How a Healthcare Tech Company Transformed its Separation Process
Offboarding technology helped this company save $6,000+ per employee
Company Industry: Healthcare
Employee Count: 15,000+
Involuntary Attrition: 5.5%
The Company
This Nashville-based healthcare technology company is trusted by healthcare payers, providers, and consumers to handle more than 15 billion transactions per year. The company provides clinical, financial, and patient engagement solutions geared toward building a stronger, better coordinated, increasingly collaborative, and more efficient healthcare system.
The Challenge
The healthcare technology company’s personnel needs were constantly in flux due to ongoing innovation and growth through acquisitions. Because of these continual changes, the HR team was often bogged down by low-value-add administrative tasks associated with offboarding—making it increasingly difficult to focus on more strategic initiatives. Due to the customer- and market-dependent nature of the industry, the company sought a more efficient way to manage the impact to its people when business demands necessitated a workforce reduction.
Historically, separation events took the company anywhere from 32 to 45 days between event initiation and generation of employee release agreements—a cumbersome task for the HR team given the necessary document customization based on individual employee factors. During workforce reductions, the company spent approximately $256 per employee per additional day kept on board due to costs associated with payroll, severance pay, and benefits.
In the best-case scenario of a 32-day separation process, the company still spent more than $8,000 per employee during that time period. For large-scale events, the cost easily totaled millions of dollars.
In addition to the financial impact to operations, the company’s offboarding process required a full-time project manager to coordinate complex analysis and involvement from several teams. Even with an employee dedicated to offboarding, the process was manual and inefficient, using general programs like Word, Excel, and email to manage many moving parts. This imprecision created too much room for error, posing reputational, financial, and legal risk.
The Solution
Seeking a more efficient and cost-effective way to manage these ongoing workforce changes, the company purchased Onwards HR’s offboarding technology, specifically interested in severance automation.
The Impact
Soon after implementing Onwards HR, the company managed its first workforce reduction. The company quickly saw the return on its investment.
Shortened the event processing timeline by 75%. What previously took the company a minimum of 32 days took only 8 days with Onwards HR—thanks to automated processes and workflows.
Reduced costs by $6,000+ per employee separation. At a cost of $256 per employee per day for payroll, severance, and benefits, the 8-day timeline yielded a cost savings of approximately $6,144 per impacted employee.
Increased productivity by 83%. By using separation technology to generate employee agreements and evaluate workforce reductions for compliance with employment law, the company’s HR and Legal teams no longer wasted time on routine tasks.
Gained the equivalent of a full-time HR team member. Also, thanks to streamlined processes, the company no longer needed a project manager dedicated to separations. Instead, the employee was reallocated to another key HR initiative that the company hadn’t yet been able to implement.
“This might not be the kind of technology HR professionals think they need, but once they have it, they’ll realize the considerable time savings it creates—and the pressure it removes from HR and legal teams in ensuring accuracy of required documentation, as well as avoiding any wrongful termination lawsuits.”
-Jennifer Bender, SVP People Solutions, HR Shared Services
The Onwards HR Difference
Onwards HR allows for timely collaboration among teams by leveraging real-time updates to improve communication and workflow.
The dedicated offboarding technology develops a robust event history by documenting justification of events, impacted employees, and approvals throughout the event lifecycle.
Dynamic configuration options enable quick generation of documents, including necessary legal waivers and severance agreements.
Data analysis is easier and more accurate, enabling companies to evaluate trends over time.
Built-in tools help prevent costly legal proceedings by building comprehensive employee files and evaluating for compliance with the WARN Act, Title VII, and corporate guidelines.