Advantage

About Advantage

Advantage is one of New Zealand’s most well-established IT providers, offering a wide range of IT support for businesses.

They understand that organisations have different and unique IT needs, and that’s why their service offering delivers real value to their customers. From help desk support to architecture and design, security risk minimisation, and incident response, the team at Advantage are dedicated to helping businesses with their IT support needs.

With such a personalised and valuable service offering, it’s no surprise that the team at Advantage is currently experiencing a period of rapid growth. But like with any period of growth, a whole new suite of challenges have presented themselves.

We spoke to Luele Driescher, Group General Manager at Advantage, to see how Employment Hero has helped transform their HR and payroll function as they continue to expand.

The challenge…

Manual payroll and HR processes

Luele and the team at Advantage were using manual HR and payroll processes that would take up valuable hours in their day. Not only was it time-consuming, it led to a lack of visibility for employees when it came to employment-related admin, such as applying for leave or checking leave balances.

“We used to run a separate payroll system that was well past its sell-by date. Payslips were emailed to staff a day after they were paid – there was no visibility prior to this. No one had any idea about leave balances and applying for leave was a manual Word document.”

Distributing and acknowledging workplace policies was also an admin-heavy process for the team at Advantage. They would manually distribute the policies to employees, get their signatures and file accordingly.

“Policies and procedures were manually distributed and signed – administration was an absolute nightmare.”

Luele knew that the team needed a more efficient and effective system to take the heavy-lifting out of their HR and payroll processes. After extensive research, they turned to Employment Hero HR and Payroll to help streamline and automate their workday.

Inconsistent hiring and onboarding

With the huge growth Advantage was experiencing, attracting, hiring and retaining the right people was top of the priority list. However, with a manual, admin-heavy hiring process, they were finding it hard to attract quality candidates in an already competitive market.

With no consistent hiring, onboarding and training process for their new hires, they found it began to negatively impact their retention strategy. They were looking for an HRIS that could help keep employees engaged, encourage career progression conversations and encourage employee feedback.

“Our employee feedback was irregular and 1:1 performance reviews did not really happen. All of these things impacted our growth as we struggled to attract and retain.”

They also wanted to reduce the amount of paper during onboarding and reduce the risk of documents being lost.

“Onboarding was paper driven, with papers often being misplaced. Contracts were not templated, which increased room for human error.”

Solutions…

A cloud-based, paper-free solution that saves hours on manual HR and payroll

With growth front and centre for the Advantage team, Luele knew that spending valuable hours in the day on admin-heavy tasks wasn’t a great use of time. With Employment Hero, she was able to get back to focusing on strategies to boost their ambitious growth plans.

Now there’s a centralised place where employees can manage their own personal information, apply for and access leave balances, view and acknowledge policies in a few minutes and access payslips – all from one cloud-based app.

A streamlined and efficient hiring and onboarding process that gives a great first impression

With Employment Hero, they can seamlessly connect to the recruitment platforms they use, and document the entire recruitment process. Hiring managers also now have the ability to track candidates, give feedback and keep the recruitment process organised and easily accessible to others in the hiring process.

“With Employment Hero, we seamlessly connect to the recruitment platforms we use and the entire recruitment process is captured. We can track which candidates we have feedback on and why we have rejected others.”

But it wasn’t just the hiring process that was streamlined for the Advantage team. Their onboarding process improved tenfold when they had the ability to add checklists for new starters, which included all essential documents and information. Not only does this give Luele peace of mind, but also gives their new hires the best possible onboarding experience so they can hit the ground running from day one.

“Our onboarding is checklist and task-driven, which ensures that new employees are made aware of all the necessary policies and procedures. They also have access to allocated training which can be easily managed.”

Another benefit for Luele and her team since implementing Employment Hero has been the ability to reduce the time to hire qualified employees – we all know how costly it can be to have roles sitting open!

A system that improves the entire employee experience

Prior to implementing Employment Hero, the 1:1 process and performance review process at Advantage was fragmented. The absence of structure around performance reviews and feedback impacted employee motivation and ultimately career development.

Having an end-to-end HR system in place makes all the difference when it comes to employee retention and happiness – and Luele could see the benefits for her team.

With the ability to schedule 1:1 meetings, performance reviews and happiness surveys, she’s seen employee engagement skyrocket and an overall boost to their workplace culture.

“Personal development is now formalised with 1:1s, and performance review meetings are documented. This helps the team see how their role aligns with the company’s strategy and how they can contribute.”

Employment Hero is helping businesses achieve their ambitious growth plans with streamlined HR and payroll processes

This case study was submitted under both the THRIVE and GROW categories in the 2022 Transformation Awards by Advantage.

The Transformation Awards was established to recognise the inspiring achievements of our customers from around the world. These annual awards are a great way to showcase and recognise the remarkable efforts of our customers, applauding businesses who’ve transformed their overall employee experience, scaled their business or increased community impact using Employment Hero.

Want to get involved in the 2023 Transformation Awards? Keep an eye out on upcoming editions of the customer newsletter for more or check out last year’s award categories here.

Advantage and Employment Hero – a perfect pair

We love hearing about the impact Employment Hero has made for Advantage. 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.