Worldwide multi-lingual school group of 7,000 employees reaping the benefits of Cezanne HR
TLWR? Here’s a summary:
• International Schools Partnership (ISP) needed a robust HR solution to manage their rapid global expansion.
• Cezanne’s HR software streamlined their processes across multiple countries, improving data management and employee engagement.
• ISP now benefits from better reporting, streamlined onboarding, and a system that scales easily as they grow.
The International Schools Partnership (ISP), with 50 schools across 15 countries, uses Cezanne’s HR software to help them manage their 7,000 employees.
With schools spread around the globe, multiple languages, and a variety of regionalised compliance obligations, ISP requires a flexible HR solution.
Ian, the Interim HRIS Project Manager, and Jo, the Group Head of People Operations, at ISP shared how Cezanne is being implemented across their group, and how it’s meeting their varied needs.
How has Cezanne’s HR software been able to meet ISP’s international requirements?
Our schools are all over the world and, while most of our schools are English speaking, more than half of them are located in Spanish-speaking countries. Cezanne’s language capability is very good – we’ve found it easy to use and it covers most of our needs. We’ve been able to control everything our employees and line managers see language wise and haven’t had any concerns in this area.
The ability to customise onboarding and tailor it for each and every region and school, including adding English or Spanish videos in the welcome portal, has resulted in a friendly and easy-to-follow process for new employees joining our group. The map feature in the welcome portals is a nice touch, too.
We’ve been able to set up local absence plans in Cezanne for most of the countries we operate in. On the software side, it’s a fairly quick process (gathering the information we needed to input into the system was the more significant time investment). The system’s flexibility has been very helpful.
We’ve also found Cezanne’s working time patterns functionality useful. The system probably offers more than we need at the moment, but some of our schools have asked for a lot of working time patterns to be set up, and Cezanne has been able to cope with this.
In what ways has Cezanne had the most impact for ISP?
Cezanne’s Onboarding module has probably had the biggest impact for ISP. It has given us the opportunity to put more structure and checks and balances in place, so as an HR team, we’re now able to move our focus to the experiential and social side of onboarding.
The logging and tracking of holidays, sickness and absence in the Absence module is working well. The flexibility to handle all the different country rules has allowed us to roll out self service across all our regions. Cezanne can provide a Bradford Factor so next steps will be encouraging our regions to make use of the reporting triggers available to help them have a better view on absence locally.
Other next steps for us are to explore the reporting capability more, not just absence but areas such as career progression, turnover and retention. We’re a large, growing organisation so whilst the Cezanne dashboards don’t always give us the granularity we need at the touch of a button, the flexibility offered in terms of search functionality and being able to tailor our own reports makes up for this.
We’re also starting to delve into the Performance module. Our focus is on performance development, rather than performance management – with a big emphasis on growth and how we can get better together. We have been piloting use of the goals and check-ins to help facilitate our goalsetting and continuous feedback process, so we will be rolling this out as well as implementing a more standardised approach to performance evaluation and development.
Why did the International Schools Partnership choose the Career and Succession Planning module?
Learning is what we do at ISP and we are very proud of the learning and development and leadership development opportunities that we are creating. Succession planning and understanding learning needs will be a very important part of this and we will be using the Cezanne HR Career and Succession module to help support us. Recently, we’ve hired Heads of Talent, Leadership Development and Teacher Professional Learning, reflecting our investment in this area.
As we work more with the module, we will share our feedback with the team at Cezanne HR as we’ve always found them open to suggestions and ideas.
How would you describe the support available for Cezanne?
A big focus for us has been (and is still) upskilling HR in our regions to be able to own the system effectively. When we’ve been unable to resolve something, we’ve found that Cezanne’s support portal has provided us with detailed and practical information and has enabled our Central HR team to self-serve effectively and to share advice. In particular, we’ve found the documentation in multiple languages helpful. The availability and helpfulness of the customer support team has always been good – we’re very comfortable contacting them as needed, and we’ve always had an answer within a reasonable timeframe.
What advice would you give others who are new to using Cezanne?
Give yourself time to familiarise yourself with the system to understand how things work. As with any software solution, it’s really important to take the time to explore it and get used to it. Using it regularly is vital as this also keeps the data accurate and up to date. A system will only be as good as the time and information you put into it. But it doesn’t need to be all consuming – a little bit of time each day and as and when there are changes to implement.
And don’t hold back on turning to the customer support team for guidance in the early stages, they have a wealth of experience that they are happy to share.
