By the Numbers
- 54% reduction in overall turnover
- 58% reduction in early-stage turnover
- 50% net employee growth in 3 years
Challenges
THIRTY YEARS BEHIND: An internal audit of Whitaker’s HR processes revealed a company still running almost entirely on paper, decades behind where it needed to be.
“Most construction companies are heavily paper-based, and we were no exception. We had boxes and boxes of files. My first reaction after auditing the state of our processes was, ‘What have we done? We’re 30 years behind where we should be.’ We didn’t just need an HR system, but a platform that could help us build a real human capital strategy.”
DATA BOTTLENECKS EVERYWHERE: Simple requests like an address change could sit unresolved for months, passed along on paper or over text instead of through a cohesive system.
“When employees wanted to make an address change, they had to come into the office or hand a piece of paper to their foreman to bring to us, which meant it usually ended up sitting on their dashboard for two months. Or we would text back and forth, but even that wasn’t very efficient.”
HR-LESS TECH STACK: Whitaker’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) program had been customized for 20 years into a system so tangled that nothing else could integrate with it, and it still wasn’t built for HR.
“ERP systems will try to tell you that they’re HR systems, but they’re just not. We used an ERP that tried to sell us on customization, but over 20 years, you can imagine what happens in customization—you create this little monster, and nothing talks to it. Because of that, I knew we needed an actual HRIS.”
COMPLIANCE GAPS WITH REAL CONSEQUENCES: Without documentation in place, Whitaker was losing EEO and unemployment claims outright.
“We were losing EEO and unemployment claims because we just didn’t have any documentation when I first started.”
DISCONNECTED BY DISTANCE: With 80% of employees spread across four states, Whitaker’s remote workforce was losing the human connection a growing company needs.
“We’re a remote company and 80% of our employees are spread out. We have people spread from Washington, Oregon, Nevada, and multiple locations across Utah. We were just losing that human connectivity. We needed some technology, something to connect humans to the business. One of my very first initiatives was to figure out what kind of HR system would make sense for our company to connect.”
The Solution
THE PLATFORM THAT ANCHORS EVERYTHING: BambooHR now serves as Whitaker’s mainstay for everything human capital related, from employee files to performance management and benefits.
“We use BambooHR as our true north on the human capital side. We still have an ERP, but it handles only the essentials, like payroll, org structure, and rates. We narrow it down as much as we possibly can so that we can keep BambooHR as our mainstay. All the data integrity relative to employee files, any kind of performance management, benefits, and more is going through BambooHR. It’s cleaner, easier to use, and aesthetically better.”
FROM GUT FEELINGS TO REAL FACTS: Reporting has become a daily tool across accounting, HR, and the executive team, replacing what used to be a slow, difficult search for data.
“Reporting is used pretty heavily now in the business, especially over the last year and a half as it has been adopted by and become a mainstay for our accounting department, HR, and all the executives. Prior to BambooHR, finding data was so much more difficult, but BambooHR makes it so simple.”
EARLY ATTRITION, CRUSHED: Making early turnover visible on company scorecards and in weekly executive meetings helped Whitaker cut zero-to-six-month attrition from 2% to 0.84%.
“The visibility of the data has definitely assisted us in our endeavors to decrease turnover rates. We were losing a lot of people in the zero to six month range. We started making that very visible. I put it on our company scorecards and we reviewed it in our weekly executive meetings. That turnover went from 2% to 0.84%. And that’s a direct correlation to the visibility of the metrics in front of us.”
A TURNOVER BREAKTHROUGH: Overall turnover at Whitaker has dropped from 68% four years ago to a projected 31% this year, well below the industry standard.
“Four years ago, our overall turnover was 68%, which sounds like a lot, but the industry standard is probably around 55–60%. This year, we're going to be at about 31%.”
PERFORMANCE FEEDBACK THAT FUELS GROWTH: Quarterly performance assessments delivered through BambooHR are widely used and now contribute directly to headcount growth and lower turnover.
“We do quarterly performance assessments and give feedback through BambooHR and it’s very well received. It gets utilized quite a bit in our business. It’s pieces like this, in addition to data and reporting, that really help contribute to our growing headcount and decreasing turnover rates.”
TECH THAT BRINGS PEOPLE TOGETHER: Self-service tools have strengthened connectivity between employees, managers, and supervisors across Whitaker’s distributed workforce.
“BambooHR made a big difference in our internal connection. Employees are empowered by using self-service tools, and overall it helps with our connectivity to managers and supervisors.”
DATA-POWERED PAY DECISIONS: BambooHR® Compensation Management now gives Whitaker easy access and insight to the data behind wage grades and salary bands, making it simple to lead with data-informed pay decisions that get results.
“We’re loving BambooHR Compensation Management right now. We’re creating wage grades and salary bands—things we should’ve been doing all this time. It’s so easy to access and use the data.”
