Deputy

Part of the Transformation Plan included identifying and eliminating inefficiencies. A logical first step was to move away from physical rostering and embrace an automated system that could keep up with the team. Lifeways Chief Transformation Officer Amanda Brooke explains the company’s desire to shift away from their old model. “We knew there were inefficiencies, but we couldn’t identify [all of] them from our pen-and-paper approach,” she says. “We needed a solution that would digitise our data and give us oversight over the way we operate.” One of these challenges included time-consuming scheduling practices. Staff members had to create paper rosters, record start times, and duplicate them across multiple systems.…

Lifeways looked at several solutions, all of which met their well-documented requirements. What made Deputy stand apart — and what was so crucial to a successful transformation — was how easy it was to use for frontline teams. “Deputy has been a key step in our transformation journey,” Amanda says. “The rollout across all of our services was incredibly successful. I’m very pleased to say that we have realised the benefits that we forecast at the outset.” Improved time savings and efficiencies The team scored an early win during the Deputy pilot, when a manager needed to address staff shortages for certain services. Addressing these shortages would ordinarily have taken most of the day.…

Part of the Transformation Plan included identifying and eliminating inefficiencies. A logical first step was to move away from physical rostering and embrace an automated system that could keep up with the team.

Before Deputy, Village Ace tried out several different systems, but none of them hit the mark. One of the systems required their team to manage schedules on paper, making it chaotic for their team to keep track of employee schedules and leave requests efficiently. “People would request to sign off on paper, and the managers would track it on a calendar and then they have to give that information to a worker who was processing payroll,” says Maria. It also took a lot of time and work for their team to keep track of vacation hours, leave hours, and how much they had to pay out with only pen and paper. Sometimes, staff would forget who was taking paid holidays and subsequently forget to tell payroll.…

Village Ace switched to Deputy in 2019. Since then, their stores noticed a significant improvement in their efficiency in building schedules – especially since managers can oversee operations on the go with Deputy’s mobile app, saving them time and having to commute. In addition, Deputy’s ability to digitize large and critical documents has saved her team several thousand dollars every year. Maria can share the most updated version of essential files, such as the employee handbook, instantly with her team. She’s also witnessed staff morale and retention increase because employees have easy access and visibility to their schedules and can balance life outside of work.…

In addition, Deputy’s ability to digitize large and critical documents has saved her team several thousand dollars every year. Maria can share the most updated version of essential files, such as the employee handbook, instantly with her team.

Variety is one of Dedes Waterfront Group’s greatest strengths, and overseeing various services, such as dining, events, and weddings, requires different skill sets. Dedes had the right people in place, but optimizing workforce management processes across all locations wasn’t easy. As the detail-oriented director handling backend operations, Kerrie vividly remembers what it was like to manage the company’s large hospitality workforce with their old system: “It was like the Dark Ages.” With every department and venue operating independently, Kerrie marvels at the sheer effort it took to reconcile information and how little transparency she and Con had into the business.…

Everything changed around 2015, when Con and Kerrie discovered Deputy, an all-in-one platform that would streamline employee administration, from onboarding and rostering to time-tracking and team communication. What initially drew Dedes to Deputy was its ease of use—both for administrators and for venue employees, who could access their schedule and time clock on their mobile devices. Since then, Kerrie summarises Deputy’s impact on the business in three words: “accessibility, efficiency, transparency.”

The most powerful impact of having all this information available in one place is increased efficiency. “Deputy just makes life easy for everybody,” Kerrie shares. “It saves so much time, I can’t even exaggerate.”

As you might guess, a business like VaxWorks sees huge demand for their staff and vaccination services ahead of flu season each year. And during the covid-19 pandemic, that demand went into overdrive. “We needed to bring on a very large number of staff very quickly,” Damian says. “So we were recruiting dozens of new staff a week, and we needed an application which would allow us to onboard people quickly and also build rosters smoothly.” During those busy hiring seasons, before they started using Deputy HR, they would spend an average of 20 hours a week just on recruitment admin — and it would take a few weeks to get new staff hired, onboarded and ready to work.…

When it’s time to hire new employees, Damian loves that Deputy HR makes it simple to add custom questions to job listings and applicants can submit video answers with their CVs. This enables VaxWorks to quickly understand which candidates have the right clinical experience — before they even have their first interview — and progress the best applicants fast. “We get a lot of unsuitable applicants, which we want to screen out quickly. So the fact that they need to be able to answer these questions knowledgeably and the fact that they have to put in a bit of effort really helps.” “What that does is allows the first interview to be more of a conversation than an interview because they've actually already shown their clinical expertise.…