Story House Early Learning

The challenge

Story House lacked a centralised solution for managing a decentralised workforce in a connected, consistent, and simple manner. With over 40 and growing services, there was limited oversight on key metrics across the organisation without significant manual intervention including turnover, compliance, and team member performance. The People & Culture team was reliant on anecdotal feedback from managers or lengthy manual audits. Without appropriate technology, managers spent more time completing manual tasks instead of their primary focus of educating and caring for children.

The solution: A best-of-breed HRIS

As a growing organisation, Story House’s Head of People & Culture, Kate Ludwig, was certain of the organisation’s requirements. It was crucial that the chosen HRIS worked well with other existing software systems in place, but was easy enough to adopt by all its employees (Story House-ers) nationwide.

After researching multiple different systems, Kate and her team chose intelliHR due to its flexibility, functionality, and standout customer experience.

On top of centralising information, automating manual processes, and providing in-depth data insights, the platform’s ability to empower managers in supporting their employees was a key value-add for Story House-ers.

"The self-service capability of intelliHR allows us to empower our managers to look after their people, while also providing them transparency around key business functions like compliance and pay rates." Kate Ludwig, Head of People and Culture at Story House Early Learning

With increased engagement and a high adoption rate, Story House has achieved some great results within the organisation thanks to intelliHR.

Key results

• 75% - Reduction in admin hours

• +16 - Increase in NPS

• 8% - Decrease in YoY turnover

Outcome #1: Scaling and streamlining bulk recruitment with JobAdder

Story House wanted to be strategic with the systems, processes and benefits put in place to support its people-first culture. By embedding intelliHR into its daily operations, the organisation created significant efficiencies for its Story House-ers through HR automation.

Through automation in intelliHR, the People and Culture team were able to save time by eliminating paper-based forms, unnecessary manual processes, and manual data analyses. The automated reminders, easy-to-read dashboards, and centralised source for information resulted in 75% reduction in admin hours for Story House’s People and Culture team.

The early education sector also has significant compliance requirements, which Story House handled seamlessly with intelliHR’s compliance management solutions. Story House-ers can take accountability for their personal compliance via intelliHR’s self-service functionality, and managers can track their progress through the compliance dashboard.

By providing better visibility of key employee information and streamlined processes, intelliHR enabled Story House to make proactive data-driven decisions with ease.

Outcome #2: Improved engagement with 16-point increase in NPS and 8% decrease in YoY turnover

Upon the implementation of intelliHR, Story House created a continuous feedback  model to track employee engagement and wellbeing across the organisation. The automated feedback loops consist of three quarterly check-ins and one formal appraisal each year, as well as a quarterly wellbeing check.

Having a consistent feedback loop through intelliHR between employees and managers helps the People and Culture team to better understand the workforce and their current state of mind. This has led to improved employee engagement and wellbeing – indicated by a 16-point increase in NPS.

When paired with intelliHR’s powerful analytics, the organisation is empowered to dive deeper into its people data. Kate and her team could analyse employee sentiment, key trends, and even employees at risk of churn. Managers were also able to utilise all the in-depth analyses from these regulated check-ins to have meaningful conversations with employees regarding their job satisfaction, goals, and career progression. A direct benefit of this can be seen in the 8% decrease in YoY turnover across the organisation.

"Capabilities such as keyword analysis and predictive attrition analytics assist our People and Culture team in understanding key insights and risks more efficiently." Kate Ludwig, Head of People and Culture at Story House Early Learning

Outcome #3: A certified Great Place to Work with supportive diversity initiatives

As a reflection of its excellent culture, Story House was awarded a Great Place to Work® certification in early 2023. The certification involved a rigorous survey with a 60-question trust index on topics such as justice, inclusion, balance, welfare safety and opportunity as part of the process. The organisation could also go into the process confidently due to its solid understanding of employee engagement and satisfaction gained through intelliHR.

Another example Story House further continues to set is by using intelliHR to support its strategic goal of embracing diversity. Using intelliHR, Story House gathered information on their First Nations Story House-ers, as well as valuable information to understand Story House-ers’ pronoun preferences, personal preferences for recognition, and other spoken languages.

Collecting this diversity information via IntelliHR has assisted Story House in creating its organisational Reconciliation Action Plan.

Why choose a best-of-breed solution over an all-in-one?

As a growing organisation, Story House’s Head of People & Culture, Kate Ludwig, wanted a best-of-breed HRIS that offered enterprise-level functionality, without the compromises of an all-in-one solution.

Kate and her team wanted more depth in their chosen systems, not width. That way, the organisation could make the most of the strengths of each system with fewer compromises across the board.

"When I looked at intelliHR, I could see it had all of the functionality that my workforce and I needed to manage our Story House-ers. When you look at an all-in-one solution in comparison, there were compromises that we’d have to make to achieve our goals – and compromise isn’t something I wanted to do when it comes to our people-first culture and strategy." Kate Ludwig, Head of People and Culture at Story House Early Learning

With intelliHR (HRIS) at its core, Story House’s HR tech ecosystem includes an ATS platform for its recruitment team, from which data flows into intelliHR upon onboarding. The organisation also has a payroll system to process pays, a recognition system to incentivise employees, and a learning management system (LMS) for learning and training purposes. Onsite employees also have a workforce management system to process leave and manage their rosters and timesheets.

Having a well-integrated tech stack has created a seamless candidate and employee experience. Thanks to a more consistent user experience and smooth data flow from one system to another, Story House Early Learning can spend less time on tedious tasks and more time on its mission – to make every child’s early learning story a happy and positive one.