CUNA Mutual Group is the leading financial services provider to credit unions and their members worldwide offering more than 300 insurance, investment and technology solutions. They provide these services to approximately 10,000 credit unions and 83,000,000 members throughout the world with most being in the United States. 90% of their workforce is in the U.S. with 5% in Canada and another 5% scattered throughout the rest of the world.
Topic: Implementing Employee Self-Service
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HR.com: What brought employee self-service to the forefront of your business agenda?
CUNA: We had the Internet and intranet... we had a lot of business drivers for our customers. There was a lot of talk about the types of experiences we needed to provide to our business customers. On the heels of that, some of our leadership began to consider focusing on the same type of experience to our employees. That started us on the B to E - business to employee - initiative to make sure we were providing that same type of rich experience to our employees. Self-service was one of the major portions of providing a rich experience.
HR.com: What were your first steps in developing self-service?
CUNA: We knew right off that we didn´t have a way to easily reach our employees. We had just completed a successful transition to electronic pay stubs, where we removed the paper pay stubs for all employees who were on direct deposit. This was developed in-house, and we knew that it was not feasible for us to build an entire self-service solution in-house.
We formed a team that looked at what we had to put in place in order to build an environment for employee self-service. We used a consulting group; at the time it was Hunter Group (now Cedar), which helped us identify the steps necessary to provide such an experience. The three things that came out of that initial analysis was the needed to:
HR.com: It sounds like prior to the use of the consultants you already had made a decision to implement Employee Self Service (ESS). Is that right?
CUNA: Yes. We had a vision of what we wanted to do. We brought the consultants in to validate that vision and to help us justify it. We heard about Authoria at a PeopleSoft conference around 2000. We wanted to move the momentum forward, but we knew we did not have an answer on how to build a business case until we brought in Cedar. They helped us validate our vision and helped us build the business case that justified moving ahead with these plans.
HR.com: It appears that there is high importance in your organization on business cases, why is that?
CUNA: We have corporate priority projects, which go across our whole company. They are typically larger in scope and effect many areas of the company. These types of projects require a higher level of justification, and are usually funded by the corporate budget rather than the typical, functional budget, and there for go through a lot more scrutiny. With this, we had to get the HR head´s approval, than our Corporate Priority Project office where we got the approval of the CEO.. Without a proper business case this project would not have gotten a green light.
HR.com: What were your next steps after the buy-in?
CUNA: We started working on the three phases that we had planned: The PeopleSoft upgrade, the E-Apps and Authoria. We started with the upgrade to lay the foundation so we could move forward. Once we got the upgrade into a spot where we felt it was stable, then we started with the E-Apps. We started with the E-Benefits application. We also looked to compliment the transaction with the benefits plan information, the health and welfare portion of Authoria. We wanted to have all of the benefit plans authored and have the PeopleSoft E-AppS along with Authoria fully integrated so that employees could go back and forth. To a user doing a plan comparison and the entire information gathering, the process should be seamless. At the end, we had to make sure that the integrations between PeopleSoft and Authoria went smoothly.
HR.com: Why did you decide to start with open enrolment in benefits?
CUNA: In the fall of 2000, our CEO said to our HR head, "I want this to be the last time I have to send in paper on open enrolment." That was one big driver, but also we looked at Cedar to guide as to what would be our biggest bang for our buck.
HR.com: Why did you consider it the biggest bang for the buck?
CUNA: We knew we had a lot of printing charges; distribution charges and we had re-entry of the elections, which led to labor charges. We were going from a total paper process, where we were entering the enrolment forms, doing the data entry and re-sending confirmations. It was a lot of paper passing. Once we went through this, the process would totally remove the manual intervention.
HR.com: What was the result once the open enrolment and the e-benefits and welfare were automated?
CUNA: It was a great success. We had no technical issues and no one had difficulty getting in, and getting access to complete the enrolment online. Only a small number of affiliates were not able to complete it online and we supported them with the traditional methods.
HR.com: Open enrolment is an issue that is usually made jointly with spouses if applicable. Was the system accessible from home?
CUNA: If a family member works here and looks at the material and knows that some aspects are important to the family, the employee can do the plan comparison at work and create a customized comparison sheet and he/she could then take it home to investigate further. Many of our employees also have the ability to access our system from home. Therefore many employees could sit down with the family and look at their options right on line. They could look at the specific items that are important to them. They could also see what they had taken the year before. They could then elect to stay with that plan or change it. Over the last few years, people have been forced to change their benefits because we have had a drastic change in our policies.
HR.com: How did you communicate this new way of managing benefits?
CUNA: We tried to design everything so that it was intuitive, so that we didn´t need to do any full-day or half-day training sessions. In fact we did not offer any training sessions; we provided all instruction through our corporate communications. We did, however, inform the employees that this change was coming, prior to our implementation. So all communications were done through our corporate communications and the intranet to drive people to go that route. Plus, we took away the paper option. It was their only option.
HR.com: Have you noticed a change in the number of calls you´d get seeking support, now that the employees can find most answers on their own?
CUNA: Most of the calls we received were ´how-to´ calls. How do I use this? It was a brand new experience for us. Our call volume stayed about the same, but most of the calls were for help using the system, rather than inquiries about benefits. We still get a handful of calls regarding policies.
HR.com: You have made additions to what is available to the employees since the implementation. Can you tell us about some of those?
CUNA: With PeopleSoft, we have moved into a payroll self-service. It means that we can roll out the W2-reissue, W4 (state & federal tax withholding maintenance), and direct deposit maintenance.. It also allows employees to access and change their own personal information, like address, phone number, etc. We focused on a lot of self-service projects and then we combined that with the corresponding subject from Authoria (direct deposit is a nice example). We receive a lot of questions about the direct deposit setup information, so just placing the transaction on-line alone would not have helped much.
HR.com: Any reason why you had chosen payroll to be your next phase?
CUNA: Primarily because of the volume of changes that are submitted by employees to change their direct deposit information and a number of W4 withholdings they wanted to claim.. By adding the self-service portion, this paper work would go away. The good thing about this program is that employees can choose, on a payroll basis, where their money will be deposited. Some like to have the money divided between accounts. The employee has the freedom to set this up on his/her own.
HR.com: Where did you go next?
CUNA: In 2003, our main focus was on beefing up the employee handbook. Our employee handbook is the spot where we keep all of our employee policies and procedures. One of the things that helped drive this, was our need to achieve benefits commonality. We needed to streamline our procedures and policies around many of subjects that were addressed in the employee handbook. The nice thing about the handbook is that it is employee specific. When an employee goes into the system, it knows that he/she is an employee; it knows the address and location. It then shows all of the policies and procedures that are applicable to that particular employee.. There are now far less calls to HR or the manager. It´s customized and specific to the employee. Prior to Authoria, we had a lot of these things online in our intranet, but there was no intelligence behind it. At that point, we left it up to the employee to go into the intranet and pick and choose the parts of a 100-page document that applied to him/her. With Authoria, they are providing the intelligence and the employee is not left with choosing, the system is giving him/her the answer that directly applies.
In late 2003, we began to talk about Total Compensation Statements. In the past, we had provided Total Compensation Statements to our employees, but stopped that practice several years ago because it was a manual, paper-based process.. In the past few years we had started to receive feedback from employees, the desire to provide these types of statements again. We gave it consideration, however the cost associated with producing such documents was still an expensive proposition. In 2003, while attending the Authoria User Conference, this was a service they were looking at offering in the near future. We contacted Authoria immediately and partnered with them to develop and offer these statements to our employees.
HR.com: What is included in these statements?
CUNA: The statement provides a nice summary of the employees total compensation package including salary, benefits, time off, retirement, and other benefits that we often times don´t think about. This information is spelled out for employees in easy to read charts and several sections have pie graph depictions as well.. The first sections were employees´ salary that included; annual salary, Bonuses, sales incentives, and our CSSP bonuses. The second section covers benefits.. The employee was able to see what benefits he/she had and what he/she is contributing, as well as the company´s contributions. There was also a section on Retirement. We summarized what they have been contributing in their 401K plan and what the company match was. We also had a section on annual time-off benefits where we told them about personal time, sick time, holidays and vacation time that they were eligible for. We also took the days that they had earned per year and translated it into dollars based on their current salary. We also offered a Life Career section where we described the other types of benefits that we offered... but not ones we attach a dollar amount to. For example; Bereavement leave, continuing education reimbursement, corporate fitness site, cafeteria, financial services and even the GM discount we offer our employees. This section alone, created a lot of positive feedback from our employees.
HR.com: It is common knowledge that benefit communication in most organizations is poor. In fact it is consistently found during exit interviews that many employees are leaving for a perceived better total compensation package. It becomes clear during these interviews that employees did not realize they had many of the benefits they were leaving for.
CUNA: That´s one of the things that we wanted to address here. We wanted people to have a full picture of what they were getting and what the company was providing for them.
HR.com: How else did you increase employee awareness?
CUNA: Every leader in HR feels we offer a very rich and competitive benefits package. From the Total Compensation Statement, we also welcomed the employee to link to other subjects within Authoria. If there was more detailed information on a particular topic, we allowed the employee to click on a link and go to the Authoria topic to read more about it. We want a one-stop place for all information. We also offer the employee a chance to see their compensation statement at any time of the year as opposed to once a year that we had done previously. They can also see statements from previous years.
HR.com: What are your next steps?
CUNA: We think we´ve reached the employees fairly well. Our biggest focus now, is on manager self-service and how do we do the same types of things to help automate managers´ interactions with the employees. We put information out in front of our managers but we haven´t given them transactional opportunities, other than their annual salary planning. We see a real opportunity in this area to improve services.
HR.com: Any words of wisdom for a company that is looking at moving to employee self-service?
CUNA: I think people can get caught up in trying to do a big-bang type approach. We did not. We rolled it out in phases. We didn´t get to our ultimate goal immediately, but every rollout keeps reinforcing what we had done before. We do see the traffic increasing as people are going on-line to get information. The tide has turned. The things we do on paper, people are asking about when we are going to automate. Before they were wondering where the paper was? Now they ask why they have to do it on paper and they cannot do it online. The tide does turn; you just can´t look for it automatically.
We took our time so we´d do it right. Now, people have grasped that concept and they want more.