Phoenix Senior Living Achieves Six-Figure Savings by Switching to Paylocity

Compassion, commitment, and respect for residents form the hallmarks of the service at Phoenix Senior Living. Established in 2014, the company provides seniors and their families with personalized care to meet their unique social, physical, and emotional requirements.

Dean Slye, Vice President of Human Resources, explains: “We’re an extremely fast-growing organization, going from 50 to 2,500 employees in a little over eight years. Today, we manage 48 senior living properties in ten Southeastern states—from Virginia to Florida, and Kentucky to Louisiana."

Within its properties, Phoenix Senior Living offers a range of service models, such as independent living, assisted living, and standalone memory care. Maintaining the highest standards of care requires a diverse, specialized workforce at every location, including nursing, activities, dining, housekeeping, and maintenance staff, plus back-office business and sales teams.

“Around 70 percent of our employees are caregivers, whether certified nursing assistants [CNAs], personal care assistants [PCAs], or medical technicians,” adds Dean. “We also have central administrative and operational functions at our corporate office in Roswell, Georgia.”

To manage the workforce, Phoenix Senior Living relied on an ADP solution for several years. But with users increasingly frustrated with the system, it was time to make a call on its future. “Changing vendors is often challenging but we were at our wit’s end with ADP. We moved to Paylocity and the experience was phenomenal—we’re huge fans of the platform,” notes Dean.

The Challenge: Tackling the Turnover Conundrum

To navigate a challenging labor market, Phoenix Senior Living needs the right platform to attract and manage its talent—but its old ADP system offered limited functionality and was extremely costly.

Competition for Talent Makes Retention Tough

In recent years, labor shortages have created major headaches for the senior living and healthcare sectors. “Historically, our turnover rate was well below industry norms. But since the pandemic, it’s jumped by around 30 percent,” notes Dean. “Big companies offering higher pay or sign-on bonuses are luring many professionals away from our industry.” As a result, it’s an ongoing challenge for Phoenix Senior Living to retain talent and recruit new staff to work in its properties. “We want to understand the root causes of turnover and take steps to boost retention,” adds Dean.

Inflexible, Costly Systems Frustrate Users

While turnover has spiked since the pandemic, the problems with the ADP solution date back even further. “When I started here five years ago, most many of our HR issues related to ADP,” notes Dean. “The payroll system was inflexible and clunky, while customer service was far from responsive.” To add insult to injury, Phoenix Senior Living was paying $1.2 million per year for the troublesome system. “I replaced ADP with a new platform at another company, and it was a difficult and painful horrible process. But we were reaching the point that we felt that we had to switch providers,” adds Dean.

Manual Processes Increase Workloads and Risk

Another drawback was the lack of onboarding functionality in the ADP system, which left Phoenix Senior Living reliant on manual workarounds. “We handed new hires a stack of paper to read, plus a printed handbook and benefits guide. It wasn’t a great experience for them,” explains Dean. When HR required specific data, individual locations spent time copying paper files and sending over scanned versions. And in the case of I-9 Forms, manual processes created significant risk. “There are so many regulations around I-9s. Any errors could create issues during audits,” adds Dean.

The Solution: Selecting a First-Class Solution

After demos from multiple vendors, Phoenix Senior Living selected Paylocity for its user friendliness, great support, robust core HR capabilities, and extensive employee engagement features.

Streamlining Payroll, Recruitment, and Onboarding

Initially, Phoenix Senior Living rolled out Paylocity’s core HR modules, with positive results from day one. Using Payroll has streamlined the pay process, as Dean adds: “Our team wouldn’t change a thing about the system.” The organization harnesses the Recruiting module to manage hundreds of concurrent job openings. The team can screen candidates, arrange interviews, and send offer letters through the platform, then move a chosen applicant’s data straight into Onboarding. “New hire paperwork, handbooks, and HR files are now digitized. Going paperless has been awesome,” notes Dean.

Offering Flexibility to Employees on the Move

Employees at Phoenix Senior Living can now use the Paylocity Mobile App to access their pay stubs and W-2 forms, and check holiday allowances. “Most of our staff don’t sit at a desk all day and don’t have email, so being able to access their HR files via the app is extremely handy,” says Dean.

Automating Benefits Management via APIs

Phoenix Senior Living also makes extensive use of Paylocity’s Integrations to simplify and automate employee benefits management. The organization has built many API-based data feeds with healthcare and financial plan providers, including Blue Cross Blue Shield and Empower. “We also run a gift-giving program for employees,” explains Dean. “Paylocity sends data on their work anniversary or birthday to third-party Snappy Gifts, who then send a gift. It’s very cool.”

Gathering Valuable Insights from Employees

In addition, Phoenix Senior Living recently launched Employee Voice to capture feedback from the workforce. As well as 30- and 60-day surveys for new hires, the company is running exit interviews for voluntary terminations to understand their reasons for leaving. “Employee Voice is easy to use,” notes Dean. “We set up the questions, timeframes, and intended recipients very quickly.”

The Results: Unlocking Efficiencies to Drive Growth

Users at Phoenix Senior Living are united in the view that Paylocity represents a major upgrade from the ADP system, supporting more reliable, intuitive, and faster HR and payroll workflows.

Handling Enterprise-Scale Payroll Seamlessly

With Paylocity, key HR processes are now running more efficiently than ever at Phoenix Senior Living. In the case of payroll, two employees process pay for all 2,500 employees in the platform, running four separate bi-weekly payrolls—two payrolls cover employees working at the senior living properties, and two more payrolls cover teams at the organization’s development and construction entities.

Saving Time and Mitigating Risk

Paperless onboarding has made life much simpler for new hires and the HR team, with no more tedious manual data entry. Dean explains: “When we found we could digitize onboarding, it was like the angels were singing!” And whenever users need specific HR files, they can simply run a search in Paylocity to grab what’s needed, rather than spending time making a copy of a paper version.

“New hires can now complete I-9 employment eligibility checks on their phone, adding pictures of their identification documents, before Paylocity authenticates everything,” adds Dean. “That will help minimize our exposure to regulatory risks.”

Planning Steps to Boost Talent Retention

The survey data from Paylocity will also help Phoenix Senior Living to explore the reasons behind employee turnover and to plan effective steps to lift retention and attract staff for its growing portfolio of properties. “Turnover is such a hot topic in our sector,” notes Dean. “Previously, we ran an annual survey but couldn’t get the level of detail that we now have. We’re excited to dig into the data by property, position, length of service, and much more.” The organization also plans to use Paylocity's Insights & Recommendations module to explore other key metrics, such as labor costs.

“The first phase with Paylocity has been about HR fundamentals. Moving forward, we’re looking to use the more advanced data analytics and Performance module, plus the employee engagement capabilities to connect our diverse, growing workforce,” concludes Dean.