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How important is it to hear from your peers when considering making a change to your HR system of record?

If you’ve grown tired of accepting that your manual processes and finance-driven systems just can’t handle HR in the way your district needs, then you don’t want to miss what two of our panelists from a live client information session have to say. Hear how they gained buy-in across their district to finally make a change and increased efficiency and transparency across building leaders and how their roles have changed.

How did you gain buy-in across your district? 

How has this helped internally with efficiency & transparency to principals and employees? 

How has your role in the district changed now that you have this HR system of record? 

How did you gain buy-in across your district?

Jump to Video #2

Darin Lancaster

Business Administrator – Carbon School District

The HRMS system fit in with our internal processes for hiring — from when a principal or hiring manager requested a position through that entire hiring process. We were initially looking for a benefits management system.

For us, it wasn’t a very difficult sell to our administrative team. We have a Superintendent who at his previous job was an HR director. It was a neighboring district and they used very similar systems to what we had – and so he came knowing the weaknesses of those systems. And when I showed him what Frontline had offered, he said “That’s exactly what I wish I had before I came here… That’s exactly what we need!”

So internally, we were all onboard from the very beginning because we saw how valuable it was to have one company that could interface with all of these different needs that we identified.

We also wanted to focus on the less visible cost of our inefficiencies and the loss of time and effort of our employees as a result of not having a good system. Considering those two things combined, our school board became very supportive of us going forward.

AnJie Doll

HR Director – Spring Grove Area School District

Before I got here, the district had implemented [Frontline’s] Absence Management. And when I got here, there were challenges in the recruiting process, and so [Frontline] Recruiting & Hiring was the first system we embarked on and then shortly thereafter, [Frontline’s] Time & Attendance – because we still had paper timecards here! So, there was an interest in making that shift internally, and certainly in the recruiting process.

The joke was that there was this stack of folders that traveled around all the elementary principals to review the applicants, or they all had to come to one place to review them.

So, as we looked at the system that we were using for other HR processes, it was much more an accounting system and we had some challenges with that in reporting, in lack of information because it’s an accounting system … it’s not an HR system.

How has this helped internally with efficiency & transparency to principals and employees?

Jump to Video #3

AnJie Doll

HR Director – Spring Grove Area School District

When I got here 5 years ago, everybody came into our office, and it was our job to take care of things for them. We spent a lot of time shifting the resources into their hands to allow them to really take ownership of their data, their information, their absences.

Darin Lancaster

Business Administrator – Carbon School District

We have an accounting system, and it’s functional for those in our business office who utilize it regularly. We know how to run it. We know how to extract information. But outside of our business office – our principals, department heads, and administrators – they couldn’t extract any useful information out of our system that we had.

And so, we would get all of the calls, “Can you run this report for us?” “Can you get this information for us?” Right away, we were thrilled about the ability of principals to access from the HRMS system all of the information that they normally call us about: their positions and their employees.

We really didn’t have an “HR solution.” Our accounting system tried to dabble in those areas, but it just wasn’t really polished. So that opened up a whole new realm of information that our people could access. As a result, we’re answering fewer questions, [the principals & site-leaders] are more up-to-date on their information, and our records are more up-to-date because they can finally see who’s at their building, what position they’re assigned to, and the information they can access.

You don’t need a report if you can just open the window and see what you’re looking for. So we’re running far fewer reports and distributing them to our people.

How has your role in the district changed now that you have this HR system of record?

Jump to Video #4

Darin Lancaster

Business Administrator – Carbon School District

For me personally, the changes that I’ve been most excited about deal more with processes. Our principals and managers mean well, but they skipped steps. Whether intentionally or not, with the paper processes that we had before, you could start on step three and skip steps one and two, and nothing was there to flag that.

So now you can’t jump to step 3 without first completing steps 1 and 2. It’s helping us. We see it really tightening up our adherence and compliance to the processes we want our people to follow.

AnJie Doll

HR Director – Spring Grove Area School District

One of the key changes has been that we have actually had some transition in leadership. Historically, people have been here a long time, so the principal knows who all their people are. But when you have that person retire or that department head move to another role or hire someone new, if they’re internal they may know some of the people – but they don’t know all of the parts and pieces.

With the Position Management system in [Frontline] HRMS, when someone exits a position and when you put the new person in to the position they belong in, they instantaneously have access to all of the information they need – by the position not the person! So, we didn’t have to make five different updates in five different systems to get them what they needed. They had access to information at their fingertips of the roster in their building or in their department.