As one of the world’s most successful asset management and insurance companies, Sun Life helps its clients achieve lifetime financial security and live healthier lives. Routinely recognized as a top employer, Sun Life also focuses on the well-being of its employees so they can, in turn, continue to provide exceptional service for Sun Life clients. Creating innovative and custom-built apps with Workday Extend has made that possible.
Recent examples include an app that streamlines the sabbatical process—a clear sign that the company cares about employee benefits. Another app lets the staff choose colleagues to buddy up with in case of an evacuation. (That was prompted by the worst wildfire season in Canada’s recorded history.)
“A lot of the apps we develop are focused on the employee experience,” says Eric Chung, director of HR systems management. “We build seamless experiences that help our employees save time and remove friction.”
Building upon years’ worth of experience using Workday Extend, Sun Life keeps pushing the boundaries of custom app creation and development to meet the company’s rapid growth and evolving business needs of its clients. Sun Life’s app development framework is based on its SPACE formula for success:
- Size of impact
- Proximity to users and data
- Alignment to road maps
- Complexity versus critically
- Engagement with stakeholders
Sun Life requires about 1,000 employees in specific roles to regularly update a personal history form to meet insurance industry legal and regulatory rules.
Before, employees had to manually complete the form and email it for manager review and approval. “They were manually tracked before, which took a lot of time and effort,” says Samantha Ruscica, manager for HR systems management at Sun Life.
Now, these employees have a new, streamlined process using Sun Life’s personal history certification app. After logging in to their dashboard, they receive a confidential attestation form with expiry and reminders to complete. Alerts are automatically sent to employees who still need to complete their attestation or need to begin the process. “There is some uptake or upkeep we do annually, but otherwise it’s self-sufficient, which is lovely,” Ruscica says. “Automating has saved time and resources.”
An outbreak of wildfires in Canada prompted Sun Life to reevaluate the employee safety process. For its new process, Sun Life used Workday Extend to create an assisted evacuation app. Employees use the app to request assisted evacuation buddies; the requests are then sent to a manager for approval, then a safety partner, and then each designated buddy to confirm. Each quarter, employees use the app to attest to whether anything has changed, such as their location.
“Previously, this was all done manually via PDF forms that were emailed and took two weeks,” Ruscica says. “With the app, we can finish in four days or fewer.”
We are so incredibly grateful that our safety procedures are now automated.
Manager for HR Systems Management
Company leaders needed an efficient and accurate way to manage their merit and long-term incentives budget during mergers and acquisitions.
One recent example was the addition of more than 1,500 employees following an M&A, which meant Sun Life needed to integrate its benefits into the budget and system. “Some managers oversaw acquisition employees and workers hired the traditional way,” Ruscica says. “Because of this, manually creating spreadsheets wasn’t practical because of the potential for errors.”
Instead, managers are using an M&A app Sun Life developed that accurately identifies who is eligible for merit raises and incentives and when. Managers now have a bird’s-eye view of employees who came from M&A versus other new hires. After logging in to the app, managers can quickly see these colleagues’ titles, job levels, ratings, pay scale, and location.
“We were able to create a [long-term incentives] and merit app where we could load particular employees’ ratings and their proposed targets, and managers could go in and make those decisions and submit for the next-level approval, similar to what a merit cycle would be,” Ruscica says. “We saved so much time compared to doing it manually. The app kind of saved the day for us.”
This was very exciting because the M&A app gives managers who are new to Sun Life a great experience from the start.
Manager for HR Systems Management
Sun Life encourages employees to take three- to six-week sabbaticals to help them feel refreshed, happier, and more productive. But complex eligibility rules that vary by region, not to mention a time-consuming, manual process of back-and-forth emails and PDF attachments, contributed to a 50% error rate.
Sun Life’s custom sabbatical app now uses eligibility data that managers trust, digitizes the request process so it’s automated, and makes the whole benefit program error-free. Employees log in to view a custom card on their home screens that shows if they’re eligible to take a sabbatical in any given year. “We saved at least 40 hours just from getting rid of errors,” says Ruscica, adding, “What’s cool about the app and its built-in date options is it automatically calculates end dates and will check start dates to ensure they do not overlap.”
Sun Life is always looking for ways to create more innovative apps, which is why leaders also take advantage of regular updates, adjustments, or enhancements to Workday Extend features.
“Every year, there’s something new that comes out,” Ruscica says. “As the platform grows, our apps grow. I love that aspect of it.”
Related Content