How a Canadian association raises the people management bar with Rise
Client Stories 5 minute read

How a Canadian association raises the people management bar with Rise

Rise | March 10, 2020

The CLIA uses Rise’s all-in-one HR platform to better serve their clients. They’re a small team, so they need to be able to focus their efforts on their people, not their processes.

Canadian Lawyers Insurance Association (CLIA) specializes in the management of liability insurance for their clients. With headquarters in Regina, the small organization provides their law firm clients with the direct and localized service they want and need. 

As the Administration Manager of CLIA, Sheila Gyorgy wears many different hats in her role. From supervising her team of claims administrators to managing accounts payable and accounts receivable, she is a key player in CLIA’s tight-knit team of five permanent employees. As Sheila says, the successful dynamic of their team is dependent on having camaraderie with flexible, supportive, and trusted colleagues that can adapt to the small work environment in which every day is different.

When CLIA began to scale, the association’s goal was to find ways to make their business operations run smoother at all angles. This priority is reflected in their choice of Rise in handling CLIA’s HR, benefits, and payroll processes.

While connecting with a director at Sun Life Financial during a charity run, Sheila, herself a previous employee of Sun Life’s Regina division, had mentioned that CLIA was actively searching for a new solution for their payroll and HR needs. At the time, the association’s payroll management was being outsourced and administrative tasks such as time-off tracking were handled through numerous spreadsheets. From this experience, Sheila believed that bringing payroll back in-house and doing away with overwhelmingly time-consuming spreadsheets with a centralized and integrated system would provide ease of mind.

Since CLIA already had their group benefits set up with Sun Life, Sheila’s connection recommended Rise. After three fantastic presentations, Sheila was sold by the offered services, and as she reveals, Rise stole the competition from the other providers under CLIA’s consideration.

As Sheila recounts, the Rise team took the lead in setting CLIA up for success right off the gate with steps and instructions that were simple to understand and quick to execute upon.

In fact, Sheila felt that Rise did the majority of the work up front, leaving her with very little preparation and work to do on her end. All she had to do was provide the required employee information, and it was all taken care of. Rise took the load off the typical lengthy and intensive implementation process and all of the involved tasks, making it an entirely time-saving and stress-free experience.

Upon the completion of a smooth and seamless implementation, using Rise for Payroll + Benefits + HR has helped CLIA take care of business when it came to people management.

With their previous payroll service provider, CLIA frequently encountered challenges, such as waiting for payroll reconciliation invoices for year-end, often for months on end. Having little to no insight into payroll processing was both troublesome and worrisome. 

With Rise, as soon as a pay run was approved, the money would be taken out of the account by the next day. In the end, it takes five quick minutes to process payroll on a biweekly basis. For such a convenient and streamlined service, Sheila found tremendous value in the time effectiveness and cost savings of Rise payroll. 

With Sun Life and Rise’s joint integration, group health benefits management became a one stop shop for CLIA.

Rise’s single sign-on feature allows CLIA employees to log in to Rise for everything they need to take care of when it comes to their health insurance, including connecting directly to their my Sun Life account to submit their benefits claims. For Sheila, the quick and integrated nature of benefits premiums being synced automatically in payroll deductions on paycheques without manual intervention has proven to be a huge benefit. With one less step to take, it’s one less thing administration needs to worry about.

When it came to time-off management, CLIA’s CEO was the first test case. Whereas previously, employees had tediously entered their vacation time in hours, Rise’s time-off tracking system allows employees to input their days off for approval. As a devotee to paper-based documentation practices, they were persuaded by the effortlessness of this electronic solution to vacation time tracking.

Now, Rise’s digital HR solution is something that every CLIA employee uses and champions, thus alleviating the volume of administrative HR requests directed to Sheila.

From personalized care to quick response times, Sheila truly feels that providing excellent customer service is the number one priority for Rise, appreciating how the team goes over and above to satisfy their customers.

For an Administration Manager with many responsibilities like Sheila, effective time management is crucial. She greatly appreciates the small things that Rise does to make an HR and payroll administrator's day run more efficiently and effectively. For example, receiving email reminders to process payroll and having calendar entries sent to her inbox when it’s time to process payroll helps to take the responsibilities and pressures off her plate so that she doesn’t need to worry about these tasks later on. Because of these gestures, Sheila can rely on Rise’s consistency when it comes to service and support.

Something so simple for Rise to do means so much to CLIA, which makes all the difference. In finding the most appealing solution for their people management needs, the case is closed on Rise. 

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