Chief Executive Arlene White
How’d you like to be the one flicking the switch on a full disaster recovery changeover to an alternate data centre, right in the middle of a world-wide business continuity incident? You’d be doing it all remotely, and for good measure you’d be running New Zealand’s largest payroll from the alternate site, with 94,000 school staff depending on you getting it right.
Sounds like fun? It’s all in stride for Education Payroll. Like many businesses we had just drawn up a split roster for ‘at home’ and ‘in office’ staff when New Zealand moved suddenly to COVID-19 alert level 3, meaning everyone needed to be based from home.
But thanks to our investment in modern workplace technology, we didn’t miss a beat. Within a day we were holding all meetings and an all-staff broadcast via Teams, and we had full access to our systems, files, and the morning quiz. Within a few more days we’d run the schools’ payroll remotely, processed detailed back pay for five collective agreements, and shipped some new features into our bespoke product ‘EdPay’, which is replacing its predecessor Novopay.
A couple of weeks later, we remotely completed a full disaster recovery site switch and ran a full pay cycle from it to prove the system worked.
In the background our call centre has kicked back in, supporting schools through this complicated time, and staff have moved seamlessly to virtual working. We’ve discovered some pretty groovy Teams backgrounds, and in fact things have gone so well, we think we’ll bring aspects of this way of working into the future with us.
If you’re thinking of joining our team, we can guarantee you some innovation, a warm and friendly atmosphere and plenty of work-life balance and flexibility.
If this hasn’t been your company’s story, we’re always open to sharing our experiences and thinking with others – there’s no flies on us!
18 June 2020