Putting employees in the driver's seat when it comes to managing their own data

Andrea Frohning, Chief Human Resources Officer, Patterson

Andrea Frohning is the Chief Human Resources Officer for Patterson Companies, a leading distributor of dental and animal health products based in Minnesota. She has been with the organization since May 2018. In her role, she is responsible for all aspects of the Human Resources function including compensation, benefits, talent development, succession planning, performance management, employee relations and diversity, equity and inclusion.

Patterson Companies is an industry-leading distributor of dental and animal health products, which has been in business for nearly 150 years. For a company to thrive as long as ours, you need a few things: quality products, a commitment to customer service and, most importantly, a strong workforce to keep things running smoothly.

From hiring the right people to retaining them for the long-haul, Patterson is a company that is committed to listening to our employees’ needs while looking for ways to strengthen that workforce for the next 150 years.

Two years ago, our organization implemented Workday, a human resources lifecycle management software to help empower our employees. While the system itself is known for its ease of use, the thought process behind this change was somewhat more involved.

Understanding the need

The culture at Patterson – and at most large companies that have been around for over a century – has evolved quite a bit, even over the course of just the past few years. Employees have become more tech-savvy and eager to have real-time solutions for HR tasks like printing pay stubs, requesting time off or even recognizing coworkers. Whether it’s banking, shopping or even ordering food delivery, people expect transparency when it comes to their data management. How long will it take for me to get my package? What’s my current credit card balance? What’s the wait to get a pizza? All of these questions can be answered using everyday technology, and employees expect the same level of convenience from their employer.

“Don’t wait until there’s a problem to look for innovative solutions. Work proactively as opposed to reactively, especially when it comes to the needs of your employees.”

Similarly, we as an HR department have become much more focused on understanding our employees’ when it comes to retaining talent. How long do they stay? Are we losing long-tenured employees? If so, what can we do to better engage and reward them for their work?

When we began the RFP process for an HR software management program, we knew we needed something that would satisfy both audiences. When we discovered Workday, we found a partner that could empower employees and inform our HR team. It was the right partnership for employees, and seemingly a no-brainer for our leadership. But that wasn’t always the case.

Be Proactive

While we had a system that was providing solid basic HR transactions in place, a change in our leadership would spark a push to drive improvements in our processes and offerings.

Over the past 10 years, we’ve seen a major shift in our leadership structure. From our CEO to our COO and of course our CHRO, we have built a team of experienced leaders from different backgrounds that compliment the leaders in our company who are experts in our industries. Bringing together these different perspectives has allowed us to have a fresh perspective on our business, and to recognize that change is important if we want to continue our success.

While there wasn’t an issue that was unresolved in the way we had done things in the past, we recognized as a leadership team that implementing Workday would be a way for us to proactively take care of our employees and live our People-First value. Ironically, the pandemic would end up creating a need for employees to have greater remote access to their information. Fortunately, we were already far enough down the path in the implementation process that we didn’t need to be reactive.

The lesson here? Don’t wait until there’s a problem to look for innovative solutions. Work proactively as opposed to reactively, especially when it comes to the needs of your employees.

Providing the right support

Once legwork had been completed and we were ready to rollout Workday across our organization, we recognized that training, change management and ongoing support would be paramount to our success. This was no small effort, and it would take a team effort in order to make sure the implementation and adoption matched the effort that had gone into this project over the past several months and years.

Samantha Bergeson, our Vice President of Human Resources, was instrumental in leading this effort, and creating a cross functional team that included IT, organizational change management, HR and others. We knew that the lift wasn’t just going to be about the technical aspects of the program, but the cultural shift that needed to happen with it.

To support this shift, we created training materials and made sure we had system experts on hand to help answer questions, but we also made sure to engage with people experts who understood our employees and could be available to talk about not just the right solutions to their questions from a functional standpoint, but from a usability and understandability standpoint as well.

In our first week, we had very high adoption rates for Workday, measured by site visits and interaction. But more impressively to me, is that we did not have a huge influx of support requests and phone calls. That means our materials and communications ahead of time were thorough and easy to understand, keeping our support call and email volume low. That’s a win for our employees, and our HR support team.

In the end, the Workday implementation at Patterson demonstrated the importance of balancing technology, culture and transparency, when it comes to creating a more positive workplace. Moving forward, we plan to use the data available through Workday to help better engage, attract and retain talent, while enhancing the software based on our employees wants – and not just on what they need in the moment.

Data Management