How Western Global Innovated Their People Management

Western Global are a family run business describing themselves as a leading provider of tanks and dispensing equipment. They have been running for over 50 years and have around 150 employees in total across locations including UK, US, Canada and Poland as well as proudly boasting distribution locations worldwide.

Western’s Requirements for Appogee Leave

In 2018 Western Global got in touch with Appogee HR as they were looking for a better way to manage their employee absences. Some of the main issues that provided a poor employee experience included time-consuming HR admin, lack of global visibility, paper based absence management and lack of automation. 

The process for leave management involved a paper and spreadsheet based system which included paper forms to request holiday, which needed to be physically brought to managers to sign off, and a sick leave process which involved staff calling in to request sickness with managers then marking that on a spreadsheet. As a global company, this old fashioned process lacked innovation and was providing a poor day to day employee experience whereby staff didn’t feel in control of their own holiday allowances and also had to deal with potentially awkward interactions with management when requesting any other kind of leave.

With this in mind, Appogee HR identified that Appogee Leave their leave management software solution would be able to help them solve these issues. Western were able to get this set up in minutes and created automated workflows to seamlessly and accurately manage staff absence. Using self-service employee access, staff were able to check allowances and also update their details to ensure details such as addresses and bank details were up to date. HR could also create absence reports to ensure they could monitor wellbeing and absenteeism easily. 

The Upgrade Process

Within 2 months of implementing Appogee Leave, Western Global got in touch with Appogee HR to discuss the possibility of upgrading their HR technology to the advanced people management solution, Appogee HR Success. With the help of Appogee HR’s customer success team, Western Global were able to start an upgrade trial of the solution, involving many of their global team managers in the process. By utilising the 14 day free trial of Appogee HR Success, they identified that it would be able to help them achieve their new objectives. These included requiring a performance management solution which could align their staff to company objectives, improving their onboarding process using the online onboarding portal, and create more meaningful HR reports to keep the C-Suite in the loop.

Appogee HR’s Customer Success team worked closely with Western Global to ensure they would get the most out of their investment by providing detailed demonstrations of all the key features to the global teams. They were also able to assure Western of the excellent support they’d receive throughout their contract by introducing them to the support team and the detailed knowledge base to allow for a seamless transition from Appogee Leave to Appogee HR Success.

Western With Appogee HR Success

Utilising the HR reporting functions, Western Global’s HR team are able to ensure that key managers stay in the loop when it comes to people management. The onboarding module has also been considered to be a key enabler of creating their new seamless onboarding process.

More recently, being able to use Appogee HR Success throughout the global pandemic also meant that the HR function of the business was able to continue seamlessly thanks to all employees within the company now being able to access leave requests, company documents and all of the critical reporting functions online. Using newly available leave profiles, they are also able to keep track of who is working from home and who is in the office as well as who was furloughed and will be able to report on this when required. 

Similarly, Western have been able to onboard 2 new employees remotely. These staff members have been able to have access to everything they need to start their employee journey with Western Global showcasing Western’s new found HR innovation. 

Western Global are also confident they’ll be able to utilise all of the key performance management tools to allow them to create performance reviews aligned to company goal tracking using the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) method. This will provide each employee with transparency and visibility on all company goals, as well as seeing how each team aligns with these. They believe that with the OKR approach, introduced by Appogee HR, that their employees will be able to really see where they’re adding value within the company and the whole experience of being part of the team at Western will become much more meaningful.

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