Home Care Provider Supports Employees with a Modern HR & Payroll Platform

Integrated Life Choices (ILC) was founded in 2006 with a mission to support people with intellectual and developmental disabilities in living fulfilling lives. Its 1,800 employees work tirelessly to help individuals in communities throughout its home state of Nebraska and across several metropolitan areas in Colorado and Texas.

Because ILC provides front-line services, most of its employees spend more time in the field than they do in the office, and they often work outside regular office hours to help the people they support and their families. In the past, this made it difficult for leaders to ensure clear communications across the organization, and there was a risk employees could feel isolated from the company and their peers.

“Our employees are scattered across three states, so the question was: how do we bring them together?” explains Becky Miratsky, ILC’s Chief People Officer. “How can we create a work environment where they feel like they are not just a number, and they're a piece of the whole picture?”

One key problem was a lack of effective centralized communication tools. ILC had to use email and its legacy intranet to share information, and leaders could never be completely sure whether employees had gotten the message. Moving to a modern, integrated HR & payroll platform with Paylocity was the first step in transforming ILC’s communications, its community, and its culture.

The Challenge

A Company Unsure Whether Employees were Getting the Message

Without an effective channel for on-the-go communication across the organization, ILC’s leaders, HR teams, and employees struggled to collaborate.

Listening to Employees’ Needs

ILC employees spend much of their time visiting homes or care facilities across three states to provide support for people with disabilities and their families. When a team is short-staffed due to illness or employee turnover, ILC needs to be able to coordinate its resources to ensure all the people they support get the care they need. However, feedback from employee surveys showed that inconsistent communication hampered collaboration. As a result, teams in each region tended to work in silos, making it difficult to share ideas or work together to solve problems.

Bringing People Onboard

Recruitment was one key area where a lack of communication hurt the business. Many ILC employees have friends who work in the same field, and referrals would have helped strengthen the company’s recruitment pipeline—but employees were often unaware of vacancies. Moreover, ILC’s paper-based processes made recruiting and onboarding slow and labor-intensive for the HR team and candidates alike.

Getting Benefit from Benefits

Another follow-on effect of ILC’s communication issues was benefits administration. Since it was difficult to keep people informed about their benefits, employees often had to call or email the HR team with questions about open enrollment and other issues. “We have a two-person payroll team managing benefits for more than 600 full-time employees, and the number of questions that can come in during open enrollment can get really overwhelming,” says Becky.

The Solution

An All-in-one HR & Payroll Platform Creates a Hub for Communication, Collaboration, and Culture

With Paylocity, ILC is able to share information consistently and reliably across its entire organization, helping employees work together to improve the quality of care.

A Central Platform Enables Seamless Communication

ILC employees spend most of their time in the field, which means their main computer is their mobile phone. The Paylocity Mobile App provides a single gateway to company information, HR tools, and communication with coworkers. Leaders share video messages with employees in a direct and personal way, helping to keep the company’s hierarchy flat and lines of communication open—so everyone feels that they are on the same team.

Digital Communities Drive Collaboration

Via the Paylocity Mobile App, every employee has access to Community, which makes it easy to communicate and collaborate with their peers. This contact and encouragement is vital in a job where people often work long and unsociable hours, and it’s easy to feel isolated. Moreover, it helps employees stay connected to what’s happening in the business—which teams are short-staffed, where the vacancies are— and work together to solve problems more effectively.

Self-Service Solutions Empower Employees

The app also provides direct access to a range of HR solutions, such as On Demand Payment, which gives employees the power to decide when they get their paycheck, and an “Ask The Expert” tool for Benefits Administration. The HR team can also easily run competitions and set up referral bonuses to encourage employees to help with recruiting—and the whole Recruiting and Onboarding workflow is now digitized and streamlined.

The Results

Keeping People Connected to Deliver Better Care

Paylocity creates a positive environment where ILC employees can share experiences, work together, and flourish.

Better Communication Boosts Employee Satisfaction by 25%

“Of all the systems I’ve looked at, Paylocity is the one that really focuses on employee experience and employee engagement,” says Becky. And for ILC, that focus has really paid off. Today, employee satisfaction with the company’s communication capabilities has skyrocketed with an uplift of 25%. Employees feel that they have an instantaneous connection with their peers, HR, and leadership—helping them stay motivated even on the toughest assignments.

Digitized Recruitment Enables Onboarding in Minutes

A faster, simpler recruitment process doesn’t just save time and effort for HR—it helps bring new people into the business faster and makes them feel part of the ILC community from day one. That not only helps to bolster team spirit, it also reduces the risk of good candidates falling out of the recruitment pipeline and slipping away to other organizations.

Smart Tools Empower a Two-Person Team to Support 1,800 Employees

Paylocity’s self-service capabilities empower ILC employees to access their HR details and information about pay and benefits instantly, whenever they need it and wherever they are. As a result, the volume of questions employees raise with HR has fallen significantly—especially during open enrollment and other busy times of year.

Becky concludes: “Our employees are able to make better-informed choices on their benefits because they know how to get the answers they need. The key is communication: Paylocity helps information flow through our organization so that everyone has the insight they need to work effectively.”