Shamrock Foods

Could you give us an overview of your HR activities at the organization on a typical day? 

As the vice president of total rewards and HRIS, the team and I build vendor relationships, design and monitor benefit plans for associates and screen data for healthcare programs that can help reduce overall healthcare costs. Furthermore, we design, implement, and administer all HRIS systems, from payroll systems to compensation management, applicant tracking, and onboarding. Every day, our operations are active in terms of both systems and benefits. We manage vendors that handle outsourced services such as support for HR issues, and we ensure operations are consistent.

In that context, could you elaborate on some of the latest trends and challenges in your line of work, particularly in total rewards and HRIS? 

One of the persistent challenges that I have faced is implementing a fully integrated HRIS in an efficient manner. With the HCM platforms being expensive and low in functionalities, we never really adopted them. We were rather monitoring various emerging trends around sustainability and exploring ways to manage and sustain growth with multiple systems as opposed to an integrated HCM. However, over the past 5 years, we have been closely tracking several industry developments around HCM platforms to decide on the platform we would select—one that would help us accomplish the majority of the problems we were facing while integrating all the critical human resources data.

Also, like everyone else, being compliant with varying labor laws across all regions has been a longstanding market impediment for us. Taking the complexities out of this compliance maintenance space is something that we are currently focusing on. Last but not least, we have also been observing the trend of increased healthcare costs throughout the globe. Subsequently, analyzing a wide range of disease management data for several years has helped us determine the areas where disease management programs would be most effective with these associated costs. Accordingly, we have been implementing some of those programs for the last couple of years with a goal to mitigate the rising healthcare costs.

As previously stated, to streamline CM-related operations centralized resourcing strategy was adopted. Could you tell me about the solutions or structural changes to the workflow that you have implemented in that context?  

In 2021, we went live on a full HCM platform, from having over ten individual systems to one system that does everything. We implemented every module from the UKG Ultipro solution. The entire HRIS experience for employees is now on one platform, from start to finish. Moving into that platform has taken us two years of effort, but from an operational standpoint, it has made things much more efficient.  

Could you give us some insight into the improvements you unlocked, like before and after scenarios? 

Much progress has been made in data integration, eliminating the need to manage data interfaces among multiple partners. Reporting and analytics are streamlined as data is gathered from a single virtual source rather than gathering it from several sources and combining it to create a report or analytics. Our managers now access one system to accomplish everything for their employees, making it more efficient from an operational standpoint.

What conditions or checkboxes did you have in place while selecting the solution, and what advice would you give to other HR leaders in selecting the right solution for their organization?  

An essential need for us was payroll compliance. We obviously required someone providing a payroll engine capable of processing massive numbers of transactions in a brief period while also ensuring all tax compliance. The rest was the prospect of doing the same tasks as before, albeit differently. To ensure that the system we chose would meet all the requirements, each process, from hiring and onboarding candidates to terminating an employee, was examined.

"We design, implement, and administer all HRIS systems, from payroll systems to compensation management, applicant tracking, and onboarding"

In terms of analytics, two major check boxes we sought in a partner were one that used AI rather than merely talking about it and one that was advanced with more predictive and prescriptive thought rather than reactive reporting and analytics. Aside from that, another important requirement for us was the ease of use of the interface, a system that did not require formal training for all users to understand and operate.  

Could you comment on the pressure the pandemic brought to the HR team or your departments in general and how you aligned yourself accordingly? 

In general, the two factors that caused the most trouble were the tracking of various rules and regulations established for sick time, which increased manual labor, and the many 401(k) exceptions made during the pandemic, which became a management task that we were not prepared for. It was advantageous because considerable time could be spent while working remotely on software implementation.

Could you share any projects or initiatives that you are currently implementing to better your operations? 

For background checks and other hiring tools, a few partners who interact with our HCM slightly better than previous partners are being integrated. Now, a lot of time is spent building a slew of new analytics, dashboards, statistical analysis, and the like because more data is available in a more accessible tool.

Moving away from the technical to the managerial, based on your experience, what are some of the dos and don'ts in total rewards or HRIS that you would recommend to your peers? 

From a total rewards perspective and with a focus on benefits, the main advice I would give my peers would be to avoid being caught up in soft savings. Many wellness providers, for example, discuss the various financial benefits of having a great wellness program. If the math underpinning benefits and healthcare is not understood, it is easy to be caught up in some of these pitches. There is no effective way to measure a wellness program financially, and it is extremely difficult to tie it to financial savings.

How different programs contribute to lower overall healthcare costs should be examined. It is also vital to know that a wellness program does not guarantee dollar-for-dollar savings, and that is a significant discrepancy. HRIS must be kept simple because many complicated programs promise a variety of fancy things, and the more complicated it is, the more time is spent administering that system.  

What leadership principles do you use as a senior executive to influence your subordinates and colleagues and foster the organizational work culture?  

I emphasize focus within the team because losing focus reduces the quality of the task at hand. When the focus is lost, it takes a toll on efficiency, and this is a problem that everyone faces. Everyone tries to multitask and accomplish numerous things simultaneously, but no one is truly focused on a single activity and instead switches between them, never giving a task its full potential, which is easier said than done. 

Nevertheless, we always strive to promote a strong organizational culture, which is to treat our associates like family and business partners like friends. With associates, we always prioritize family, knowing that the happier they are at home, the happier they will be at work. Driving, retaining, and maintaining that culture is critical to the team's success, not only in terms of retention but also in terms of employee performance.