A Credit Union Says Goodbye to Paperwork with BambooHR® Time Tracking and Offboarding
After 21 years as the director of HR for a large oil company, Karen Mitchener decided to retire. But that didn’t last long. “It’s not all it’s cracked up to be,” she says, and so, when an opportunity arrived to take on the role of VP of Human Resources at Via Credit Union, a local credit union, she jumped on it. But Karen wasn’t jumping back into quite the same rodeo. She was leaving behind the robust technology and software at her last job and diving into a mountain of paperwork.
Tackling the Paper Mountain
“We are in the 21st century, but we were not in the 21st century there…. Everything was paper…I had a mile high stack of documents to sign when I came in.” Because Karen was already an HR expert, she knew this wouldn’t do. “It was a waste of my time, and it was a waste of other people’s time,” says Karen. So she decided to bring Via Credit Union up to date and enlisted BambooHR to help tackle the paper mountain in front of her.
Luckily, introducing BambooHR to the organization was an easy task. “[BambooHR] was the easiest implementation I have ever done. It was the most user-friendly and the least confusing product that I have ever used throughout my entire HR career,” says Karen.
Getting rid of the avalanche of papers was just the start. Karen has used BambooHR to help make improvements all over the company, especially in time tracking, onboarding, and offboarding.
Giving Employees Ownership of Their Time
“We rolled out [BambooHR®] Time Tracking in early November, and I cannot begin to tell you how much more efficient and streamlined it was and how [many] errors were reduced,” Karen shares. Via Credit’s previous time clock was a home-grown punch system that required employees to log in to multiple systems and softwares. “It was not efficient, and employees were never able to tell what their time-off balances were, so they were always making phone calls asking, ‘When did I take a day off?’ or ‘Did I take that day off?’” It was not only confusing and cumbersome for employees, but it also put extra weight on managers and HR to be constantly checking and relaying time-off information to employees.
“[With BambooHR],” Karen continues, “they can see what’s going on without asking their supervisor or HR to calculate their time off balance.” With pride, she adds, “It has given employees ownership of their time off, and it allows them to see what their balances are as they’re requesting time off.” That means fewer people calling to have Karen look up their information, and the end result is employees who are able to plan out their time off easily and independently.
Improving First and Last Days
Before BambooHR, Via Credit Union would onboard employees by sending around a Word document that had to be filled in, printed off, and then passed from department to department in order to add IDs, emails, teller logins, and anything else an employee needs to have on their first day. “If somebody was on vacation, [the form] sat on their desk and didn’t get to anybody else. [You] can’t have those kinds of missteps on somebody’s first day of employment,” says Karen.
Knowing how critical first and last days are to both employees and the company, Karen didn’t hesitate to employ those features in BambooHR. “Onboarding and offboarding were some of the pieces that I quickly, quickly added,” she says, “because I knew I could blast information out there and everybody that needed a piece of that information would have it. We would have our act together, and we would be prepared for new employees.”
Security and keeping data safe is essential at a financial institution, so when someone gets offboarded, passing around a paper that may get lost on someone’s desk wasn’t cutting it. “It’s extremely important for us to deactivate teller IDs and those types of things on the list at the conclusion of the last day of employment,” says Karen. “Everybody gets that notice and everything can quickly be deactivated. [BambooHR] has completely changed the efficiency of being prepared and making sure everybody has received notice.” Plus, Karen can easily track if somebody doesn’t have something deactivated, and all it takes is a quick followup instead of a hunt for a lost piece of paper. “It provides greater security for us.”
With BambooHR by her side, Karen has rocketed Via Credit Union to the 21st century and made things not only easier for her but for everyone at the organization as well. She’s happier, Via Credit Union’s employees are happier, and the whole operation runs a little more smoothly.
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As head of marketing at BambooHR, Amy focuses on creating compelling marketing experiences with the product, people, and brand together. Amy joined BambooHR in April 2020, bringing with her almost 20 years of marketing and leadership experience at several companies including Smartsheet, Microsoft, HPE, and Vulcan.
