Webinar: Nail your employment processes with Commonwealth’s isolved People Cloud

This session was recorded on June 29, 2021.

Presentation Deck

 

isolved People Cloud

Employees are the heart and soul of a company, and what they expect from their employers is continually evolving. HR and payroll professionals, like other business leaders, are taking on a more strategic role—if they can manage to step away from routine workforce and benefits administration responsibilities. To help create a top-notch employee experience while allowing leadership to keep their focus on strategy, Commonwealth Payroll & HR expertly serves its client’s employees using isolved People Cloud.

Since becoming one of isolved’s earliest certified network partners in 2010, Commonwealth Payroll & HR has solved numerous employee transactional challenges for our clients. In the meantime, we’ve turned grizzled payroll & HR leaders into adopters of friendly and evolutionary workplace technology that allows a comprehensive and convenient focus on the full employee lifecycle and made them more efficient in the process.

Join Jeff Plakans, Founder and President of Commonwealth Payroll & HR, as he describes the impact that isolved People Cloud has had on Commonwealth’s clients and offers a deep dive into some of the more exciting and transformational features of the solution. In additon, Jill Pesce, Solution Consultant at isolved will offer her expertise showcasing how this one-touch solution can be uniquely tailored to manage your employees needs.

isolved People Cloud

Webinar Transcript:

Jeff Plakans (00:04):

Welcome, everyone, to today’s webinar entitled, Nail Your Employment Processes with Commonwealth’s isolved People Cloud. Today, we’re going to focus on the challenges that employers face in putting employment processes in place, keeping them consistent, and addressing the changes in compliance and adaptability required by the ever-changing landscape we exist in simply by being an employer. Today, we’re going to be joined by Jillian Pesce. Jill, would you mind saying hello?

Jillian Pesce (00:37):

Hi, everyone. Good afternoon.

Jeff Plakans (00:39):

Now, Jill is one of the top solutions consultants at isolved Commonwealth’s key technology partner in delivering our employer solutions. Jill is going to talk a bit about isolved People Cloud itself and then give everyone a peek into its full and broad capability. We are going to be recording this session, so all registrants, attending or not, are going to get a link to today’s session. So, let’s get started.

Jeff Plakans (01:09):

What does it mean to be an employer? Sounds simple, right? Well, I bet that if you asked 100 business owners or operators what it meant to be an employer, you’d get almost 100 different answers. That’s because everyone’s experience is different and it’s based on many things such as the size of your company, what industry you’re in, whether your employees are considered white collar, blue collar, or gray collar, could be anything. Could also change based on what state you’re in, whether or not your employees were actually W2 employees or independent contractors. Although for today’s discussion, we’re going to stick to the pure W2 definition of employees.

Jeff Plakans (01:52):

The independent contractor question is a whole another webinar that we’re not going to get into today. If you’re in a services business, chances are your payroll is going to be closely tied to how you serve your customers. But if you manufacture widgets, being an employer might mean something completely different. Most of all, the answer will change based on your perspective. Are you an employee or are you an employer? If you are an employer, being asked what it meant to be an employer, you would likely answer with the word compliance, or making sure you were not doing anything illegal with regards to how you pay your employees.

Jeff Plakans (02:36):

This could include making sure you’re staying on top of minimum wage or tracking hours so you were paying overtime when it’s due. In some states, it could mean complying with pay equity provisions. But you might also answer in terms of controlling your payroll costs or being focused on what return on investment your bottom line payroll might bring. Before COVID, and now more recently, the labor market has tightened up considerably. This is due to COVID programs keeping people home, but it’s based on the fact that the economy is finally lifting out of the funk created by the pandemic and that’s making it seem safer for employees to explore their alternatives.

Jeff Plakans (03:18):

So, to many employers, finding ways to engage and retain employees is suddenly important and relevant again. Now, if you’re an employee, you might think being an employer means making sure that there’s a career progression for you at your company. You may also see it critical for your employer to make sure you get regular performance reviews and are keeping up with the compensation curve. Then of course, we come to the legislative definition of what it means to be an employer. Now, there are at least 50 different definitions of this. But for simplicity today, we’re going to go to stick to the definition of employer under the Fair Labor Standards Act.

Jeff Plakans (04:04):

Employer includes any person acting directly or indirectly in the interest of an employer in relation to an employee and includes a public agency, but does not include any labor organization other than when acting as an employer or anyone acting in the capacity of officer or agent of such labor organization. That’s pretty much everyone on this call and everyone we ever deal with here at Commonwealth. So clearly, our mandate is broad and the details and expectations behind it many, and our definition of employer as clear as mud. So where does that leave us as employers?

Jeff Plakans (04:49):

Well, we need to figure out ways to meet our requirements, we need to stay informed, and we need to put processes in place to communicate and interact with our employees on all fronts. So, not much. Back around 2000, we started to see some shifts in the way employers were addressing these challenges. There had always been payroll companies, and that’s where I started my own career. Payroll by nature is transactional. You tell me how many hours to pay your employee, and I, with the help of my computers, will help calculate the paycheck and tell you what taxes you owe.

Jeff Plakans (05:29):

But some payroll companies started paying the taxes for you, and once that flood gate got opened, employers began to assume or to realize that they could rely on the payroll companies for a whole lot more. There were some other factors such as greater internet bandwidth and its availability to the business community and rapidly shifting legislation to accommodate the dot-coms. All of a sudden, simply calculating paycheck was just not enough. Enter the term human capital management, or HCM for short. I always laugh when I hear this. Lots of companies have now put these letters in their name.

Jeff Plakans (06:13):

The problem is, no employer or employee outside of the payroll industry knows what it stands for. But we’re going to spend a little bit of time on it today because it’s going to be good to have a nice label to put on things, so I’ll explain here. When we talk about human capital management, we’re really only talking about a tool used in the process of being an employer. Think of all the components that we’ve mentioned already; time tracking payroll, processing, HR benefits. Now envision them all under one simple, web-based application that is customized exactly for how you and your employees need it.

Jeff Plakans (06:56):

Nothing extra, nothing beyond your needs, but scalable when you need it to be. Now, if HCM is done right, we are using that to automate employment processes that were previously manual. As you can see from this list here on the slide, if we’ve done that, we’ve made life easier for the employer, and we’ve probably made them more efficient along the way. But there’s much more driving the demand for an HCM solution and it’s defined by how our workforce is changing. Everyone knows we have at least four generations working alongside one another, but what does that mean to you as an employer?

Jeff Plakans (07:37):

It means you need to consider the motivations and the requirements of your team members. So, when we look at your employees, we see that it’s critical that we follow the rules in any jurisdiction that we have employees in. We hear too often from employers that, “I don’t know what I don’t know,” and that there’s so much truth to that. What can you do to deploy processes that force compliance? In an HCM system, that’s what you have as a possibility. You also have employees that demand empowerment. In other words, to be able to do things themselves without having to ask the HR team to do it for them and to do it whenever they want.

Jeff Plakans (08:21):

Over the last few years, we’ve seen a demand not just for employee self-service, but to be able to use their tools no matter whether that be on a computer, on a mobile phone, or on a tablet. With COVID, remote work was proven that it’s not just good policy, but now a permanent part of the landscape. Employers need to be ready to address the needs of a distributed workforce quickly and efficiently. So, now we realize that our old payroll solution isn’t going to cut it and that we’re looking for something that will specifically meet our needs no matter whether a company size is 10 employees, 100 employees, or 1,000 employees.

Jeff Plakans (09:04):

For some companies, this isn’t just an option anymore, it’s a need. For this purpose, Commonwealth has partnered with isolved in the use of their People Cloud solution. Isolved spends a tremendous amount of blood and treasure to perfect its People Cloud solution, keep it up to date, and ensuring that it’s relevant. What we love about our relationship with isolved is that they allow us to focus on the other critical component in delivering a great and memorable experience to our customers, and that is building a service organization that is there to support you in your use of the application whenever you need it.

Jeff Plakans (09:47):

Isolved distributed solution across about 140 certified network partners across the US, and we at Commonwealth are one of the most senior having deployed the solution to our clients since 2010. Now, the role of humans resources is changing. Positive employee experiences are increasingly important as they can impact productivity and customer experiences. And employers are taking a more strategic approach to human resource management, but HR leaders need more flexible tools to help them adapt to this new normal that we just spoke of and better guide their strategic decisions.

Jeff Plakans (10:29):

So, isolved People Cloud delivers employee experience by design with a consumer-grade user interface that we’re going to see in a minute that is simple to navigate, intuitive to use, and performance ready on any device. People Cloud delivers by ensuring a configurable path to easier manage your employment processes. This is done by allowing you three steps of employ, enable, and empowering your team. With People Cloud, the first and foremost obvious step is to employ. We attract, we recruit, and sign on the most talented individuals while helping newly hired employees become productive quickly by eliminating paperwork and redundancies from their onboarding process.

Jeff Plakans (11:16):

We can also easily manage the employee life cycle, securely store and share data, ensure organization-wide compliance and handle disciplinary action while processing payroll efficiently, accurately, and completely. The next, we’re going to enable. When you enable with People Cloud, you can accurately track, manage, and process time, attendance, and expenses for your entire workforce, even remote or mobile employees, while offering effortless online benefits enrollment and streamlined services that save time and money. Finally, we’re going to need to empower our employees.

Jeff Plakans (12:03):

Empowering employees means keeping them connected, sharing ideas, seeking feedback, and collaborating while improving productivity and boosting performance by developing top talent and rewarding their innovation and their success. So, theoretically, this is all great, but of course, a picture is worth 1,000 words. So I’m now going to help you see how we employ, enable, and empower our employers with our People Cloud solution. That leads me to Jillian. Jillian is going to give us a presentation, and let me just give her the control of the screen so she can share our screen. Alrighty, Jill, it’s all you.

Jillian Pesce (12:56):

Okay. Thank you, Jeff. Can you see my screen that says, “Good afternoon, Brent?” Jeff, can you see that?

Jeff Plakans (13:13):

Give me one second. No, not yet.

Jillian Pesce (13:21):

Okay. One second.

Jeff Plakans (13:30):

There we go. Perfect.

Jillian Pesce (13:31):

Yeah. All set.

Jeff Plakans (13:32):

All set.

Jillian Pesce (13:33):

Okay, perfect. We’re going to walk through the solution. I will show you the various components that it can do and how it all seamlessly works together. I just want to mention a few points before we get into this. There’s a lot this system can do. It’s designed to your needs to be as simple or as robust as you need it to be. It’s highly, highly configurable. You’re going to hear me say that a lot. You’re going to hear me say, “You decide what these fields represent. We never purge any data.” The important thing to know is this solution is not a box where you have to fit the way you fit in to how it works and change the way your day-to-day works.

Jillian Pesce (14:20):

The system is rules and rules based, so we’re going to write the rules so the system works the way you need it to and the way your everyday business runs. So it’s, again, highly, highly configurable, you decide who has what level of access to certain pages in order to do their jobs. You’re going to decide that on levels; supervisors, managers, and also individuals. Just keep that in mind as we go. Again, another thing, and you’ll probably hear me say it a lot, we don’t purge any of the data. That would be up to you, so you can always reference things from years past.

Jillian Pesce (14:58):

Without further ado, what you’re looking at right here is an employee experience. Again, you’re going to design with this looks like. But this is adaptive technology where you would be able to have this accessibility to all the functionality on whatever device you have in your hand as Jeff mentioned earlier. It’s going to conform to the size of iPad or phone or tablet, whatever you have in your hands, laptop, desktop, computer, and you’ll have full functionality. The best part is it’s not an app, so when your iPhone is making updates or those certain updates happen, it’s not going to impact the way this works.

Jillian Pesce (15:37):

But before we get here, before we’re an employee, we need to begin recruiting. We can do this through the attract and hire component. We have this career page which is branded out to match your corporate identity. It has your logo, it has your colors in the background. This can be directly on your website or we can provide a link on your website bringing people to this page. They would see all the open positions, they would select what they’re interested in. And you decide what this says, what you want to disclose about this position, and if they’re interested, they can apply.

Jillian Pesce (16:12):

This is an example of a short application. It’s mobile optimized and completely configurable. So my list may not match your list, which is fine. You can do things like have initial jobs screening questions, we can upload their resumes, we can track how people are finding out about the position with various job boards and sources. You’ll see we love wizard-driven formats here. They really simplify the process and they do minimize errors. So we always do see if this ended the wizard page, the submit screen, it’s doing error checking for us.

Jillian Pesce (16:47):

It’s letting us know we missed this area. So I want to have check marks all the way down. Once I have check marks all the way down, there will be a button here that’ll say, “Submit my application.” Again, just an example of a couple of things that you can have initially. You can have short applications, long applications, and you can look for references, employment history, education history, and really do an in-depth questionnaire section. But again, completely configurable to your needs. When we go over to the backend, this is where we’re designing that application process and how we administer the candidate through the process.

Jillian Pesce (17:23):

We can set up these jobs screening questions. What type of question are they? Are they required and will they knock this candidate out of the process? If there is an internal requisition process in place, we would just need to know that and then it can be mirrored within the system. We can create new job listings easily, we can save templates, and we can easily push jobs out to job boards. This solution does integrate with over 4,000 job boards and that’s on the national level and the local level. So we would create a page that just has your favorites on there.

Jillian Pesce (17:59):

Some of them use credits. Some of these job boards directly will bill you, you’ll see like an Indeed sponsorship account. Then you also have access to these free boards, and these are names that we’d recognize. They are the organic versions though, so you can not pay to hold your post at the top. It will organically fall down the list, but it will definitely be seen. All I need to do is select the boxes next to the boards I want to utilize and I hit submit job board selection. It will then push the job out to those appropriate boards. I can also do this through my social media page; Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Jillian Pesce (18:37):

I can also get reporting. There’s about 30 standard reports. The most popular in the solution are sources, time to fill a position, time to hire. Any of these EEO1 reports can also build a custom report and you also have access to dashboards, giving you a little bit of insight as to the pipeline process and which sources are working best for your employee search here. We have a qualified applicant pool where I can see all my applicants, I can look them up by status, job title, department, and even I can go back in time if I have candidates from the past.

Jillian Pesce (19:15):

I can do bulk action, selecting all these people or half of these people, and I can archive them, or I can email them, update their status, and I can have preset email templates making my job effective and easy to email out multiple people at once. If we look at a specific application file, I can see their whole application with employment history and questions, references. I can see if they applied for another company… Excuse me, position in my company. We can contact the candidate through text message or email. I always have a trail of that here.

Jillian Pesce (19:54):

We can add notes, we can rate the employee, we can upload documents, and we can have other users have access and rate these employees as well. We can also help if you have background check needs, drug screening needs as well. They do all the heavy lifting and integrate with the solution directly. Can also have offer letters, multiple versions of offer letters. We can bring those over to the HR record. We can also integrate, set up integrations with things like personality assessments through selective hiring, and also a virtual interview tool. We can initiate the onboarding for the new hire directly through here.

Jillian Pesce (20:37):

So if you have one or multiple companies, you will simply select the company we’re hiring for and start the process. With onboarding, the paperwork is not always created equal, so you can have multiple versions of templates based upon the position or maybe even the employment and category. You would select the appropriate template that contains the paperwork you need filled out, fill out the questions, decide what gets brought over to the employee record, and then hit send, we hit send, the employee or this candidate receives an email with a link. They click on the link and they’re able to view their onboarding experience.

Jillian Pesce (21:19):

Again, this list is highly configurable, completely configurable to your needs. You’re going to decide what this list looks like, and it can be different again based on positions, departments, categories. You can house documents that you want them to view and electronically acknowledge and we can have forms to fill out. You’re going to decide what all of these fields represent as we’re going through the process. If you’re using attract and hire, majority of this information fills in automatically, so they really just have to fill in the blanks and verify.

Jillian Pesce (21:52):

They do have the I-9 form right here. They will fill it out, select their citizenships, and sign the form electronically. We also have a tax wizard built in that will allow them to fill out any necessary tax forms, always the most compliant and recent forms. They can go through the process, it will generate those forms for them and pull directly into payroll. Then based upon what you’re looking for, you might want them to put in contact information, you might want them to enter in their direct deposit account information, unlimited number of direct deposit information, checking savings, and pay cards.

Jillian Pesce (22:32):

You might have the opportunity for that work opportunity, tax credit if you’re offering a position to a veteran or somebody that was receiving snap. You might be entitled to a tax break for that. They can upload copies of supporting documents. That can be avoided check. That can be a copy of a driver’s license, copy of a passport photo. Anything you want to keep in the employee record, they can upload here simply. Then again, at the end of the wizard, we have a confirmation statement letting us know if we missed any areas and of course we get the opportunity to verify the data we’ve entered in.

Jillian Pesce (23:08):

Then I would go back to these specific sections, complete them. So I have check marks all the way down, and then I would submit my paperwork. Then at this point, my employee portion is done and I’m now logged in as an administrator. You can have one company or you can have multiple companies. You’re going to have one login into isolved and you can toggle back and forth between the businesses. You could see your payroll calendars, you might have multiple pay groups. You would see that here. If somebody is going through onboarding, they would sit in this pending employee dashboard.

Jillian Pesce (23:43):

If they’re pending approval, that simply means that they’ve completed their paperwork, so I’m going to want to save them as a new employee. You’ll notice it’s going to bring over all their information that they entered in on onboarding right down to that direct deposit information down here. So I just have to enter in their salary information and then anything else that I make required, full-time, part-time, categorizing the employee. This org labor job area is different for everyone, and you might have things that are required that I don’t.

Jillian Pesce (24:13):

Our tier structure and classification of our employees is most likely different, so again, it’s going to look the way you need it to look. Once I hit save, this employee is now saved in all components of the solution. It’s a true single database, so if I make a change to an address, it’s going to update throughout benefits and HR and payroll. So you don’t have to re-key in any of that data. Within this employee management section, it’s showing me everything from hire to retire. I can look at this employee document section here and choose one of my employees.

Jillian Pesce (24:45):

This is my electronic filing cabinet. So I can see anything he’s uploaded, I can see anything he’s acknowledged electronically. We don’t purge any data here, so this is always going to remain until you delete it. I can go into any of these areas in these folders and upload copies of documents, different types of documents, and determine the level of access that everybody would have to this document. I also have a folder for my I-9 to be stored separately. I can view this, print it, and seal it with a wet signature, or I can run the employee through E-Verify directly through here, go to the section two and complete my document authorization.

Jillian Pesce (25:27):

The solution is compliance-driven, so based upon the zip code I enter in and depending on the state you live in, the address may have a component here in this taxing location area. The solution is smart enough to know the requirements per state. If I vary from state to state, this will change again, compliance-driven solution. If I need to terminate someone out of the solution, I can simply print a termination report, select the reason, which is my terminology. It’s configurable and I can select the date and see if I’m tied to any benefit plans. This termination report can serve as somewhat of a checklist for me.

Jillian Pesce (26:05):

But I do have a complete termination wizard which is going to walk me through a streamlined process of all manual termination processes gathering all the data on a particular employee and walking me through this process. If he has any company property, it’s going to tell me. If he’s tied to any benefits, I need to know what they are and when they stop and is he COBRA eligible. I can pay out any unused PTO balances according to my rules. I can also unassign my employees from specific jobs and roles and reassign somebody else to take their place. Nothing falls through the cracks when you’re terminating this person.

Jillian Pesce (26:48):

I can also see some pay items here, I can stop some automatic earnings. I would be able to see if there are any garnishments and also any pending performance reviews that I have scheduled. I can go through this wizard and I can make sure that I can run an audit at the end and I make sure that I complete everything that I need to with regards to this employee. We don’t purge any data, so I would always be able to see the history of any job titles that any employees had. I would see any… excuse me, details down below. I can even tie some workers comp codes.

Jillian Pesce (27:24):

And I have full capability for location and percent distribution which can be mapped and exported to general ledger. My salary page, again, we don’t purge the data, so I see the historical data of the salary changes, and again, I can see details down below. I can even see salary-grade information if you need that. You could set that up accordingly. I can future effective data pay change. It can be prorated if this change occurs mid pay periods, so you don’t have to do any manual intervention here. And we can house alternate rates of pay, unlimited number of earnings, it’s your terminology, unlimited number of deductions also.

Jillian Pesce (28:03):

We can track balances or arrears and of course have access to any garnishments or direct deposit accounts for our employees. We can track things about our employees, their contacts, where they worked prior. Any certifications we need to keep current, we can set it up so we get email reminders prior to expiration of any certification. We can track any skills or education history for employees, any training courses that they’ve completed, which ties directly to the learning management system we’re going to take a look at. Even any corrective actions if you’re tracking, company property, who has what computer, and also OSHA incidents.

Jillian Pesce (28:45):

This system is going to be able to get the data out. You’ll be able to report on any data that’s in there, so long as you put the details in. This OSHA 300-day summary report is going to be a standard report for you. It’s a very tiring report to complete and the system does it automatically just by simply running us a report putting in date ranges. Very easy to do and saves you a lot of time. You also do have access to a basic performance review system within here that’s included. We are going to talk about another robust system, also called share and perform.

Jillian Pesce (29:21):

But you do have a basic functionality within the solution which allows you to review your employees, you decide the rating scale, you decide the comments, you decide what you’re evaluating, and the employees have the opportunity to give themselves a self-review. So you do have the capability to do that within the platform as well. Well, let’s talk about our employee self-service. This page is going to be designed the way you want it to be, what you want them to have access to, any documents or personal information that they can manage. They can view their direct deposit accounts and manage that.

Jillian Pesce (29:57):

They can also view their pay history and they would be able to print stubs, multiple stubs if they needed to at any time. And they have access to tax forms and they could change their tax withholdings. They also have access to their benefits, what they’re currently contributing, and they can walk through a benefit enrollment directly through their self-service portal for a life event change, for an open enrollment. Also, if they are a new hire, they’d be able to go through and manage their beneficiaries. They would have a cost analysis sheet on the different plans they’re eligible for and then they can go make their selections, waive coverage they don’t need.

Jillian Pesce (30:39):

Again, at the end of the wizard, we’re always able to see what we did not complete and what we still need to finish. If you’re tracking paid time off, that all gets inputted into the system and the employees can come in and request time off right through here. They have access to their balances at any time, their upcoming time off, any pending requests or any past-time off as well. So they can make a simple request, and once they put it in, they’ll submit it to their manager for approval. Once it does get approved, it’ll automatically gets stored on timecard.

Jillian Pesce (31:14):

The employees can clock in a variety of different ways, one being a physical clock. There’s numerous different types of clocks; finger reader, touch clock, pin entry, and also swiping a badge. There’s also what we call a virtual clock where they’re able to set up a station on a tablet or a computer and the employees can put in their pin code and punch in or out, submit missed punch information, and then they can go about their day. They’re also able to clock in on a phone, a tablet, or their desktop computer in the same way, because again, this is the same functionality across the board, simply by performing a quick punch or a detailed punch.

Jillian Pesce (31:57):

The detailed punch is going to show the coordinates of where the employee was when they clocked in or out. And this labor group area is configurable, so we can track the labor of where the employees are spending their time and create drop downs. Again, you might be tracking the labor by grant or division. It might be different for everybody, maybe by project, so these are configurable. And you do have capability if people are clocking in on their mobile device to set up different levels of geo-fencing such as acceptable perimeter of where they can clock in and out, or simply by setting up location, coordinates of what those coordinates are and that’s the only time it’s going to work for them to clock in or out.

Jillian Pesce (32:39):

So it really just depends on how strict you need to be. They would have access to their time card, being able to do actions that you allow them to as entering hours or submit missing punches. They can also verify their time card at the end of a pay period and so can the supervisor and manager. So again, you’re going to design this the way you need. You can set up alerts that are critical for you, so all of that gets managed before the person that processes payroll has to come in and intervene.

Jillian Pesce (33:11):

As a manager, it’s the same experience if I’m logging into my self-service portal, except I have this manage tile here where I’m able to approve things such as time off requests, missing punches, timecards. I would be able to see all of the time cards for the team that reports to me and I can drill down to the individual cards. I also have a calendar here where I can see if any of my employees are going to be out that day. They have little dots on the bottom indicating if it’s a pending request I need to approve, or if somebody is going to be out that day I would be able to see it under absences here. So my team can have visibility to this also.

Jillian Pesce (33:56):

So I’m back into my administrator view, and if I’m utilizing the time system, all I need to do is come in to process payroll and lock up the time cards. That pulls over all of the punch data, all of the paid time off approvals, any adjustments that were added to the time card, and we can commit those timecards, it’s going to automatically populate into our time entry grid. You can have multiple versions of this time entry grid based upon the type of payroll you’re looking to accomplish. It could be a bonus, it could be a retro pay, and simply setting up the templates will dictate the column headers here.

Jillian Pesce (34:31):

This is my standard payroll template, shows me the name and the salary and the total hours, and then how those hours are allocated. So for me, it’s nice and easy, I can make a simple change right on the grid, or if I need to make a change to an individual employee, I can go ahead and do that. I can see all the earnings codes, I’d be able to make any changes here, I can do a one-off block of a deduction if I needed to as well, and I can preview their check. If I needed to add any adjustments here or additional checks, I would be able to do that here.

Jillian Pesce (35:07):

If my grid looks correct, I can go ahead to preview my payroll which is going to produce our payroll reports. I can use these to audit my payroll, and then when I’m through auditing it, I can hit process which will then run the payroll and take a copy of those payroll reports and store them for you in a report archive. Again, we never purge the data. We have over 350 standard client reports. You would have access to those reports based upon your needs and usage of the solution. They’re all alphabetical. We can handle any ACA requirements and you would see these reports up top.

Jillian Pesce (35:47):

There are different report categories where you can look up certain areas like general ledger. You may want to map the payroll data to seamlessly come into your accounting software. With a chart of accounts and a few recent journal entries, that can happen, nice and easy for you. There’s also a report writer tool here which you can configure a custom report. It’s not necessarily a custom build-out report, it’s just configuring a report with the data that’s in the system to write a report. If you’re interested in learning to write it yourself, you can use the help documents here.

Jillian Pesce (36:22):

You also can reach out to your customer service rep and they can help you write this report anytime. If you wanted to learn more about the isolved solution on how to utilize certain components of it, you could go into the university, which we’re going to go into here, and everything under classroom is isolved related. If you wanted to learn how to run a report, there’s report writer courses you could take, or if you wanted to learn more information about the time and attendance, you could look up that as well. There’s also the other side of the house, which is my classroom.

Jillian Pesce (36:58):

This is our learn and grow component. This is where I can set up trainings for my employees and assign them out. I have the capability to award badges as well. Anything that you see a pro next to is considered pro content here and we have it grouped together nicely in categories for you, like leadership and management, COVID-19, and also HR compliance. This HR compliance is pretty much the most popular. It’s showing me those active shooter courses, the bullying courses, HIPAA, sexual harassment prevention. These are interactive courses. They’re considered what we call SCORM content, where there’s embedded tests and questions throughout the course.

Jillian Pesce (37:44):

Employees can stop midway and then pick up their progress as if they need to later on. You also might want to utilize, and I’m going to go into the back end of the solution now, a marketplace feature. This marketplace allows you to look up additional coursework based on anything you’re looking to assign out. Maybe you want to learn more about CPR and you feel you need more course opportunities here, you can simply look through these, get an understanding of what the course entails, and then add it to your training. That could be a course added to your list that you could assign out.

Jillian Pesce (38:23):

You also could create your own course. That’s very easy to do. If you can send an email adding an attachment, you can definitely do this. You’re going to simply name the course and talk about what type of course it is. Is it like a podcast type of training? Is it a PowerPoint? Is it SCORM content with embedded testing? Is it a video? Is it a link to a YouTube video? You can have all sorts of different trainings uploaded here and then you can decide what the passing grade is if you’re going to include a test, and also about how long it will take to complete the test.

Jillian Pesce (39:02):

You also have capability to set locking settings there. So if somebody fails the test a few times, they could be locked out. You really can get granular on how you want to design this. You can create tests on your courses that you have set up and they can be broken out. If you have different chapters, you can break it out that way if you needed to. You can decide if these questions are going to be multiple choice or true or false, and then tell the system using these radio buttons what the correct answer is. You can also shuffle and randomize the question and answers using these buttons over here.

Jillian Pesce (39:41):

You then can create what we call course paths. Sometimes, it makes sense if you have four or five courses… I’ll refer to the new hire orientation as an example. When a new hire comes on board, you may want them to take four or five courses. That could be office culture, sexual harassment prevention, and then specific courses related to your industry. You can group them together and just assign them one course path, which you can pull courses from the pro content, anything that you’ve created internally or from the marketplace, and group them together instead of sending out four or five separate courses.

Jillian Pesce (40:21):

You can assign different courses out to your employees in a few different ways. One way is sending them out manually, which is one at a time. Say I’m your new hire, I need to take the new hire orientation path, you’re going to assign it to me manually one at a time. Another way you can assign something out is by org labor. This is going to pull your org labor groups from payroll and you’re able to assign out a course or a path through that way. You also can do it by teams. You can set up teams in learn and grow and then assign something out by a team. Gives you a little bit more flexibility.

Jillian Pesce (40:58):

Then you can decide is it a course or a path, and then which course are you assigning, and then when is it due? You can give it a due date, save it, and then all these automatic emails will happen notifying everybody that they have been assigned something with the due date and so forth and they can get intermittent reminders. You also have some reporting capability where you’re able to see an average test score over the past 30 days. I would say focus your attention over here. If this is over 20%, this is well over 20%, you might want to have some conversations with your employees and see what’s happening.

Jillian Pesce (41:34):

Are these tests too hard or do we need to take a look at our contents here. But this is really just a good way to see what’s going on. You can get feedback on courses and you can even get some intel on which courses have frequently chosen incorrect answers. You’re able to see some reports on any assignments that you sent out. When we talk about at-risk assignments, at-risk in our sense is two days prior to the due date. They’re at risk of missing the deadline. So you can run reports on that, you can see who’s overdue, you can see who’s completed any assignments.

Jillian Pesce (42:12):

You even have the capability to filter out, because these reports could be long. You can filter out by status and then download it to an Excel file. You can do the same thing for legal company course status. This has every single course that has been assigned to every single employee. It can get very lengthy and it does show you the status. So again, I would utilize the filter options and then download it as an Excel file. Lastly, you do get insight on some of your users. You’re able to see some statistics; when’s the last time they logged into the system, how many badges or certificates did they earn?

Jillian Pesce (42:53):

You can even see what those certificates are. So, Arletta has this certificate, she completed the compliance training, and this is what it looks like. It can have your company logo in the corner and you can manage the dates. If this is something that needs to be maintained, like a sexual harassment prevention, we can have the expiration and have automatic reminders letting us know that it’s going to expire. Now, also within our solution, we have an employee engagement and performance tool known as share and perform. This is an area where we have capability for employees to engage and collaborate with each other.

Jillian Pesce (43:33):

We start off on this landing page. When I access share and perform through my employee self-service, I land here, showing any announcements, who my employee of the month is, any messages about charities or anything. These are all interchangeable, you can edit them, you can add new ones. You can store documents, maybe monthly newsletters here, and you see any recent activities. The feed wall shows us who we can turn to for help, we can share ideas, we can share knowledge. We can ask our employees, our fellow employees for help, and we can publicly praise our employees for helping us.

Jillian Pesce (44:12):

We can set up gamification rules with these posts and assign numeric values to different actions that we’re doing. These points can be accumulated, so you’ll see that up top, and it can rank the employee on a leaderboard. So it is incentivizing the employees to utilize the system, to engage with each other, help each other out, because nobody wants to be at the bottom of the leaderboard, right? So this is going to influence them to get more involved and engaged here. We can set up groups where we can interact the same way on the feed wall, in an open group setting, a common interest group setting, or a closed group setting, which is mostly for departments or teams.

Jillian Pesce (44:58):

We can share documents with each other and schedule events. We can even house surveys here utilizing a third-party survey platform. You can house that right in here and you can set it up so the employees can provide truly anonymous results so they feel that they have a safe space to be honest and share their ideas and feedback. We can have feedback from the employees to their managers so we can see all this correspondence that goes on in a given year prior to our annual reviews. It can be simply an employee does a project for their manager and they request feedback on how they did.

Jillian Pesce (45:37):

Also, the manager can just provide feedback to their employees at any time. And we have these types of feedback. This is designed to be constructive and precise, right? So, good work, development opportunity. We also have these categories here and you can add to the categories in this section as well. But any correspondence or feedback in this area, I’d be able to see when I go to do my review. We can have organizational goals that we can set up that can be cascaded and aligned from the top down or the bottom up.

Jillian Pesce (46:12):

I’m able to see, if I have an organizational goal in place, who out of my employees is contributing to this goal and I see where they’re at and their statistics. If I’m a manager, I can see my team goals and I can see where they’re at in the process. We always want to encourage our employees to check in on these goals regularly. Anytime a goal is created, we can set up notifications to remind us to check in regularly. And of course, we can align it to any goal we need. We also can see my goals and I can set up key results, or what you might know as KPIs, where we have a goal and we break it down so we can have weighting capability and ensure that this goal does in fact become a successful one.

Jillian Pesce (47:01):

With regards to our review process, we can set up different cycles of the review so the employee can go ahead and do their self review and then the manager can come in during their designated timeframe and do that review as well. If I go down here, I see all of the different components with this employee as far as their goals, job description, any feedback over the past year. I could see past reviews and I can also see 360 capability, so I can send out unlimited number of nominations and unlimited number of templates with questions about my employees and have them review each other and I can get feedback on that.

Jillian Pesce (47:39):

Here’s my review process. The employee did their review first, I can not make any changes. The employer decides the rating scale, this is configurable, as well as what we’re rating, what we’re evaluating on our employees. This is configurable to your needs. This is a nine box. It’s a tool to measure the employee’s leadership potential which is based on a 10-question questionnaire, and that will move the employee on the appropriate level or box row. Also, we can measure their performance based on the supervisor review, which moves her from left to right.

Jillian Pesce (48:13):

So every employee begins here based on their leadership potential questionnaire and how they do on the review will move her accordingly. We always want to get to the green. If an employee ends up here, this is really basically telling us that she can be promoted today. This light green shaded area is basically telling us that promotion is in her future and she’s on the right track. A supervisor can come in here and they can give a rating based on their rating scale and add comments. We also see the leadership potential questionnaire down below. If they’re not promotable, we’ll check the box, she’ll remain at the bottom row.

Jillian Pesce (48:53):

But if not, we’re going to fill out these 10 questions. These are set questions, they’re not industry specific, and they’re not configurable. You can also attach any notes or plans. You can attach any learning management courses and schedule one-on-one meetings right from here. You do also have access to a dashboard which gives you a one-page snapshot view, like an HR command center, of where your people are at in the performance review process. We also have a dashboard similar with regards to 360 peer-to-peer reviews. I can see everybody that’s reviewing specific employees and where they’re at in the process.

Jillian Pesce (49:38):

Are they working on it? Which is yellow. Are they completed? Which is green. Or did they decline the nomination? Maybe you’ll allow your employees to decline a nomination simply because they have a lot going on so they don’t have the time. You can also have external reviewers. If you see an E in the top right corner, that simply means they’re outside the organization. It could be a vendor or a client. We’re looking for unbiased opinions here on this employee. So I can see all of that here.

Jillian Pesce (50:07):

Lastly, you have a suggestion box, which is like that old school where you have an index card and you get to include it in that box on the wall in the office. You can do this all electronically now. You can create a suggestion and be completely anonymous with it if you wanted to and decide who gets to receive it and say what your suggestion is. Then you get to track where it’s at and you can make comments back and forth on the suggestion. So you really have an idea of where it’s going, and if it’s been addressed, you can also export any suggestions into an Excel sheet as well.

Jillian Pesce (50:43):

This is really designed to be the hub and heartbeat of your company, again, with engaging your employees, having them collaborate with each other, having this peer-to-peer review, this nine box capability, and this intranet where you can push out any communications and announcements. Jeff, I will turn it back over to you.

Jeff Plakans (51:10):

All right, let me come back in the screen here. Wonderful. Thanks, Jill. I appreciate it.

Jillian Pesce (51:16):

You’re welcome.

Jeff Plakans (51:19):

You were plenty thorough, hopefully everyone got a good impression of isolved People Cloud and how it all ties together. Now, we know that one of the biggest challenges that we face is with clients that we have that are only using pieces of the system, growing into and understanding what else is available to them. What have you seen out there as far as companies that have scaled through or evolved through the product? How are they seeing and getting access to the additional pieces?

Jillian Pesce (51:52):

It really is different for everyone. A lot of people like to begin with core payroll just to get started with HR functionality, maybe time and attendance. But we do see a lot of people adding on services because… Or we see it the complete opposite, or we see full boat. They get everything all at once because they really just want to a seamless, streamlined process. And as you can see, it talks to each other, all the components are simpatico, right? They all work together, you get the information backwards and forwards. It can be done to any employer’s needs. That’s a wholehearted, honest answer.

Jeff Plakans (52:32):

Well, so we’ve seen with COVID obviously the demand for the full solution in a box, I guess, is the better way that I would say it. Now, where we’ve seen that almost more than any other thing is in two places. We’ve seen it on the learning management side where employers have been more challenged, “Okay, how am I training and teaching employees that are all in the same place… or not in the same place rather?” One of the things that is important for companies to become successful there comes down to their ability to really customize the content.

Jeff Plakans (53:09):

Now, there’s plenty of pro content that’s there, but what have you seen in terms of best practices with companies doing in terms of creating their own content that’s specific to their company?

Jillian Pesce (53:20):

I see a lot of people utilizing the text type of course where they can upload a video or a YouTube video or something that’s industry specific. That’s the most common I see truthfully.

Jeff Plakans (53:34):

Okay. All right. So you’re seeing that quite a bit. What about on the engagement side of things? As far as companies, obviously with COVID, share and perform in the engagement component became all the more important again with remote employees. The performance management piece is one part of it, but the social piece is another. Have you seen it really make a difference with a lot of employers in terms of their ability to communicate?

Jillian Pesce (54:00):

Yes. One of the most important parts in that feed wall is if somebody asks for help. We hear a lot about this and we see it in… You’ve seen it at some point in your life before platforms like this really became popular, but this really skyrocketed during COVID because we all got used to that remote life. There was no hang over the cubicle and ask a question or wait outside your manager’s office. You couldn’t do that. So, sometimes we would email out our entire organization or we would email our entire team.

Jillian Pesce (54:30):

Then what happens is your inbox gets flooded with reply alls and it gets very hard to manage. So, by posting out, asking for help, you get one email, and it says, “Jill has asked for help.” So you go there and everybody can respond and we’re seeing significant reduction in response time and we’re seeing it all in one place.

Jeff Plakans (54:53):

Right. Well, and I think that’s the biggest component. For everybody that’s joined us today, we’re running up against the end of our hour here. Thank you very much for joining us. I’m going to take the presentation over one second just so I can flash a screen here and…

Jillian Pesce (55:20):

Do you need me to do anything?

Jeff Plakans (55:22):

Nope. Here we go. Okay. Now I just got to make sure that I’m sharing the correct screen again. There we go. Perfect. Now, on the screen is a QR code. If you want to know more information about isolved People Cloud, broaden it beyond… Well, if you’re a client of ours, you can broaden it beyond what you’re already using. Go ahead and hit that QR code with your phone. That’ll get you to a place to communicate with us and we’ll talk about the specific needs that you have.

Jeff Plakans (55:54):

If you saw something you particularly liked or have further questions for us, you can hit us that way. We are, as I said, going to be recording this. So this recording will go out to the attendees and be available to everybody on our website later. Jill, thank you very much for joining us today.

Jillian Pesce (56:12):

Welcome.

Jeff Plakans (56:13):

To everyone else, thank you for joining us. Have a lovely day and stay cool if you’re in a hot area right now. Thank you very much.

Jillian Pesce (56:21):

Have a good day.

Jeff Plakans (56:21):

Goodbye.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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