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Lutheran Life Communities Adds the Human Touch to Talent Management
By implementing Halogen eAppraisal Healthcare, Lutheran Life Communities in Illinois has been able to create an employee performance and talent management system that reflects the organization's focus on the human side of things and building strong relationships.
Illinois-based Lutheran Life Communities delivers respected and innovative care to hundreds of thousands of individuals. The organization has implemented Halogen Performance™ Healthcare for over 1000 of its
1500 (and growing) employees across four sites, plus two sites currently being implemented in August/September of this year respectively. Since deploying the Web-based system, Lutheran Life Communities has been able to:
- Deliver time savings for managers and ensure HR can focus on strategic HR programs;
- Ensure every employee has an appraisal and drive consistency in how performance is assessed across multiple facilities; and
- Create an employee performance and talent management system that reflects the organization's focus on the human side of things and building strong relationships.
Customer profile
Not-for-profit, Illinois-based Lutheran Life Communities delivers respected and innovative care to hundreds of thousands of individuals. With six locations, Lutheran Life Communities provides a variety of services including residential care, adult day programs, in-home services, childcare and pastoral care. The organization has grown steadily over the years through partnerships with existing older adult care providers and new community development.
Challenge
As a rapidly growing extended care provider, Lutheran Life Communities struggled with managing employee performance reviews and, overall talent management processes, using a paper-based system. Like many organizations, their human resources team used a tedious Excel-based system for employee performance assessments. This involved a massive amount of manual work for the HR team, yet provided no way to efficiently consolidate and report on the data after any given process.
"We had a number of different types of evaluations, which resulted in a lot of paperwork for our team," said Susan Clapper, Human Resources Consultant, Lutheran Life Communities. "I would spend multiple days each month tracking down documents, sending out reminders and sorting information by department. The whole thing was becoming more unwieldy as we added new sites and employees to the mix."
Lutheran Life Communities is dedicated to creating a caring environment, but the existing paper-based process trapped managers in administration, taking time away from relationship-building conversations about performance with employees. Renee Deevey, VP Corporate Services challenged Clapper to research a way to modernize the system in order to keep pace with the organization's growth and to be able to focus on delivering strategic talent management programs.
Solution
With the goal of automating the way they managed and reviewed employee performance in mind, Clapper began to research her options. Initially, seven companies with employee performance management offerings were viewed, and then refined to a short list of three, one of which was Halogen Software. From there, a broader team developed a comparison model to determine which system best met their requirements.
"Working with a cross-functional team, we assessed the final three vendors in a number of areas, including ease of use and the solution's ability to scale with our needs as a growing health care organization," explained Clapper. "Ultimately, we selected Halogen based on these factors and the company's proven track record in working with organizations such as ours."
Lutheran's assessment team saw additional value in Halogen's flexible deployment options, and the organization opted for an on-premise implementation of Halogen Performance Healthcare. "We have six locations, so it was important that I was able to train individuals at each site to become the go-to-expert on the solution, who could then work with employees and managers on a day-to-day basis. The Halogen system is very easy to use, and we've been able to quickly get multiple people up-to-speed on the administration end of things," said Clapper.
In going through the sales, implementation and training process, Clapper and her team worked closely with Halogen. "In getting everything up and running, Halogen was a true partner and nearly two years later, they continue to deliver that same level of support. Everyone from sales to the help desk has been wonderful," exclaimed Clapper.
Benefits
Lutheran Life Communities continues to roll the system out to the remainder of its employees across its six sites, providing the organization with consistency and time savings, and creating a culture where employees are thinking about their performance and personal development on a daily basis.
One of the biggest tangible improvements in moving to Halogen Performance Healthcare has been how much time managers are saving when it comes to executing appraisals. "Our managers have really embraced the system since it ultimately makes their lives easier," said Clapper. "For HR, we are using our time much more efficiently and are able to focus less on tedious administration, and more on smarter, more strategic employee performance and talent management issues."
Lutheran Life Communities has been able to create appraisal and process consistency across all sites where it didn't exist previously. "Now, every single employee receives an appraisal, even our on-call employees, regardless of location. The end result is that everyone is getting more feedback on a consistent basis. This positions us as an organization that can connect employees to our long-term vision," explained Clapper.
For Clapper, one of the greatest successes has been creating an employee performance management process that mirrors the organization's mandate and working environment. "Lutheran Life Communities is a special environment that focuses closely on the human side of things, and is very much a family. We now have an approach to employee performance management that is a fit with our values and enables everyone to focus on relationships between employees and most importantly with our residents and their families."
