Public Library Puts Community Service First with Smarter Scheduling

Today’s public libraries provide more than just books and media; they play a vital role in supporting their local communities by providing spaces for creativity and learning. La Porte County Public Library (LPCPL) hosts events, offers computer literacy training and IT support, and provides makerspaces and notary services at its eight locations. The organization also runs a mobile library and mobile classroom, and even offers doorstep delivery for residents who are unable to visit a library in person.

Maintaining such a broad range of community engagement and outreach is complicated. To ensure each service has an appropriate level of staffing to serve the public effectively, shift scheduling needs to run like clockwork — and that’s no easy task.

People might need to work at different locations on different days. Certain tasks require specific qualifications. If you’re going to drive the mobile library, you need a for hire endorsement on your driver’s license. If you’re going to act as a notary, you need a commission from the State of Indiana. Getting the right people assigned to the right shifts at the right locations is like solving a new jigsaw puzzle every day.

Like many public services, LPCPL had a difficult time during the pandemic and the organization saw high levels of employee turnover. So, recruiting and onboarding new people is also a top priority for the organization to maintain the staffing levels it needs to serve the La Porte County community.

The Challenge

Seeking an Off-the-Shelf Solution for Scheduling and More

LPCPL’s legacy HR system lacked support for scheduling, prompting the organization to look for a more modern, fully featured platform.

Simplifying Shift Scheduling
The complexity of LPCPL’s day-to-day operations made it increasingly difficult to manage shift schedules manually, so the HR team began looking for a scheduling tool that could help. “Our previous HR system didn’t offer a scheduling capability,” says De Burke, HR Manager. “So, we started thinking about moving to a different platform.”

Meeting Employee Expectations
Besides scheduling, one of the top priorities for the new HR platform was user experience. “Since I started working here, our demographics have shifted and we’re employing far more young people,” says De. “Technology is easy for them, they expect it to be part of their job, and they want to have things at their fingertips. So, we wanted a system that offered a more modern experience.”

Supporting Modern HR
It was also important to find a platform that covered all aspects of modern HR. De recalls: “I’ve spent a lot of my career using traditional HRIS systems that tried really hard to do other things beyond time and labor and payroll, but it was clear that the people building them had no idea how to do human resources. I wanted to work with people who have real HR experience and can design a system around it — so we’d have processes and data that we could really trust.”

The Solution

Checking Out a Comprehensive HR Platform

With its advanced support for scheduling, plus a host of other modern HR capabilities, Paylocity proved to be the ideal platform for LPCPL’s needs.

LPCPL didn’t take long to select a new HR solution. “Throughout my career I’ve helped multiple companies transition to different HR platforms, and Paylocity is definitely my favorite,” says De. “It’s clearly built by people who really understand HR. And I’ve never seen another system that allows employees to do what they can do with the Paylocity Mobile App.”

Seamless Scheduling
The key functionality for LPCPL was Paylocity’s Scheduling module, which has recently been upgraded with additional advanced features. “What we have now is phenomenal,” says De. “We can break down our schedules by location, cost center or job classification, and it’s all color-coded so we can see where people are working at a glance.”

She adds: “Employees can swap shifts easily in the mobile app, and we can also post any open shifts that people can claim if they want to work extra hours. It’s a seamless way to fill our schedules without having to ask if someone can take on another shift.”

Streamlined Hiring
Paylocity’s Recruiting, Onboarding and Learning modules also help to automate the pipeline of bringing new people into the organization. “The texting feature in Recruiting has been a real game-changer for us,” says De. “If a candidate is at work, they might not be able to take a call, but they can reply to a text message. We save a lot of time by not playing phone-tag when we’re trying to set up interviews.”

LPCPL uses Insights & Recommendations to generate reports on hiring, headcount and turnover. It also analyzes social media activity to predict if an employee is likely to leave the organization, enabling targeted action to reduce the risk of attrition.

Smarter Benefits
By integrating directly with LPCPL’s benefits providers, Paylocity’s Benefits Administration module saves hours for the HR team. “I used to have to go into every employee’s payroll record and update their rates manually,” says De. “With Paylocity I can just update the rates once in each plan, and it pushes out to everybody. It saves a huge amount of time on administration and auditing.”

The Results

Writing the Book on Modern HR

Paylocity has delivered dramatic improvements in scheduling, recruiting and benefits administration, putting LPCPL’s employees and HR team in control.

Cutting Complexity
Switching to Paylocity has slashed the time HR, employees, and supervisors spend on shift scheduling. As De explains: “Paylocity gives our supervisors a simple way to navigate scheduling. They can make smarter decisions based on estimated hours needed for upcoming shifts, get alerts if we are going to run into any overtime, and just generally manage the complexity in a more efficient way. We have saved ourselves a ton of a time and headaches."

Filling the Hiring Pipeline
The platform has also significantly improved LPCPL’s hiring pipeline, which is now seeing around 300 additional candidates applying every year. With a faster, more responsive recruiting process, the HR team is saving around one day per candidate on administration — and with digital onboarding, new hires no longer need to spend four hours sitting in HR filling out paperwork on their first day.

Transforming Productivity
From HR’s perspective, automating processes with Paylocity is boosting productivity across the board. “Just by integrating with our benefits providers, we’re saving huge amounts of time,” says De. “I can probably do the work of three or four HR people because of Paylocity.”

She concludes: “Above all, Paylocity gives us a modern experience of HR. It’s so easy to use, it makes sense to people, and employees can access everything they need from their phone. I’ve never worked with another system that can do that.”