Overview

Atlantic Gold is a mining company based in rural Nova Scotia, Canada, that’s committed to creating responsible and sustainable economic opportunities for surrounding communities. With one active gold site and three proposed sites on the horizon, we create high-paying local jobs while protecting the environment. Atlantic Gold runs a 24/7 operation with over 300 employees who have a broad range of technical skill levels.

Supernova Award Category

Future of Work: Employee Experience

The Problem

The majority of our employees work in the field, and so have limited access to corporate computers or email accounts. As a result, our HR and People team used to rely on paper time sheets, bulletin boards, and word of mouth to keep our employees connected, engaged, and informed. Unfortunately, this approach was often prone to errors and lapses in communication across the organization. We wanted to go paperless and fully digitize our processes so that we could guarantee consistent communications and improve employee engagement. 

Our People team needed a robust system that would streamline and improve recruiting, scheduling, performance management, benefits, and workforce analytics. We were especially hoping to improve time management and set up a smooth integration with our other business systems, like our payroll app.

COVID-19 also presented a host of challenges to our team that we hoped to tackle with a more modern solution. As an essential business, we must maintain smooth operations, while still ensuring that we are addressing the concerns and needs of our employees. We implemented a number of precautions and measures to help with this, such as staggered break times and new sanitization procedures, but we also needed stronger and more reliable communication to keep everyone informed and engaged. The uncertain and ever-shifting environment created by the pandemic made it such that we needed a robust system to help us stay agile and keep the mine operational.

The Solution

After evaluating a number of solutions including Workday and Ceridian, we picked Sage People for its robust reporting, ability to integrate with other business systems and its easy-to-use workforce experience interface. We worked with Sage People’s implementation specialists who helped us customize the system exactly as we needed it, and we now refer to it internally as ‘AG People’. 

We were also able to take into account input from employees and supervisors about streamlining HR requests and approval processes. By involving our workforce in the implementation, we were able to get up and running with automated processes that fit our unique requirements the instant we went live. A huge component of our success with AG People was encouraging mobile usage, which makes it easy for employees to connect with managers, colleagues, and information they need to be successful right from their pockets.

The results

For a team largely based in the field, it is great to be able to grant all of our employees easy access to submit their timesheets and see their paid time off balances, approval workflows, and company updates right through a mobile application. Shifting from paper-based processes to digital workflows means that we can expedite time-off and promotion approvals, streamlining performance management and ultimately increasing employee satisfaction. We also now have the ability to easily produce workforce reports, create labor forecasts, and make decisions based on the cost and impact to the business.

Shortly after implementing Sage People, we merged with St. Barbara, a mining company based in Australia that highly prioritizes employment equity across genders and ethnicities. The system helps us track how many female supervisors and First Nations native community members we have, giving us insight into diversity ratios at each level of management. We can also monitor employees’ reasons for leaving, making it easy to not only detect trends we might need to address but also to make data-driven determinations on where to focus recruiting, engagement, and retention efforts. This level of detailed people analytics enables us to develop targeted events, training programs, and promotion opportunities to help increase female representation in the mining industry.

Metrics

Since adopting a modern solution, our HR and People team have been able to reduce their administrative workload by 50%. Approvals for moving people from manager to manager, promoting workers from one job title to another, changing wages, or entering timesheets and time-off requests are all very simple in the Sage People app. Rather than doing these things in person and on paper, it’s all digital now, which accelerates most approvals to just one day versus taking a full week. This frees the team to spend more time with employees and supervisors, building deeper engagement and stronger communication. 

Even through our merger with St. Barbara, we were able to effortlessly adapt our processes to meet our new parent company’s expectations and standards, while keeping up with a 20% growth in headcount. We’ve also gained unprecedented insight and data into our teams, employees, and demographic groups. Data requests now take 10 minutes, as opposed to the half a day previously spent trying to manage employee information manually in Excel.

The Technology

• Sage People, including the core HR solution, along with the system’s workforce experience, performance management, and HR and people analytics modules
• Sage People also integrates with our payroll system, Ceridian Dayforce

Disruptive Factor

We found the implementation process very smooth, but if we ever ran into any issues or questions, we knew we could reach out to the Sage People customer community. As we’ve continued to expand how we use the system, the community has been critical in helping us figure out exactly how to use a feature and get the most out of it. Implementing a powerful HR system has been especially impactful during COVID-19. Our HR and People team can easily monitor absence reasons related to the pandemic, allowing us to get ahead of staffing shortages and keep operations running smoothly and safely, even as local restrictions were constantly changing. Strong communication via AG People allowed us to reassure people with regular updates and build resilience among our employees amidst tremendous uncertainty. When some employees were restricted from traveling between provinces to make it to work, we could keep a close eye on impacted areas and team members thanks to the information that was already tracked through our system. Without the ability to communicate digitally, we never would have been able to keep our team updated about restrictions, changing rules, staggered break times, or new cleaning procedures. AG People helps us keep everyone informed about what upper management is doing, not just to keep them safe and healthy, but also to ensure they have the flexibility they need for things like getting tested, self-isolating, or childcare.

Shining Moment

The strides we’ve made in understanding the demographics of our workforce and improving the employee experience for key demographics have been especially impactful. We can track gender and understand how that breaks down along location and job title. We also monitor our diversity ratios, and know how many First Nations groups we have on-site. It’s a priority for us to offer positions and employment to those communities, and our HR system makes that incredibly easy to track.