Blog summary:
Sylvie Mondoux of Olymel shares insights on change management strategies and processes that helped her organization support complex union rules and simplify time and attendance processes across operations.
Complex union rules and workforce requirements have practical impacts for managers, HR teams and payroll accuracy. For Olymel, leading producer of pork and poultry in Canada, operating in multiple regions posed significant compliance challenges when attempting to maintain accurate time an attendance for their workforce.
Sylvie Mondoux, time and attendance director at Olymel, shares how they navigate compliance with complex union rules by using the right workforce management system. She highlights how they retired outdated systems and implemented a platform that could meet provincial legislation, improve payroll and time tracking accuracy, and equip employees for success.
“Workforce management is really the heart of the company. It touches everything the employee experiences day to day.”
Sylvie Mondoux | Time and Attendance Director at Olymel
How Olymel’s workforce management supports complex union rules
Olymel employes approximately 12,000 people over 26 locations across Canada. These locations are highly unionized and come with significant employer compliance requirements. Sylvie explains, “One of our biggest challenges was fitting more than 30 union agreements into a single system and still delivering accurate payroll.”
This complexity was compounded by Olymel’s legacy processes, which included multiple, disconnected payroll systems and processes, a variety of in-house tools and separate systems for time tracking. “We were using multiple systems across different sites, including an old AS/400 payroll system. It was very difficult to maintain, customize or extract meaningful data.”
Multiple systems also meant that there were inconsistent processes used across work sites so there could be manual time capture processes or error-prone validation methods. Likewise, these systems limited Olymel’s ability to support flexible work, provide meaningful workforce reporting, and ultimately hindered efficiency.
Olymel needed a single system to reduce the complexity of these processes and give them the ability to customize rules that applied to time capture. These constraints meant that a flexible workforce management software that could meet their needs both now and, in the future, was non-negotiable.
Navigating successful change management
Olymel chose to find a solution that allowed them to simplify their workforce management processes by accounting for complexity. Through a structured transformation effort led by their HR team and their workforce, Olymel was able to consolidate systems and modernize their time and attendance processes using ADP® WorkForce Suite.
Sylvie notes that change management processes were deeply important. “Change management made the difference. People weren’t surprised at go‑live. They were excited.”
Following the model of a people-first digital transformation, Olymel stayed focused on the idea that better a workforce management system would mean less friction for their people. They asked their team to identify measurable impacts for managers and operations with the framing that small efficiency gains at scale would lead to massive organizational value.
These were a few of Olymel’s goals for their change management process:
- Retire disconnected legacy payroll systems
- Improve HR team day-to-day work
- Free HR leaders to focus on strategy
- Reduce worker anxiety around HR processes
If previously complex and stressful activities like timesheet validation could take less time they could be certain they were taking the right steps. Sylvie recalls when “a manager told me it took him just 15 minutes to validate his timesheet. That’s when I knew we were truly saving time.” These efforts ultimately supported the following results:
- Improved manager productivity
- Improved compliance with complex union rules
- Reduced time savings across the organization
- Improved confidence in payroll accuracy
- Supported better work experience for their people
For Olymel, workforce management complexity wasn’t just a technical concern. This resulted in a series of daily requirements that affected managers, HR teams and payroll accuracy. Changing to a unified workforce management system helped this company ease workforce processes and support greater efficiency across their production sites.
At the heart of this change was an emphasis on the people impacted by time and attendance processes. Sylvie makes clear that change management processes fueled by workforce feedback were vital steps for realizing the full value of this transformation. “Listen to your people,” she says. “Everything you do during implementation should improve their day-to-day work.”
Check out the full interview and discover how ADP WorkForce Suite helped Olymel simplify compliance with complex union rules.
