Located in Brantford, Ontario, Willowbridge Community Services (formerly known as Family Counselling Centre of Brant) is a not-for-profit, charitable organization offering developmental services, counselling and financial empowerment across Hamilton, Brantford, Niagara, Six Nations of the Grand River, Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, and Haldimand Norfolk.
Since its founding over 100 years ago, thousands of individuals, families, couples and children have come through its doors seeking life-changing support.
In late 2019 Eranga Peduruarachchige joined the organization as the Manager of Human Resources. Eranga had previously worked at another social services agency where she had selected and implemented info:HR as the Human Resource Information System of choice. On arriving at Willowbridge Eranga found that all the tracking of personnel files for the 50 employees was done in paper files. Eranga felt that her most pressing issue was the accurate tracking of employee time off – vacation days, sick days, banked lieu time and more. Using paper files was too much work to maintain promptly and accurately. Given her prior experience with info:HR she knew there was a better way.
“In my first implementation of info:HR, the experience was quite positive, especially with regard to the testing and support from the HRSS staff and the features provided by the system,” commented Eranga. “Here at Willowbridge I looked at several different systems – it’s our policy to consider alternatives – and what I found were gaps between the data I wanted to see and the information I wanted to track and what the other systems had to offer. That led me to look at info:HR again.”
Eranga added, “The senior management team, which was relatively new to the organization, was on board from the start. The team members had limited prior experience with an HRIS except me, so they leaned heavily on my expertise. They all wanted access to personnel data so it didn’t take much convincing for them to support the idea of implementing an automated system. We ended up deciding to go with the ‘cloud’ implementation of info:HR with the Employee/Manager Self Service and Applicant Tracking modules, which is an ideal operational model for an organization of our size – all the IT responsibilities fall on HRSS.”
Once the system was up and running on the HRSS cloud server in Markham, ON (housed at a Rogers Data Centre facility) and populated with basic employee data from the Initial Data Load operation, the focus turned to configuring and deploying the ESS module.
“The employees are very happy. I was pleasantly surprised at the employees’ uptake of ESS. The train-the-trainer model that HRSS employs worked quite well. HRSS staff trained my assistant, Sarah Hammond, on the use and operation of ESS. Sarah did a dry-run with me. We refined the material and then Sarah conducted training sessions with all the staff. There have been a few people coming back with questions but, for the most part, they have been few and far between.”
“The staff really like that they can see their time-off balances at any time. Managers love it – they don’t have to be writing emails back and forth to deal with time-off requests.
“The efficiencies we’ve found have been unbelievable, compared to what we had. Not only did the handwritten forms we were using require too much time transferring information from month to month, but the manual nature of the records ran the risk of introducing errors that would carry forward from one month to the next. Now, it’s very different. I’d estimate we are achieving at least 30% productivity in maintaining the personnel information – now, everything is at our fingertips.
“Systems always help us with information, and that’s what info:HR is doing for us. It will support us in a very big way that people here haven’t experienced before.”
When asked what advice she would give to organizations considering the move to an HRIS Eranga suggested, “Understand and know what the organization needs are – document those needs, articulate them to the vendor – not all systems will do everything you want to do, so be prepared to have discussions with the vendor’s implementation team to see if there are ways they can accommodate what you want within the framework of what their system can do.”
As for the future at Willowbridge, Eranga has definite plans: “Tracking employee professional development is important for us; we are a compliance-drive organization. I want to get the Continuing Education component of info:HR implemented, so we can see the training people have taken, the skills they have developed and, just as importantly, the costs to the organization for providing that professional development. info:HR provides all that capability, it’s a matter of putting it to use.
“Another future direction that I’d like to see the organization take is to integrate info:HR with our Ceridian payroll system. It will take away some optimization barriers – the processing will be much faster and the information will be accurate. I’m all about automation!”
Eranga concluded, “I’m quite confident that info:HR is a system that will support the agency for five to seven years without any issue or need to change.”
