Australian not-for-profit Uniting is working to transform its people management systems with Dayforce, starting with payroll before expanding to other functions.
Uniting’s Dr Anat Hassner (centre) speaks at Dayforce’s Daybreak conference.
The community and aged care services provider, which has about 12,000 staff, started planning the move about a year-and-a-half ago, owing to the forthcoming end-of-life of its Preceda payroll system.
Chief people and strategy officer Dr Anat Hassner told the Dayforce Daybreak conference in Sydney that the payroll replacement kicked off a broader examination and transformation of the organisation’s people systems.
Uniting, and its leaders, were sold on the benefits of transformation after observing one in its recruitment and retention functions.
“When I joined [Uniting], we had a workforce crisis: we were 1000 people short,” Hassner said.
“Because I have a background in transformation, I took that experience and applied it into a workforce crisis response activity and transformed the recruitment and retention area within Uniting … right at the outset.
“I think having seen that process, the CEO was more open to understanding what transformation looks like and how much effort and focus right from the top all the way down… it requires.”
The transformation of people systems is beginning with payroll, because a system replacement is required.
But the intent is to run more people functions on Dayforce as well, to reduce risk and administrative effort involved in staff management, and to make it simpler for staff to interact with systems used for paying, rostering, training and so on.
Hassner said her team had worked to “paint a vision” for leaders as to “what this organisation can look like if we have one platform for our frontline heroes, the people who we want being successful and really focused on their customers.”
“We established two personas – one for the ‘communities’ side of the organisation and one for the aged care side,” she said.
“We called these personas Sarah and Jeremy, and we told the story about what Sarah and Jeremy are experiencing today when they have to look at their payslip, when they have to put in their time [worked], when they have to do training. They have to access five different systems, but they probably aren’t accessing most of the systems, and they’re definitely not getting the benefits of working for one organisation. And they can’t communicate with us – when you have a single system, you have a single place to communicate directly with frontline teams.
“And then, fast forward to a couple of years later, after Dayforce is implemented, what does that look like for Sarah and Jeremy? What are all the opportunities they now have to grow their careers, to interact better, to have more mobility within the organisation?
“That compelling vision about how this is going to solve not just a risk but an experience for our frontline teams helped our board and our CEO get over the line [with the Dayforce transformation].”
Uniting is working with Deloitte on the Dayforce transformation, with HR transformation partner at the integrator, Glen Detering, indicating that Uniting is “fast approaching [its] first go-live… in the new year.”
Payroll and rostering integration
Uniting is hoping that having payroll and rostering in the one platform will help it de-risk and make it simpler to ensure that staff are paid correctly, particularly as regulations change.
Hassner said the organisation has been “heavily impacted” in recent times by the outcome of the aged care royal commission – both in meeting the increased number of “care minutes” per resident amidst a nursing shortage and meeting a requirement to differentiate pay of “direct” and “indirect” carers in residential aged care facilities.
“Up until now, the workforce was treated equally. But one of the requirements that has come out of changes to wages is certain people provide direct care and other people are indirect carers. That creates … a situation where you have to differentiate the wages that you give direct carers and indirect carers.”
Hassner said Uniting was “ecstatic about any increase in wages that pays carers, especially people that care for the elderly, more and [that recognises] the value of the work.”
“However, the way in which this manifests creates a real problem from a workforce and administration perspective for us,” she said.
Navigating award conditions, enterprise agreements and system complications already make payroll in Australia challenging, Hassner noted, and forthcoming regulations around wage theft are increasing the stakes.
Hassner said that the ability to prevent underpayment of staff required close integration between payroll and rostering systems.
Yet, she said that the number of “manual integrations” to reconcile data between the two systems meant it would be “close to impossible” to meet the new rules – without the two functions sitting on the one platform.
Hassner recounted a reconciliation exercise that Uniting had already performed to ensure it wasn’t underpaying staff.
“We went through a process over three months with a spreadsheet that had 66,000 lines of payroll data to make sure that between the two systems we have pay accuracy,” she said.
“That made it really clear to us that we have to have a platform that looks between pay and rostering.”
She added that manual reconciliation, as an ongoing activity, is “not a good way to spend time”.
“We really do want to spend more time on servicing our customers and our frontline teams, and less on bureaucracy and administration.”
Ry Crozier attended Dayforce’s Daybreak conference in Sydney as a guest of Dayforce.