got to be a component
in between there before people
start to use the system.
And then, also looking at, you
know, any other annual costs,
what the employee, you know,
was there an employee self service portal,
or would this be smething
that we would have to
still have paper forms?
So there was a lot of components
that were a full 18 point checklist
that we were looking at internally
before we even talked to any
software companies about that.
And then, before we even went through
and started talking and doing the analysis
with the companies, we
had a project committee,
mainly made up of HR
professionals, but a few from IT,
as well as our accounting
team to determine, you know,
what impacts the software
would have on them as well.
And once that committee was selected,
then that's when we started
the formal RFP process
and went through that process.
And then from there, it
was more demonstration
and evaluation of the systems
for all of those on the committee,
just to determine that we
had people looking at it
from a different lens or scope.
- Sure, like kind of
setting the scene for,
for this change to take
place and making sure that
you've got everybody on board.
And did you find that there
were any hesitations internally
or did you have to really
get executive buy in?
How did that process go?
- You know, I will say in the years past
when I was new to this
process and I didn't have
kind of that external support,
someone to walk me through what to expect,
I really didn't know and I
was going into it blindly.
I had a really hard time
getting executive buy in
in selling the need for this because
all people saw and heard
was that it was time,
it was going to cost money.
Even if it was a flat, you
know, dollar for dollar,
you know, there wasn't an increase,
but we were implementing it.
It was, you know, other people's time.
This time, I think
because I've implemented
so many softwares and I involved people
that would be my naysayers
or people that would
tell me that we can't,
or that it's going to
impact their department
in that decision making process,
I did not find that we
had a lot of pushback
because our system was so broken
and we were looking to do so many,
very high level strategic
changes within the organization
that we had to do something.
And we weren't necessarily
adding manpower.
We had double the HR
staff when I came on board
and then we restructured
the entire HR team so,
when we did that,
we actually had a pretty
significant savings
for the organization by
operating with less people.
But by doing that, it required
several changes in technology
to do that, to have those efficiencies.
So, I didn't have those
challenges, but when I initially,
you know started my career and
started with implementations,
I found it was one of the biggest barriers
and the most difficult struggles
of going through this process,
was not having somebody
who had been there or who was
an expert at implementation
to kind of help me through,
that wasn't part of the software company.
- Right, and I think, you know,
as a new HR person myself,
several years ago I went through,
this is one of the things,
tasks that I was assigned
as a new HR person.
And I guess, if you can sort of quantify,
you know, what these
savings are going to be,
and really put things
you know, into numbers,
which is not something that
I think we're trained on
as HR people.
But speaking to numbers
and you know, what the
cost savings will be
and net present value, all
of those things I think
can help to sort of make the business case
for our HR software but,
that's something you'll learn with time,
but if you can be armed with
that knowledge ahead of time,
I think it makes your uphill
battle maybe not as steep
as it already would be.
- And I, you know, in addition to the,
savings that you can quantify,
I think now more than ever,
where there is less people
and just from a numbers
perspective in the United States,
people are having less babies,
and so less people are
graduating from college,
and so there's less professionals
coming into the workforce,
and so, it's becoming more and
more competitive as employers
to not only have good
compensation structures
and to have great environments,
but the tools that you
provide for the ease
of your employees to make
changes, to enroll in benefits,
to have access to
knowledge and information
at their fingertips
has become so critical.
People have come to expect it.
- Sure, it's become almost a commodity.
something that was, you know new and,
maybe not as necessary back
when it was first introduced,
it's become just part of our lives,
like the reason that
you said it's, you know,
it's just a part of our lives anyway.
- Right, you're almost behind the times,
if you're a software company,
it's a representation of who
you are and what your company
and where you're going and so,
if you have five different
softwares or they're broken,
or they're giving people
misinformation, it certainly,
while you may not have control over
how that software does
reports, what have you,
you did select them,
and it is a reflection
of you as an organization.
I mean, one of the biggest
things that I have found
in my career is when my team
members, or even myself,
if there's a mistake that you made,
especially if it affects
somebody's payroll,
they don't ever forget that,
they don't ever forgive you,
even if fix it later on, they certainly,
they don't ever forget that,
and there's that lack of trust
with your department.
So I, you know, as an HR professional,
I think this is such an important tool.
But also, to do your job, but
also to represent who you are
and to build those relationships
with your employees.
- Sure.
So when you decided that
you were moving forward,
you've made your list, you've
prepared your environment
or your company internally for this.
How did you, of course,
going through a lot of
implementations over the years,
you sort of knew the vendor landscape,
but, how did you go about researching,
because it's constantly changing,
there are always new vendors popping up.
Did you Google search?
Tell us a little bit about it.
- So, I did a variety of things
because you're absolutely right.
When you know, what software
I might have evaluated
at a prior company, or you
know, for another organization
is not a one size fits all.
You know, a lot of times people will ask
other HR professionals, like,
who did you go with?
And that's simply means, oh,
would you go with this one
or would you go with this one?
And it's like, enough people say this one,
so I'm going to make that choice,
and that is one of the
biggest mistakes that I see
that HR professionals make
because each organization's needs
and the things that you
need from the software
and your goals are going
to be so different.
Obviously, I mean, being
part of different groups
and finding out names, I started there
with making phone calls.
I started by yes, exploring
the different websites and
scheduling reviews or demos of the system.
I also attended a few
different local conference
and national conferences
too, which was kind of nice
because many of them, if you
are part of different HR groups
will attend and be part of the
breakout session or have you
in between your sessions
where you can go and evaluate.
But I think, you know,
that's just a glimpse
into the software.
I think as anyone can appreciate,
you know, if you go on a car dealer's lot,
they're going to really focus
on all the bells and whistles
and the things that really them great
during that presentation,
but they're not going to take a deep dive
or they're not going
to say, oh, by the way,
this, you know, cup
holder's kind of small,
if you drink Gatorade,
it's not going to fit it.
They're not going to point
out the issues to you,
and so, those are great ways
to get demos and at least get
a very, very high level,
look at the software.
But from there, I think
doing your own due diligence
is so important.
So, once I saw kind of what
each software had to offer,
then I went out on a few HR forums.
There's many of them that you
can join for free on Facebook,
and you don't even have
to know anybody or other,
that I was able to tap
into a network to say,
hey, look guys, who's using,
any of you using the software,
and can I schedule some
time with you personally,
whether it be via Zoom,
whether it be coming into your office
to just do a review of your system.
I'll sign a confidentiality
agreement or what have you,
but where you can show me how
you're utilizing these tools,
what this looks like in
the real world being used,
not in a demo software,
and then I could ask some of my questions.
From there, then I would
go back to the vendor
when I would see issues
or concerns or things that
maybe the person couldn't figure out
and would ask them to take a deeper dive.
And what I found was about
70% of the softwares,
for example, would tell me
that they had a compensation
platform where they
could tie it to a review
and what have you, and as
I asked more questions,
they really didn't have a
compensation software philosophy
that could even do that.
Really looking in and taking a
deep dive on those must haves
I think is really, really important.
Not just scheduling a demo,
but asking them to show you.
I had some vendors that I said,
I want you to set up a dummy portal
so that I can go in and
play in your software.
And many did.
I was locked out after a portion of time,
but they let me go into the test portion
and try to do things,
which was really nice.
There were some that said, absolutely not,
or they wouldn't give me the time of day.
And I have a feeling
it's because they knew
right off the bat, that their
software wasn't going to meet
our needs.
And I was very, very critical
about what those things were
because many would try to
shift back to other features
of the system that were
not important for us
or things that we would even use.
So, that was one thing that I
found vendors like to do is,
is they don't give you enough
information to really do
a full, deep dive into the software.
- Yeah, I think there are nice to haves
and then there are, have to haves.
And I think, I found myself
when I went through this process,
sort of getting distracted
on all of these cool bells and whistles.
And, sort of sometimes forgetting
what are the crucial
things that my organization
actually needs to become more efficient
and to get the job done.
You know, I remember specifically,
you know, email notifications
because our current system
didn't have notifications,
so when somebody got promoted
or when somebody transferred,
it would automatically let
a specific department know
about that activity.
But that really wasn't the core focus of
what we were looking for.
We had other sort of bigger things
that we wanted to focus on.
Just being able to automate other tasks,
not even just specific and limited to
letting other departments know
about a specific thing so,
I think your strategy is--
- I agree with you.
- Your strategies is
interesting because you,
you do a demo or you get
familiarized with the product,
then you meet with another
HR professional to do
a deeper dive, to really
go through their use case
and to see if it sort of meets your needs.
With that arsenal of knowledge,
then you go back to the vendor and say,
here's what we need, here's
what I experienced or-
Did you disclose to them that
you had worked with other
people behind the scenes
with another one of their customers?
- Oh yeah.
- Okay.
- Yep, and I also,
a lot of times if they use
somebody as a reference,
I would say, well, I also heard
that this company is using
it, would you be comfortable
to me talking to somebody there,
I know them and I'm comfortable with them?
And so that's, that's how,
I'd kind of make that introduction.
- So you got information
from your networks,
just talking to people,
you did it through surveys,
of course, the actual vendor demo process.
So you took a very thorough approach
to researching the software to get that--
- Yeah, I probably drove people
a little bit crazy with it.
Just because there were
some that people were like,
oh my gosh, I love that
software and then, you know,
of course that my research,
I just would shoot it completely
down and they're like,
oh my gosh, they're like,
we thought that was great.
I'm like you got sold on the sales person
and their presentation skills
and how great they were,
but it really, none of
the stuff they presented
really is what we're looking for
and they're not going to
solve our issues here.
And there were, like I said,
compensation was a must have.
We also, aside from HR, it was looking at
what things could improve
our operational leaders
workflows and lives as well.
So this software wasn't just
meant to solve our problems,
but what were their pain points?
And so in healthcare,
especially longterm care,
you cannot legally have a nurse working
if they did not renew
their nursing license.
Well, you would easily think that a nurse
who does this for a profession
would renew their license but
people caring for people,
as you can imagine,
especially with COVID going on right now,
they're so busy working
double and triples shifts,
and they're exhausted when they get home
that they think I'll get to that tomorrow,
I'll get to that tomorrow.
And if their license lapse, even by a day,
you can get into major
trouble with major fines.
And so, finding systems
that would track that,
but then send reminders
to the appropriate people
when that hasn't been
updated, that that's coming
or that's expiring that like, you know,
puts all the stops out there
to make sure someone can't
clock in, if that's the case.
So, going beyond the needs
of automation for HR,
but finding tools to help
leaders better manage
so they can focus on the
things like patient care
that are of the utmost importance
and not all the minutia of paperwork
that comes along with it.
So, that was a huge piece too,
is finding systems that weren't
only solving HR problems,
but solving the problems of
others in our organization.
- Sure, and that helps to
also get people in your corner
to really sort of sell
it to executives as that,
sure it's going to make HRs
lives easier, which we all want,
but, if we can also take
off some burdens from,
from our peers and our managers,
I think that's a huge win
and it also is a solid
point to bring forth,
hey, we can help with compliance
and we can help this department
become more efficient as well.
So it's maybe not just about
spending less or, you know,
trying to sort of break
even with current spend,
it's also bringing in those
other efficiencies and to--
- Yeah, training, annual training
that people are required
to have if you're,
like we were open 24 hours
a day, seven days a week,
so there was no time to
say, okay, everybody meet
at this space at this
time to do your training,
'cause somebody was
always caring for patients
who were there 24 hours a day.
And so, finding tools where
people could do self-learning,
we could do onsite learning,
if they want to read
versus a video, being able
to upload videos, have proof
we did the trainings, all of those things
were tools that didn't necessarily
improve necessarily our jobs as HR,
but it improved the roles of the nursing,
directors of nursing
or the administrators,
whose licenses were on the line
if those things got missed.
- Right.
And so, how many total
vendors did you evaluate?
- You know, I think it started
somewhere around 15 to 16
as a high level of
valuation, but at the end
there was four to five that
we really narrowed down on.
Each was a little bit different,
we had one that was more costly,
but it had all the bells and whistles,
we kind of had a few
at that mid price point
that was affordable,
and then we had one that was
on the lower end of costs,
and features wise, but it,
they all fell kind of
within in our budget,
and we wanted to see, you know,
was that top end software?
Was there something
that they were offering
that would be different than
the middle of the road three?
And ultimately, there
really wasn't anything
that was that difference
other than they were charging
six times the cost of the other vendor.
And for the features that
we needed internally,
we felt the vendor we
selected had stronger modules
and things that responded
better to our needs
than the more expensive product.
- How did implementation go?
And about how long was it?
- Yeah so, the first time I would say
it was around 90 days to four
months to actually implement
from a starting to gather information,
to actually running our first payroll.
One of the things that
they had asked us to do
was put things into a spreadsheet.
And I think that the implementation out of
the entire process of selecting a vendor
was the most difficult
and most challenging.
If you haven't necessarily
used the software before,
sometimes they're asking
you to fill in information
and you don't know where
that information's going,
what field in their
system it's going to fill,
you don't know what, when you run reports,
what information that's
going to drive or impact
in the long run.
And you certainly don't
want to have a situation
where you implement a
software and you dump
all this information into
the system and it's garbage,
and then you're trying to
manually fix it and correct it.
Part of an implementation process too,
is leaving yourself enough
time to test the system
and set up test employees.
Far too many people implement a system,
and then they just try to start using it
or say, I'm going to do a double payroll
without really testing
all of the features.
A lot of times, most of
these software companies,
they focus on payroll only,
as part of like, they'll say,
oh, we're going to
implement this in phases
and we'll do payroll first,
and then we'll get to the bits
and then we'll get to this and guess what?
You never get to those things because
the implementation team
helps you figure out
how to run payroll and then they walk away
and you've paid a lot of
money for that implementation.
And so, those were some of the things,
making sure that all the modules
that they agreed to have implemented
before the true go live date,
that everything would
be trained and set up.
Sometimes that is what
the cost difference is
in the software is you
may have all the features,
longterm, the software may be phenomenal,
but the implementation
process could be a nightmare,
and so it's evaluating,
even your own team members
and their capabilities, both
from a technology standpoint,
but also, the ability to
juggle multiple projects
and implementation and ongoing work.
That's really important too.
I was fortunate enough to have
very savvy individuals on my team
that were really great with technology.
And we found that most of the time
through the implementation process,
we were teaching the vendor about things
that would work with their system,
but they told us wouldn't
work, and we'd be like,
well, let us show you, we
found this or we found that.
So, it's, you know, assuming that
when you're meeting with people,
implementation people
aren't always experts.
Some of them may have
just joined the company.
Some could be six months into
their tenure with the company.
And so, that was something
else that I put in my contract
for this time was getting to
select my implementation team
and talking through them and
understanding their knowledge.
And if they weren't up to
par, being able to change
somebody from the team to get
a better qualified individual.
- What would you say are some things
that went bad during the process
that we could learn from?
If you could pick one, one or two things
that just didn't go well.
- Really not knowing
some of the spreadsheets
and things that they were asking for.
What they called the
features were different
than what we would have
called those fields.
And so, things were put in fields
that we wouldn't have called
it that and vice versa.
And so, we found ourselves
doing a lot of rework
and fixing the system
before we could use it.
And I wish that there would've
been some sort of like list
with this is what this means
or that we would have
taken it one step further
before we started the
implementation and did a demo of
here's what these fields
mean in the system,
so now that you've signed off on with us,
this is what the system's going to drive.
If you run XYZ report, this is
what this is going to impact.
And then also there were fields that
if you were to make, let's
say a compensation change,
they didn't tell you you had
to go to four different areas
of the system to make the change.
And so, you know, not knowing that,
and then looking at a system and thinking,
well we changed it here,
but then finding that
there were multiple areas
in the system that you had to
also change that information
was quite frustrating.
- Right.
Mary, thank you so much
for all of your insights,
this has been great.
And I know it's going to be a huge help
to other HR professionals
who are going through the same thing.
Thank you.
- Of course, thank you for having me.
