Greenwood Early Education Centres

enableHR

Industry Focus

Education

Project Team:

Background

Established a little over eighteen months ago, Greenwood Early Education Centres (Greenwood) offers an exciting, innovative and fresh proposition in the Australian childcare landscape.

With a vision of providing the highest quality care and education in early childhood, Greenwood is passionate about providing children with the tools they need to be successful in all aspects of their lives. Greenwood is also committed to being an employer of choice with a focus on employee engagement and recognition.

With a Support Office in Gladesville, Greenwood opened its first early education centre in Concord in March this year. Additional centres in the Sydney metropolitan area at Macquarie Park, Brookvale, and Bronte have also been earmarked for opening later this year.

The business currently employs 37 individuals across a number of childhood teaching and junior educator roles along with support staff, a chefs and specialist Partners such as a nutritionists, Yoga Teacher, as well as Education Experts Greenwood plans to increase its labour force to 200 over the next two years.

Challenges

When Malcolm Honey joined Greenwood last year, the company had solid HR processes in place, but no central repository for all the HR and WHS information.

‘Everything was there, but with our staff being covered by a number of different Modern Awards, the information was disparate and contained within different spreadsheets,’ recalls Mr Honey. ‘We didn’t have an easy way to see the business HR risks and compliance requirements from one place. Managing the spreadsheets was manual and highly time consuming.’

Mr Honey adds, ‘As a company, Greenwood is committed to employee development and building a rewarding culture that supports an engaged and driven workforce. My biggest priority was to streamline HR management across all our child care facilities, and put a collective agreements in place.’

Meridian integration

To simplify day-to-day HR admin, Mr Honey set about finding an HR tool that would integrate with Greenwood’s established payroll system.

‘We were already using Meridian, which is one of Australia’s most comprehensive and advanced payroll systems,’ says Mr Honey, ‘so it was crucial for us to find an HR tool that would work seamlessly with it.’

‘I really wanted to avoid having to go back and forth between two systems. I wanted to do HR and payroll from the one platform to remove duplication and save the wasted time and effort it takes to manage two disparate systems.’

‘When we scoped our requirements for the HR tool, we prioritised efficiency, scalability, reliability and flexibility as central to our needs. In evaluating a number of tools, we found that enableHR was the standout solution in that it ticked all our boxes and met our functionality requirements of integrating with Meridian. Instead of getting half of what we wanted we got a complete system.’

Highlights of enableHR

Since the implementation, Greenwood has saved considerable time and effort in managing HR and Payroll. ‘Compared to how we were managing these functions, it’s absolutely amazing to be able to manage everything from the one platform,’ enthuses Mr Honey.

Gone are the days when Greenwood would have to rely on a paper chase of faxes and emails. As a filing system, enableHR is proving invaluable. ‘Being able to look up all the different details, documents, notes about an employee from one convenient location, and from anywhere saves so much time,’ says Mr Honey.

Centre leaders and Support Partners can now access enableHR to manage the day-to-day HR needs of their staff. On a practical level, this means that everyone uses the same processes in the same way. Mr Honey adds, ‘Everyone can tap into enableHR, wherever they are. Logging in through my iPhone gives me everything I need, when I need it. I don’t need to be anywhere near the office.’

Mr Honey has also been quick to utilise the resources available in enableHR to build and update the company’s Codes of Conduct in line with the content on enableHR which is backed by FCB Workplace Law, Australia’s largest specialist workplace law firm.

Future plans

As a highly regulated business, enableHR helps Greenwood to remain compliant with Australian workplace laws. As the company continues to open new centres, Mr Honey believes that their use of enableHR will become a cornerstone of the company’s approach to HR management and help the company become recognised as an employer of choice.
As Mr Honey says, ‘The quality of early education cannot be underestimated, so too is the quality of your HR management to those educators.’

In the future, Greenwood plans to use enableHR’s Contractor Management and Volunteer Management modules as the company engages a larger workforce.

‘enableHR is an everything-you-need HR System!’
Malcolm Honey HR Guru, Greenwood Early Education Centres