Valley Carriers is a family-owned and operated log hauling, trucking, and specialty transportation company based in British Columbia.
To learn more about the organization, we spoke with Genny Loewen, the People & Office Manager of Valley Carriers. Her history with the company goes back over 35 years, as she is part of the family that founded the business in 1963. Neil and Rita Klassen, along with their children, which includes Genny and her four brothers, worked together to grow the multi-generational family business into what it is today. Now, the third and fourth generations are starting to carry on the family legacy towards the future.
Valley Carriers integrates their guiding values of humility, collaboration, faith, growth, and change into their company culture. As Genny shares, their culture is all about creating a positive environment where all of their 100+ employees can grow together, work together, and support each other.
Their work culture is unlike a typical office setting. With drivers out on the road and office managers dispersed across various operation bases, team members must rely on reliable communication and reporting. As for their HR department, Genny and her team must be creative with ideas on growing the culture since their employees don’t see each other on a daily and regular basis. One way is by hosting events throughout the year, such as the annual Valley Carriers BBQ, to bring everyone together and allow team members to match friendly faces to familiar names.
The need for a better Payroll & HR system
As Genny shares, Rise is the company’s first experience with working with a payroll and HR service provider. While they were initially reluctant to sign on, for fear of what they initially saw as being at the mercy of someone else, once on board, they wished they had done it sooner.
Previously, HR and payroll was done in house, but once the company started to rapidly grow, there became a need for a different system. For Genny and her HR team, payroll was a lot of work with a lot of spreadsheets to keep track of, as they were used to entering hours worked manually into the system. They realized they needed the capability to allow managers to input employee information when needed. Genny’s team had to find a solution that would allow their workflow wishes to come true, efficiently and seamlessly.
Enter Rise’s streamlined approach to people management
Since switching to Rise, Valley Carriers has benefited from a more integrated approach to their people administration, managing their payroll, HR, benefits, and time and attendance on one platform.
Whereas before, when information was manually located by sifting through several different accounting platforms and spreadsheets, their team can now locate all the information they seek in a central place. As Valley Carriers grows, maintaining that sense of organization and streamlined efficiency is going to be important for the company as they continue to scale.
What makes Valley Carriers’ case unique is that they have different shift preferentials and premiums to manage amongst their employees. With Rise, they can now integrate information from their GPS system, which tracks their drivers’ hours, into the payroll system. Where they once were spending 3-4 days on processing payroll, switching to Rise allowed Valley Carriers to take that work cycle down to 2 days, which has been a lifesaver for their team in terms of saving valuable time.
Rise HR is a favourite amongst Genny’s HR department. Their team likes being able to use Rise HR for booking holidays, keeping track of birthdays, and for managing all employee information all together. Now, their office managers can retrieve the information they need without having to ask three different sources for a report.
Rise’s friendly and helpful customer service has been very good to deal with. As Genny mentions, support will take the time to figure out and find a solution to any issues that come up. Her team appreciates how all issues are always dealt with and never not dealt with.
Valley Carriers found an alignment with Rise as both companies have grown a lot in the past few years, sharing in the growing opportunities, pains, changes, and challenges that come with a growing business. Now with Rise, Valley Carriers has been afforded more time to get other important work done when it comes to their people management. As time goes on, their HR team will be looking ahead to utilizing Rise and its features more and integrating new HR innovations into their current processes.
