Brosnan

With a vision of restoring confidence in construction, Brosnan has earned the reputation as trusted specialists in remediation, upgrade, refurbishment, and maintenance of buildings across New Zealand.

Brosnan employs 350 people with offices in Auckland, Tauranga, Wellington, Christchurch, and Queenstown. Since their founding in 2010, Brosnan has delivered hundreds of projects. Their expertise gives clients the confidence that their most valued assets are in safe hands.

When Wendy Baker joined Brosnan as Group Human Resources Manager in 2020, her wealth of experience in management and human resources enabled her to quickly identify an opportunity to transform the company’s HR operations.

“The reliance on spreadsheets and the absence of an HRIS presented a clear opportunity for digital transformation,” Wendy says.

The main challenge faced by Brosnan’s HR team, which then consisted of two people working across HR, Recruitment and Learning and Development, was the manual and time consuming processes, which all hinged on historical spreadsheets and documents.

“All employee information sat with the HR team with no way of requesting updates and changes other than via email,” Wendy says. “All this information was also kept in spreadsheets and documents which were not ‘live’, resulting in numerous problems ranging from data errors and version control issues to data corruption.”

“We would spend an average of three hours a month updating the organisational chart within Powerpoint, only for it to become out of date as soon as there was a new employee, a promotion or an employee’s details changed.”

Performance was another area of frustration for the Brosnan HR team. The system was paper-based and mostly handwritten, meaning documents needed to be scanned and filed.

The process of retrieving information from each performance report was tedious and slow.

As Brosnan rolled out each ELMO module, the benefits of using the software were quickly felt by the team.

HR Core was the first module to be introduced, enabling them to move towards a ‘single source of truth’ for all their employee data.

“It’s easy for the entire team to use and access, all data is accurate and up to date and it’s removed the need for our HR team to be the gatekeeper of all information,” Wendy says.

HR Core’s powerful reporting capability has also been a game changer, providing Brosnan with key insights and greater visibility of the organisation.

“The ability to schedule reports, filter large data sets and easily share reports with key stakeholders has given us insight into the organisation we haven’t had previously,” Wendy says.

“We are slowly doing away with all the spreadsheets including two that have managed our work vehicles. Once all the vehicle information has been added our Fleet Manager, HR, and Accounts will have access to monthly updates and overall greater visibility.”

Using Forms, Brosnan has significantly reduced the time spent on a range of previously manual processes. For example, any changes to their Fuel Card terms and conditions would previously require 89 letters to be sent out to team members and take one and half days to complete. Using ELMO, this process now takes just over an hour.

Using workflows, automations and notifications Brosnan has been able to use ELMO to significantly streamline their onboarding process and improve their onboarding completion rate.

“The automations, workflows and notifications we have set up for onboarding have been life changing. We have reduced a 102-step process to just 30 steps and cut the number of emails for new starters by 65% year-on-year,” Wendy says.

“We have also seen an onboarding completion rate of over 90%. Previously this was around 70% across both contractors and our own new starters.”

The contracts module has also helped optimise the onboarding process, reducing the back and forth required with managers for the review and approval of documents. All contract documents are now centrally located in ELMO and attributed to an employee’s profile.

Using ELMO Performance, Brosnan has transitioned from a manual, paper-based method to a centralised process leveraging easy-to-access reports and the ability to create reminders.

Wendy and her team’s focus on change management and communication has resulted in an impressive uptake by the entire Brosnan workforce.

“The data speaks for itself. In just the last 30 days, 50% of all users have logged into ELMO, 76% have logged in in the past two months and 100% of users have logged in at some point since March this year,” Wendy says. “Over time we have made significant progress utilising ELMO and hope to continue optimising usage and its power in the future.”