Challenge
Ropes and Gray, a top-tier law firm with 1,200 attorneys working across three continents, understood that every aspect of their employee experience played a role in attracting and retaining the best legal talent. Providing employees with a modern and intuitive technology experience was more than a nice-to-have strategy for them – it was critical to their recruiting culture.
That included their internal human resources systems. During the open enrollment period for their benefits program, however, the team at Ropes and Gray discovered their current process was causing frustration and confusion among employees. They jumped to investigate the issue and fix whatever was driving the complaints.
Ropes and Gray was using PeopleSoft HCM in combination with a third-party tool for its open enrollment process. Unfortunately, the approach had two major shortcomings. For one, employees had to research their benefits options in one system while making actual plan choices in another, creating aggravating delays. And for another, the process overloaded users with too much information, making it hard for employees to evaluate benefits content and leading to time-consuming calls to the HR help desk.
The company knew it needed to act quickly to improve the system and continue to provide employees with excellent digital experiences. So they turned to Skuid to reduce the friction in their open enrollment process.
Solution
They used Skuid to quickly unify the two parts of the process. The solution was so comprehensive that Ropes and Gray was able to fully do away with the costly third-party tool. Enrollment is now done entirely within PeopleSoft.
“The Skuid solution eliminated the need for employees to have to log onto multiple sites during enrollment, made their benefits decision-making process easier, and removed a huge pain point for us,” says Elizabeth Zimmerman, Senior Manager HR Systems at Ropes and Gray. Skuid EXP integrated easily with the firm’s existing infrastructure – it didn’t even require the company to upgrade its PeopleSoft HCM to a newer version.
In addition, Skuid introduced a useful benefits enrollment wizard that acted as a sort of “personal concierge” to help Ropes and Gray employees select the right plan for them. The new system guides employees through a series of questions to identify the best benefits for their unique needs, even enabling side-by-side plan comparisons. All relevant benefits information in the PeopleSoft HCM is fully integrated into the wizard, which is designed to make complex plan information more digestible.
Results
According to a recent study by the Harvard Business Review, employers with outmoded and hard-to-use IT systems are struggling to compete for talent in today’s hot hiring market. Luckily, the team at Ropes and Gray doesn’t have to worry about that. They’ve always recognized the vital role that next-generation technology plays in addressing modern recruiting and retention challenges.
And with Skuid, the team has made its internal employee systems more user-friendly than ever. “I was recently at a meeting of HR leaders in our firm and the feedback about the new open enrollment process was overwhelmingly positive,” says Zimmerman. “They understand how important having a more intuitive and streamlined process is to employee satisfaction.”