Oklahoma City gives employees HR tools to succeed with Oracle Cloud HCM

The 20th largest city in the US, Oklahoma City is home to nearly 700,000 residents. The city’s mission is to provide exceptional service to residents and visitors, from police and fire services to utilities, public transportation, and beyond.

One of its primary responsibilities is to make the organization a great place to work because its employees are the engine that supports residents every day. However, the city’s existing HR technology hindered progress. Legacy systems, including a 20-year-old instance of Oracle PeopleSoft, lacked modern functionality and resulted in slow, paper-based processes.

Employees had to contact HR admins to complete routine tasks such as accessing paystubs or updating addresses, which took time away from caring for residents’ needs. Performance reviews were haphazard and required a series of documents and spreadsheets. Feedback to employees was late 66% of the time, and because reviews were tied to annual step increases, pay raises were late 66% of the time, too.

Filling open positions quickly had been a challenge for decades, with an average time to fill around 140 days. High turnover and a 20% vacancy rate also impacted service to residents because there weren’t enough employees to quickly complete maintenance activities such as filling potholes or repairing utility lines.

Oklahoma City recognized it was time for a change and selected Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM). Years of success and familiarity with Oracle PeopleSoft played a big part in the city’s decision. In addition, adopting a cloud native HR platform would support evolving needs of employees and residents.

Oracle Cloud HCM’s unified capabilities would help the city address its goals of empowering employees with self-service tools, attracting and retaining vital talent, and creating a foundation for long-term success. The platform would also allow the organization to redesign decades-old processes, using automation to eliminate paper-based workflows and free up employees to focus on city initiatives instead of mundane HR tasks.

Moreover, automatic updates would make new functionality available every quarter, eliminating the challenge of keeping on-premises systems up to date with lengthy upgrades.

Thanks to Oracle Cloud HCM, Oklahoma City moved off its aging on-premises systems and onto a unified HR platform to better support employees across the organization.

Self-service capabilities allowed employees to easily complete routine HR tasks on their own, such as printing paystubs, updating personal information, and accessing personalized training. The platform also worked on mobile devices, so staff could self-serve on the easy-to-use interface from their phones. If they did need assistance, Oracle HR Help Desk was built in to quickly provide answers and resolve issues. These simple improvements gave employees more time to focus on their day-to-day work of supporting residents.

The city’s previous performance management landscape was demotivating for employees due to delayed feedback and raises and a lack of transparency about career development. Managers spent much of their time doing calculations in spreadsheets and had little time left to provide meaningful guidance to their teams. With Oracle Talent Management, calculations are automated in the system, allowing managers to conduct check-ins more frequently and give actionable feedback on time, which translates to faster pay raises.

By connecting the dots between core competencies across various levels of the organization, the city painted a clearer picture of what employees needed to do to advance to the next stage in their careers. People gained more incentive to learn, grow, and go above and beyond, which resulted in better service for residents.

Oracle Recruiting helped the city address its longtime challenge of filling open positions quickly. The average time to fill dropped from over 140 days to just 45 days, which helped reduce the number of key vacancies. In such a tight labor market, the impact of these results is immense, with less understaffing, lower employee turnover, and more people on hand to support residents and citywide initiatives.

The city aims to continue its journey by using Oracle Cloud HCM’s succession planning capabilities to ensure it has the right talent today and in the future. The innovation will extend beyond HR, with plans to implement Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) for more efficient financial processes and an integrated, end-to-end back office running in Oracle Cloud.

The City of Oklahoma City sought assistance from longtime partner Sierra-Cedar for its Oracle Cloud HCM implementation. Sierra-Cedar was instrumental in helping the organization understand the breadth of capabilities and take full advantage of them to redesign more efficient HR processes. The team will also support continued optimization, helping the city tap new functionality made available with automatic quarterly software updates.