For Kelly McFadden, Head of People & Performance at Starlight Children’s Foundation, creating an exceptional employee experience is fundamental to helping the organization deliver its mission. But a fragmented technology environment was making that increasingly difficult.
“People found the number of different systems confusing,” explains McFadden. Throughout the employee lifecycle, team members had to navigate nine separate systems. Many of those systems didn’t communicate with one other, resulting in duplicated effort and inconsistent data. “We wanted to reimagine what that digital journey looked like for our people,” McFadden says.
Starlight was seeking an affordable, out-of-the-box solution with enterprise-quality capabilities. “We selected Workday because we wanted a fully integrated HR, finance and payroll platform, one source of truth and a better experience for our people,” says McFadden.
Rapid deployment, immediate value.
Starlight completed the first phase of its deployment, Workday Human Capital Management and Workday Payroll for Australia, in just six months by adopting built-in best practices. “It was a very ambitious timeline because we wanted to realize the benefits of an integrated platform as early as possible,” says McFadden.
The implementation, which replaced nine systems with just one, had an immediate impact. Team members love the simpler, more intuitive experience, which means less time navigating multiple systems, while leaders have fast, easy access to real-time workforce data to support decision-making.
For Starlight’s hospital-based employees, who spend their days with children, the Workday mobile app makes it easy to manage their shifts, timesheets, and leave on the go—with all the information flowing straight into payroll.
For the first time, our leaders have data they trust, and our people have a seamless system they actually love using every single day.
Head of People & Performance
Smarter, more efficient payroll.
“Our payroll operations were disconnected from our HR system, resulting in inefficiencies,” says McFadden. Today, information flows automatically across HR, timesheeting, rostering, and payroll. According to McFadden, this has improved accuracy and reduced manual processing for the finance team. “A lot more activity is happening upstream, which means payroll processing is far more efficient,” she notes.
Accurate payroll is nonnegotiable. Workday has enabled Starlight to automate complex award interpretation, scheduling, and time tracking directly within a single platform. This simplifies compliance and gives Starlight confidence that employees are paid accurately and in line with workplace obligations.
With Workday, our timesheeting, rostering, and payroll work together. Processing takes less time. It’s more automated. It’s more accurate. And it gives us confidence.
Head of People & Performance
Building capability for the future.
The People & Performance team uses Workday Recruiting to streamline the way Starlight attracts, hires, and develops talent, providing a better experience for prospective talent and hiring managers. “We’ve been able to capture valuable information about people who are interested in joining Starlight and progress them from application to offer more quickly,” says McFadden.
Workday is also creating greater visibility of internal talent. Employees can express interest in new roles within the platform, giving HR deeper insights into their skills, aspirations, and career interests. Starlight also plans to deploy Workday Talent Optimization and Workday Learning to connect job profiles with skills and competencies. This will support individual career development, strengthen succession planning and help proactively match people to opportunities, ensuring the right talent is in the right role at the right time.
Connecting people and finance for smarter decisions.
“The next step for us is Workday Financial Management,” says McFadden. “Today, we’re exporting data from one system, uploading it into another, and analysing it separately.” Bringing financial data into Workday will change that entirely. With people and finance connected in a single platform, Starlight will be able to forecast more accurately, build budgets from the ground up at a position level, and give people managers real-time visibility of their financial position.
Having people and finance in one place means we can plan with confidence, respond quickly, and make decisions that are truly grounded in what's happening across Starlight.
Head of People & Performance