A Testimonial From Cain Petroleum, Inc.
Ashley Watson is the Human Resources Manager for Cain Petroleum, Inc., a recognized leader within the retail gasoline service station and convenience store industry, operating multiple locations in Portland, Oregon. A part of her job is to ensure that employees are trained in and adhere to company policies and procedures in order to achieve compliance and to retain highly skilled employees. In the past year, she has discovered that using Safework Solutions’ Disciplinary Action Tracker (DAT) software has significantly reduced her company’s turnover rate and the excessive time spent on DAT recordkeeping and reporting requirements.
High turnover rates can easily cause a nightmare for HR Managers, which is exactly what happened in Ms. Watson’s case and which prompted the company to start looking for a better HR solution, specifically to help retain employees and reduce the turnover burden on the company. Upper management at Cain Petroleum found out about Safework Solutions’ DAT software while searching online for a solution.
For example, one solution that can help turnover rates is by incorporating disciplinary action tracking software, which can help manage unwanted behavior in the workplace while ensuring fairness. It also helps companies comply with legal regulations, prevent serious injuries, and improve productivity. For employees, disciplinary action tracking can encourage harmony and cooperation and give employees an opportunity to explain their side of the situation.
At the time, Ms. Watson said they were searching for a program that would allow them to easily access employee disciplinary action instead of manually going through employee files. When unemployment benefit disputes arose, it was very difficult and time-consuming to hunt down the documents needed to settle cases. In fact, it took half a week in some cases to go down to the documents warehouse and manually search through hundreds of boxes of paperwork to find information on a single employee.
“What we needed was a digital recordkeeping system, customized for our company, that would help us retain and retrieve this information quickly. What initially led us to licensing and implementing the Safework Suite software was the ease and convenience of the program and its customizable fields. We appreciate the levels of access which allow upper management to review verbiage in the DAT prior to issuing it to the employee. The other feature we love is how easy it is to view employee history, from the desktop or quickly from our phones.”
According to Ms. Watson, there have been several benefits to using the DAT tool.
Easy Document Recall
“Now that we have progressed into the digital realm, we are now able to answer unemployment disputes over the phone by simply calling up records in the system and then immediately emailing the required documents directly to the claim officers.”
Quick DAT Status Lookup
“Additionally, in the past, anytime we had issues with an employee, instead of our district coordinator being able to pull up an employee’s history, they had to call me on the phone, and I would have to pull their file and go through each document to see where they were on their disciplinary action. Now, with Safework’s DAT module, my district coordinator can look up the history on his phone and then notify me of the employee’s disciplinary status to quickly confirm the next actions to take. The time savings alone has been well worth the investment.”
Employee Accountability
“This program has allowed us to hold employees accountable to job expectations as issues arise. This has cut our processing time in half for issuing disciplinary actions."
Reduced Turnover Rate
“We are in the fueling industry so turnover is high. With new employees coming quickly, we are able to follow up on job expectations quickly to instill policies and procedures, which has helped reduce our turnover.”
For example, Cain Petroleum’s turnover rate from Q1 of 2022 and Q1 of 2023 show a decrease of about 13% after using the DAT tool. Similarly, the turnover rate comparing Q2 of 2022 and Q2 of 2023 dropped by about 17%. This means that their retention rate from this 2022 to 2023 quarterly comparison showed an average increase of about 15%.
HR System Integration
Cain Petroleum uses the Bamboo HR system for their employee roster. To assist with transferring the roster to the Safework site, Safework Solutions was able to connect to Bamboo’s employee list with an API (application programming interface). This helped their HR department save a great deal of admin time trying to add employees into the system and turning off the inactive ones. Every night at midnight the API looks for changes in the Bamboo HR system, and if there are any changes (new employees, inactive employees, email changed, last name changed, etc.) the API makes the change automatically in the employee’s profile within Safework.
Safework Solutions is dedicated to providing practical software that saves companies time and money while helping to retain a skilled workforce. A list of tools can be found at https://www.safeworksuite.com.