Southern Cross Health Insurance had a strategic priority for simplification across its business. In particular, HR was a complex area the organization was looking to improve, after decades of cobbling together bespoke pieces of software that didn’t talk to each other.
Getting a handle on workforce data to support planning and decision making were key priorities. With separate recruitment, payroll, learning, and performance management systems — and manual spreadsheets for processes like remuneration reviews — even simple reporting created a heavy administrative load. Leaders were not able to easily access the information they needed to manage their teams effectively.
During the pandemic, Workday was key to us continuing business as usual without disruption. The move to working remotely was seamless.
Chief People & Strategy Officer
Ease of implementation and integration, strong security and support.
According to Vicki Caisley, Chief People & Strategy Officer, Southern Cross Health Insurance chose Workday for its ease of configuration, implementation and integration, ongoing support, security, and operating and implementation costs. Locally located support people and data were also important.
“We were looking for something that was a one-stop-HR-shop — a full end-to-end solution. We also needed an application suite that would integrate easily with our existing payroll system, which is run by an external provider. We did customer validations and had our own security and digital team on the selection panel. We could see that Workday’s self-service, data and analytics, and dashboard features would be incredibly useful to help us run our workforce.”
Highly efficient and effective HR team.
Head of People and Culture, Fleur Elliot says Workday has dramatically reduced the amount of time the HR team spends on admin. “Just thinking about my team, there’s a whole pile of reports we don’t see any more. All of the reports that used to be run manually for Finance and IT — they’re just happening magically in the background now. Plus, we have very little involvement with payroll now. It’s saved us hours and hours.”
“Workday has also made a huge difference to learning and development. It’s now easy to capture who has completed compliance modules. All of our onboarding learning is automatic. People can even work through the modules on their phone as they commute. For us, it’s become a set and forget process, rather than having to continually chase everyone up.”
Data and analytics empower leadership decisions.
Offering a single source of truth in real time, Workday’s data and analytics is producing the kind of insights leaders need to make decisions that lead to better outcomes. “Dashboard reporting is proving hugely beneficial,” explains Vicki.
“For example, with COVID-19, our annual leave use slowed down and our accruals started to increase, so we were facing year end with 2-3 times our normal leave accrual on the balance sheet. Because of Workday, we’ve been able to quickly and easily manage that issue, working with leaders to get people to plan and book leave. We could monitor in real time how many hours of leave we’d have at the end of year. Previously, getting just one leave accrual report would have taken up to six hours with multiple people involved. Today, I can get that information any time I want, at the push of a button.”
Workforce visibility supports operating model agility.
As Southern Cross Health Insurance continues to innovate, it makes regular changes to its operating model. “Before Workday, we were manually updating organization charts and didn’t have a real time version of our structure,” says Vicki.
But last year, when we reorganized our business model, Workday put all that information at the HR team’s fingertips. “In a pretty short space of time, we had a full view of our vacancies and filled them rapidly using Workday for recruiting and onboarding. With previous changes, I can remember working late into the evening pouring over organization charts and trying to cross reference employees to make sure we’d captured everyone. With Workday, those days are over.”