In a tight jobs market, Carlisle Homes uses human capital management to boost its employee experience – empowering its workforce with insights and grounding people decisions in data.
Improving the employee experience.
Carlisle Homes is a medium-sized residential construction company with a highly decentralised workforce. Like many of its peers, Carlisle had multiple “clunky”, reactive, back-end HR systems that didn’t talk to each other. Against the backdrop of a critical skills shortage, the company had no visibility of what made its people tick.
New GM People & Culture, Krista Hunt, had watched top brands partnering with Workday and knew this had contributed to a different type of employee experience. “When we evaluated Workday at Carlisle, the answer was just so clear. We loved that we could mould the solution to suit the tone and personality of our business – and knew we were investing in something that would evolve with us.”
Good brands work with good businesses. Against that measure alone, Workday is a clear market leader.
GM People & Culture
Accelerating job readiness.
Construction is a high turnover industry, making rapid onboarding essential. In the virtual environment imposed by the pandemic, Carlisle has converted its induction and job readiness training into Workday’s interactive, digital learning modules. “We’ve been able to get some excitement into onboarding, using animation and gamification to engage people with technical content,” says Krista.
“People love that it’s self-paced learning. Whenever they have some downtime, they can work through another segment. It used to take 12 weeks before our new starters were confident to work with customers. But now we’re using learning technology that empowers and engages people, it only takes 8 weeks.”
Investing in our people through systems like Workday was an easy decision. Companies invest heavily in evolving their technology position across many business areas – the people space is equally critical. If anything, given today’s ways of working, it really should come first.
John Doulgeridis, Managing Director
Building a performance culture.
Using Workday, Carlisle Homes has shifted its performance culture from a scorecard-based process to one where people take responsibility for their success. “We rescripted every KPI into more encouraging, simple language and introduced new ways of thinking about performance. Because people were comfortable with the system, it removed the barriers to processes that people had previously thought were clunky and time consuming”, says Krista.
“In our first post-Workday performance cycle, participation jumped from 65% to more than 80%. It was particularly extraordinary because, at the time, the State Government had shutdown construction – absolutely the worst time to try to get people excited about performance reviews!”
Our induction training is so popular the business is asking how we can develop similar e-learning modules for their areas.
People Business Partner
Building data into people decisions.
People Business Partner, Sara Garvey, says the data Workday delivers is levelling up what HR can do for the business. “Now we have one central source of the truth, we can generate reports to inform business decisions. Right now, we’re working with our stakeholders to help them interpret the people data, which has been very well received. The next step is to teach them how to self-serve – to build their own dashboards and reports and drill down into the data themselves. It’s exciting to think about all the possibilities.”