Prior to implementing Sift in 2020, Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO) had a workforce of around 120 people. As hiring sped up during the pandemic due to increased demand in handling public health requests and technical calls, maintaining an accurate organization chart became tedious.
ASTHO was looking to move to a more streamlined system that did not rely on their HR coordinators to manually update their org charts in Visio. By drawing in boxes and connecting lines when someone new would join or move, the task became redundant.
Tracking down a solution that would automatically update their org chart and save time was necessary. As everyone switched to working remotely, it became apparent that finding a way for employees to understand each other's roles and who did what was important. For their now virtual organization to stay connected, ASTHO set out to acquire the right tool.
Kimberly Bozeman, Senior Director, Staff Development and Staff Engagement at ASTHO, was on the hunt to find an org chart solution that would meet the company’s needs and lessen the burden to manually update Visio when new employees would join. Sift stood out in Kimberly’s search due to the ease of its automatically updating org charts, saving time from the HR team. “...the edge that we found with Sift was [that] it was so user friendly.”
Sift usage grew across ASTHO pretty quickly not just due to its ease of use, but as a result of ASTHO incorporating Sift into their onboarding efforts early on. They were able to achieve 96% active usage of Sift after launching the tool in 2021.
Kimberly explains:
“We introduce [Sift] during the onboarding process. We send them a tutorial link and during their first day, we have an HR welcome orientation. We have a 30 day, 60 day, and 90 day check-in with different individuals within HR and we ask them if they are utilizing Sift. We've heard a resounding praise for Sift with them being able to use it and being able to quickly figure it out.”
The ability to make it work for their organization right out of the box was a plus. Customizability was a perk that allowed ASTHO to make Sift their own instead of just another software tool.
“I like being able to customize some things. [....] When I got back after my leave, we had our logo on our profile and had our brand’s blue color applied,” said Kimberly. “We built out the platform so it would work for us better, like connecting projects and work groups.”
Sift was easily able to handle ASTHO's primary need of creating automated org charts in a way that saved time. Kimberly mentions:
“We have to provide our org charts to funders, a lot are through CDC and government funded organizations, so being able to easily provide our charts to [them] is something that I love and don't have to stay in Visio for 5 hours to complete that.”
Sift has helped ease a lot of requests the HR department would’ve had regarding org charts. Now everybody in their organization has that visibility and ability to generate org charts on their own.
“We (HR staff) rarely receive requests from staff to produce unit org charts, and that was the edge over the other platforms that we researched. Everyone within the organization can go in and produce anything that HR produces. There's nothing that's hidden within the platform.”
No longer having to rely on Vizio for org chart creation, the HR staff were open to completing other projects and reducing repetitive work for the team.
In addition to the org chart, ASTHO liked the fact they could use Sift’s Directory and expanded employee Profiles as a way of connecting with colleagues and getting to know them beyond their job title. “[You can search] for someone within the directory, let’s say someone who likes hiking. Oh, I see that you like to go hiking and that your office is close to the regional office. Maybe we should connect,” says Kimberly. Bonding on those shared interests helped to keep their culture alive in a virtual setting.
During their all-hands meetings, Kimberly gets a sense when attendees are searching for the speaker to understand their role within the company. ASTHO incorporates Sift’s Reach Out To Me For section of the profile to showcase and highlight projects employees are working on, bringing subject matter experts to the forefront.
Since launching Sift, ASTHO has grown to over 302 employees. With the long term onset of remote work, they have started planning for more of a virtual organization and also want to look for other ways to stay connected and maintain their culture.
As a result they have formed internal work groups to look at Sift to see how they can make things better for everyone in the organization. ASTHO plans to utilize Sift Pages to create a space that connects all of their new hires and gives them easy access into seeing all the different committees.
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