Employment Hero’s Swag unites the team at Eagle Bay Brewing Co

About Eagle Bay Brewing Co

Eagle Bay Brewing Co is a brewpub with a production brewery, restaurant, garden bar and vineyard, based in the beautiful Margaret River wine region. The company has been running since 2010 on a beloved family farm, using locally sourced ingredients to create a range of beers, wines and meals in the restaurant.

As more employees joined the company, the team started looking for additional support when it came to managing their people, payroll and recruitment. That’s where Employment Hero came in.

We were lucky enough to get an insider look at the difference Employment Hero has made after speaking to Adrian d’Espeissis, Director, and Keith Warrick, General Manager at Eagle Bay Brewing Co.

The challenge…

Having started from a small founding business and evolved into a fully-fledged operation over a decade, Eagle Bay’s HR and payroll processes were still a little behind the curve. The team had invested in technology to help, but it wasn’t serving them as it should.

Adrian describes, “in the early days, we used paper timesheets and manual entering, but it meant we had five systems to do what Employment Hero does.”

Managing all their people operations across a number of platforms was taking precious time away that business leaders rarely have. It meant that a lot of effort and time was needed for tasks that could be automated, like manually putting in data with every pay run, and fiddly onboarding processes for new team members.

Additionally, managing the team had been easy when everyone was based in the same place, but the team had grown to include remote employees and sales reps who regularly travelled for their role. It was becoming harder to facilitate strong communication and make sure everyone was on the same page.

The solution…

Enter Employment Hero. Eagle Bay Brewing Co joined the Employment Hero community back in 2022, signing up to both HR and payroll features to support the team. As Adrian puts it, he was able to store everything employment in one easy place – the platform could be “a one-stop shop”.

That’s not all – Eagle Bay Brewing Co has seen loads more benefits, beyond hosting employee information in a centralised space.

A culture of strong communication

A successful business needs a great culture, where their team feels empowered to be themselves at work and rewarded for work well done. Communication is also key – feeling ‘out of the loop’ can quickly diminish employee engagement.

For the team at Eagle Bay Brewing Co, the ‘Company Feed’ feature, which can be viewed in Employment Hero and on mobile through Employment Hero’s Swag superapp, proved to be the key to unlocking a whole new channel of communication.

“What Swag brings for us is simplicity and communication,”  Keith says. “We can communicate with a large team through the Company Feed, ensuring that everybody is aware of new developments across the business. That includes team members working remotely in Perth, as well as our sales team who are remotely located. So to streamline that was really powerful.”

The Company Feed isn’t just useful for communicating big company developments – any employees across the business can post ‘shout-outs’, recognising their teammates for fantastic work. It was certainly useful for Eagle Bay – as Keith points out:

“I think the greatest benefit of the Swag app has been the team engagement – it’s become ingrained in the DNA of the way they communicate. They can acknowledge one another and feel part of our values-based culture.” 

Supporting and building the team

For managers and HR leaders in the Eagle Bay team, Employment Hero has everything they need. The numerous features when it comes to recruitment means that growing their team is easier than ever, with key processes like onboarding completely digitised.

“From advertising for positions vacant through to recruitment and onboarding, we’ve got such a diverse team that every aspect of Employment Hero is being utilised all the time,” Keith says.

There’s no more multiple logins for various digital solutions. Instead, the relevant people have everything they need to manage people, performance and much more. According to Keith, “it’s really put into one place all of the tools that we use all of the time, as far as our people and our culture are concerned.”

Easily managed rosters and timesheets

At a busy organisation like Eagle Bay Brewing Co, being across timesheets and rostering can be a headache. For the Eagle Bay team, while they had a home venue, they also had employees elsewhere, with lots of different shifts to manage. According to Adrian, that’s where Employment Hero’s rostering and timesheets features came in.

“The rostering and timesheet side of things is really handy. People can clock-in and clock-out on the phone, if they’re out on the road, or through a tablet in our home venue, depending on where their role is.”

Our payroll software is then designed to take that employee-submitted information and translate it into timesheets that can be quickly reviewed. Best of all, all that information is funnelled into our single touch payroll system, so payruns are completed quickly and accurately.

Transformative software, supporting Aussie businesses

For Adrian, he’s satisfied that all his responsibilities as an employer are being met – and is loving having time for the important stuff.

“Employment Hero has definitely taken a load off because all aspects of employment are there and it’s being done properly. That’s given us more time to focus on the business and grow the business – and it’s still growing after 13 years.”

We love hearing about the impact Employment Hero has made for Eagle Bay Brewing Co. If you’d like to learn more about how Employment Hero can support your team and transform your HR processes, speak to one of our business specialists today.

If you’d like to see how much time and money you can save with Employment Hero, take a look at our return on investment (ROI) report. 

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