No HR systems? Still working with word documents, excel spreadsheets and hoping it comes together? Limited by budget or trying to make a case for those precious dollars? This was the situation that ClearView Wealth, an Australian life insurance, funds management and financial advice group, found themselves in. They embarked on a journey from a making do with just a payroll system and many spreadsheets to utilising a variety of cloud based systems that now enable them to search for talent, provide online learning,  facilitate real time conversations and feedback on performance, and ensure remuneration and rewards are fair and market competitive.

Deb Lowe, Head of People and Culture at ClearView Wealth, presented a fascinating case study at HR Tech Fest 2015. We spoke to her after her presentation where she revealed some lessons learnt along the way.

Working with the right partner is critical; someone who can learn and understand your culture and process and translate it into the new paradigm whilst challenging you with ideas to make it best practice. Data preparation for the remuneration system was probably the one thing that tested us but we allowed plenty of time so completed within our original timeframe.

How easy it was in hindsight. We had delayed doing this thinking it would be time consuming but our implementation of Learning Seat the prior year laid the groundwork. We held data in our payroll system and in spreadsheets so the task of extracting it and formatting it into tables was time consuming but had to be done to give us the basis of our data in the new environment.

Working with our partner Remesys (always upbeat and anything was possible) and using the implementation to build on our employee brand. We had a lot of fun coming up with names and the internal marketing campaign. We are a small team and we really wanted the change as we knew it would make a difference.  Also seeing the system come to life was really rewarding.

We knew it was important to engage the people so we spent time designing and deploying the system and thinking about change but we didn't allow enough time for training. So our training really was ‘just in time' and what is interesting is we had a classic change curve; early adopters embraced but nine months on we are still training up the laggards. So actually changing everyone's behaviors and practices takes a lot longer than you think. The process of changing behavior really only starts when you go live. So we now know that the ‘go live' date is only really the beginning, not the end.

Deb Lowe is Head of People and Culture at ClearView Wealth. She has worked in financial services for over 20 years and has extensive experience in human resources.

Deb was a popular presenter at HR Tech Fest 2015.