Established in 2008, the Community Health Centres of Northumberland (CHCN), located in Port Hope Ontario, is a community-centred primary health care facility, and a member of the Alliance for Healthier Communities, the advocacy organization for non-profit, community-governed, multidisciplinary primary health care agencies. With a vision rooted in providing comprehensive primary care services delivered by an interdisciplinary team of professionals to promote healthy communities, it offers a range of community-based services and responds to health-related community concerns.
From the beginning, and with a staff of approximately 50 employees, managing the HR portfolio fell to Taryn Rennicks, Director of Corporate Services. Everything was new, and in the early days the level of automation for back-office functions like HR was very minimal. “It was hilarious. We had staff filling out archaic paper timesheets,” says Taryn. “We needed to track many of the usual exception time categories – vacation, sick time, float days, things like that – but we also needed to track employees’ hours worked for reporting requirements to our funder. There was no way we could avoid a timesheet.”
In addition to tracking on paper the time taken from entitlement banks, the time bank balances themselves for each employee were being populated and updated manually. This led to more time spent on recording duties than management wanted, given all their other responsibilities. Just prior to Taryn’s arrival senior management decided that the time had come to replace their manual process with an HR system that could provide a high degree of automation.
Based on a recommendation from another Community Health Centre, CHCN looked into info:HR, and saw that it would fulfil all of their tracking and reporting requirements. As a bonus, the licensing and implementation fees were at a level that allowed them to initiate an expedited purchase process.
Taryn led the implementation. She remembers, “Training was easy and info:HR support was awesome. Michelle Beasley provided the training and implementation assistance to our Accountant and myself. In turn, we provided how-to training for the Online Timesheets module to the rest of our staff. They took to it very well, allowing us to replace the old paper timesheets. We’ve never looked back.”
Michelle recalls that the implementation went smoothly. “We did a number of training sessions to ensure that the employee information needed by the Online Timesheets module was properly entered into info:HR and that security profiles, reporting relationships, items like that were all correct before releasing the module to the general employee population. None of that is difficult or time-consuming, but it needs to be done properly so that everything goes as planned with the rollout.”
After several years of operating info:HR in-house from their own server, Taryn needed to consider what would be next. The server was coming to the end of its life, so the CHC needed to look for a cost-effective alternative. By this time, for several years HRSS had been offering clients the option to have their implementation of info:HR hosted on an HRSS cloud server resident at a Rogers Data Centre facility in Toronto. It provides the best of both worlds; it relieves clients of the need to install, manage and maintain the application, but unlike most cloud applications where the location of the data is largely unknown, their confidential HR data remains in Canada. Taryn felt this was the right move. The migration took just one day, after which everyone was accessing the system with their data from the HRSS server. Taryn points out an unexpected benefit: “Many of our employees use laptops since they are on the go. Now that we run from the HRSS cloud server, they can fill out their online timesheet from wherever they are; they don’t have to be in our building, connected to our network.”
As their experience with info:HR has grown, the dependence on HRSS support staff decreased; support calls and emails are much less frequent. One call that Taryn does make is to schedule assistance with her year-end rollover with Barbara Chicago, Client Services Manager. Barbara remarks, “Working with Taryn is always a pleasure. She has been using the system for a number of years now, she is very self-sufficient using the system and her data is always clean. We typically complete the year end process together, as it is something that is only done once a year. It is always a pleasure to work with our clients to ensure that the process goes smoothly. I always say, ‘I cannot expect you to remember every step when you only do the task once a year.’ It also provides us some time to catch up and answer a few questions that may have slipped through the cracks during a very busy year, and also discuss projects for the coming year.
“Our clients get so busy doing the day-to-day tasks that some things – like training plans, reporting and how managers can leverage our online modules to better manage their employees – get lost in the shuffle. Year-end calls allow us to remind our clients to check out our free webinar series so they can refresh on topics that have been forgotten and to consider refresher training to brush up on skills. One of the best options we offer is a Best Practices Audit. The audit gives us the time to review the data in the system and how it is being stored. We can provide our clients with options of how to leverage and utilize info:HR and the web modules to free up more of their valuable HR professional time.”
After using info:HR for ten years, it’s become second nature for Taryn and the staff. “We know how to push the buttons and spin the dials to get info:HR to do what we need, and it delivers for us. It’s been a productive ten years for us and we’re looking forward to many more.”
