For decades, our organization, Universal Metro Asian Services (UMAS), has offered valuable home care services and adult daycare services in native languages to immigrant populations from Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and Latin America. We promise a care-driven, family-life company culture to all our clients across Illinois. But just as airlines tell passengers to put on their own oxygen masks before assisting others, UMAS had to shore up its back-end technology to take care of our staff and, ultimately, care for our clients.
When COVID-19 hit, we quickly realized our business processes needed to speed up drastically to keep up with changing times. We didn’t have the right technology to enable our vital community-driven work, and an important area to target was our HR and Payroll software.
Like many nonprofits, UMAS personnel wear many hats. With multiple siloed systems for measuring, tracking, and reporting, UMAS needed a new provider to deliver integration and efficiency. Our HR team was pulled in different directions. We had to manually pull reports and compare, enter, and cross-check the data nightly.
We worked with Paylocity to co-create a solution that saved work hours, reduced unnecessary requests, and freed personnel to focus on the tasks most relevant to their skillsets. Our existing systems easily integrated into the Paylocity platform. We also synched the Electronic Data Deliverable (EDD) with Electronic Visit Verification Software (EVV) which allowed for automation of some mandated reports.
Clean data and integration with the state-mandated Electronic Visit Verification Software (EVV) software are critically important for us. Our state uses the EVV to audit us -- that's how we get paid, and that's how we do payroll. In this climate, there is not a more important system to streamline and ensure data integrity.
Thanks to these integrations, our nightly spreadsheet was completely automated. These integrations saved us time and cut down on the number of programs and interfaces the team at UMAS had to navigate daily.
With the new system in place to fit our needs, we are now saving hundreds of hours yearly. System integration saves the team about 80 hours per year, increasing efficiency and keeping critical data safe within the same system. And now, all 28 of our supervisors can onboard employees themselves, saving HR about two hours per new hire – a total of 300 hours a year in onboarding alone. Streamlined onboarding means getting new staff into work faster and acquiring funding from the state more easily.
Another benefit of Paylocity’s platform is Community – a modern communication and collaboration space that resembles the social media and apps that our workers use in their personal lives. Employees now use Community to access important updates, recognize peers, share photos or ideas, and feel a part of the UMAS mission. Most of our 2,400 workers are typically out in the community, and they use our mobile app anywhere they go. Remote work is no longer a pain point.
As you start the year with a renewed commitment to driving your mission, look at the systems you have in place, so that you can take care of your people first. With this upgrade, UMAS has found more time and energy to focus on our future – helping our employees to serve immigrant communities in new ways.
By Sagar Kumary
