Insurer Transforms HR and Payroll to Empower a Nationwide Workforce

Over the past 20 years, the company’s growth has accelerated, and it has extended its historic base in Washington, Oregon and Idaho to four new states: Utah in 2002, Arizona in 2014, Montana in 2018, and most recently, Wyoming in 2022.

That expansion has been mirrored by the increasing geographical diversity of the company’s workforce. A significant proportion of its 400-strong workforce work remotely, and it now has employees in more than 20 states.

The ability to hire the best people, no matter which state they live in, is a key part of Mutual of Enumclaw’s success. However, it also poses administrative challenges. Each state has its own complex and ever-changing labor and tax laws, and noncompliance is not an option.

Keeping on top of the legal requirements for 20+ states and onboarding people in new states whenever necessary was a significant burden for the HR team. The combination of an inflexible legacy payroll system from a legacy provider and cumbersome spreadsheet-based reporting processes made matters worse. It was time for a change—and that’s where Paylocity came in.

The Challenge

Legacy Payroll Systems and Processes

Mutual of Enumclaw struggled to get the level of service it expected from its existing HR technology vendor—but moving to a new platform seemed like a risky venture.

Deteriorating Service Levels
Mutual of Enumclaw had been considering moving away from its legacy payroll platform for some time, but a previous attempt to move to a different payroll vendor had ended in disappointment.

“We didn’t have a good experience with a previous payroll implementation, so it was hard to get people enthusiastic about moving to another new platform,” explains Trina McBride, Sr. People Operations Administrator at Mutual of Enumclaw. “But with our existing vendor, we felt like the customer service we were receiving wasn’t up to our standards, and that’s something we really value in our partners. And every time they updated the system, the user experience went five steps backwards, instead of improving our processes and workflows.”

Labor-Intensive Manual Processes
As a result, Mutual of Enumclaw’s HR and payroll team had to spend too much time on manual processes that could have been automated. Rolling up figures for year-end reports was complicated and labor-intensive. Calculating bonuses and merit increases required hours of work in highly complex spreadsheets.

“Our monthly payroll process was so complicated that we had to start it three days prior to payday,” adds Trina. “It was a challenge to provide great customer service to the rest of the organization until the payroll was completed.”

A Vision for Connected HR
Beyond addressing the pain-points with the company’s existing processes, the team also had a broader vision of sharing HR data across the business for greater insights and better decision making. They saw Paylocity as a means of achieving that vision— which helped the HR team gain the momentum they needed to make the move.

The Solution

Making a Smooth Transition to a Modern HR & Payroll Platform

Paylocity helped Mutual of Enumclaw implement a new platform that is transforming the company’s payroll, compensation, benefits and reporting processes.

While Mutual of Enumclaw’s previous attempt to move away from another HCM had run into difficulties, migrating to Paylocity was a different story. Paylocity’s implementation specialists guided the company’s HR team through the process, and the project was a complete success.

"There were also things that amazed me, like the amount of data Paylocity were able to pull out of the system we moved away from," says Trina. "I didn’t believe they’d be able to get that information, but they did.”

Simplifying Tax Compliance Nationwide
Now, with Paylocity’s Payroll system, Mutual of Enumclaw can hire employees in any state with total confidence that it will be compliant with local tax and labor laws. Setting up a new state is as simple as filling out an online form, and Paylocity will automatically calculate and pay the appropriate taxes. The entire payroll process is also much more automated, freeing HR to focus on its employees.

Streamlining Bonuses and Benefits Calculations
The Compensation module in Paylocity decreases the need for spreadsheets to calculate bonuses and merit increases—a process that used to take executives and supervisors several hours. Meanwhile, the Benefits module integrates data from external benefits providers automatically, relieving HR of the need to re-key 401k data from one system into another.

Integrating HR Insight into Decision-Making
Insights & Recommendations is already helping Mutual of Enumclaw achieve its vision of integrating HR data into broader business decision-making. Key metrics such as employee turnover are automatically generated and integrated into the company’s data warehouse on a nightly basis, and custom reports make it easy to give executives the instant insight they need.

The Results

Underwriting a Policy to Assure Future Success

With Paylocity, Mutual of Enumclaw has the platform it needs to maintain its growth trajectory while keeping HR and payroll operations lean and efficient.

Accelerating Payroll
By streamlining their processes with Paylocity, Mutual of Enumclaw’s payroll team has accelerated the monthly pay run, saving a two full days every month. Automation also makes payroll errors a thing of the past—for example, if an employee receives a raise mid-month, the platform calculates their salary accurately from the effective date, avoiding the need for manual retroactive adjustments.

Freeing Time for HR and Executives
Similarly, improvements in compensation, benefits and reporting save time for HR and leadership across the board. This is especially important at busy times such as year-end, when every moment is precious. The ability to build annual bonus and merit increase plans in Paylocity saves the HR team and executives a considerable amount of time and accelerates the whole process by days.

Trina comments: “Paylocity has helped us drive so many improvements across all areas of HR and payroll. Individually, those improvements might sound like little things, but when you’re working in the system every day, they all add up to something pretty big.”

Realizing the HR Vision
“Our goal is to connect HR with other parts of the business,” concludes Trina. “Paylocity gives us an open platform that can talk to our finance department, our ERP system, and our data analytics team.”