Collaborate Day 2 Highlights: Viewpoint HR Management Now Available in Spectrum and an Inspiring Message on Hard Pivots

One of the biggest highlights of Viewpoint Collaborate 2020 so far has been the integration of Viewpoint HR Management into our Spectrum solution (already available for Vista), giving HR professionals and employees a broader web-based onboarding platform and self-service capabilities designed to boost talent acquisition and scale and automate many HR processes.

The integration is all the more helpful in light of the COVID-19 pandemic as it provides contactless onboarding, enabling companies to bring employees on remotely and electronically, keeping themselves and employees safer while also digitizing their operations. HR staff can also easily share policy updates, safety information or request a digital signature remotely, leading to a much safer and more efficient culture for everyone.

For employers, the biggest benefits provided by HR Management are the flexibility to customize onboarding forms, easily assign onboarding tasks to unique jobs in the office or field, and digitally capture required forms like I-9 compliance, state withholding and more. HR Management also directly integrates with Spectrum’s payroll and HR functions, creating a unified, digitized system of record that’s easy to use and helps streamline the workflow for HR staff.

By centrally managing everything in one place, HR Management in Spectrum can save HR teams countless hours handling processes for each new or existing worker. This is particularly helpful given that many construction companies have hundreds to thousands of workers within its HR systems, each of whom has a myriad of daily, weekly or monthly activities that an HR team must constantly track and manage. HR Management in Spectrum automates many of these processes with an easy-to-use solution that greatly reduces the workload of already-strapped construction HR staff. 

“Having Viewpoint HR Management available to us as Spectrum users is huge,” said Dhara Thakkar, HR generalist with K-Five Construction Company, which helped beta test the solution’s integration with Spectrum. “We had a largely paper-based onboarding process prior to this, and it was difficult to manage among all of the different hiring managers. Now, having a customizable digital system in place makes the onboarding process as easy as it gets. I can see us cutting the time we spend on our onboarding by 50 percent.”

With HR Management in Spectrum, job candidates can now easily apply to jobs online or via their mobile devices and applications are automatically tracked and routed to hiring managers, ensuring that no candidate is inadvertently lost in the shuffle. Once hired, new workers can access and sign paperwork, read important documentation and much more — all from the same platform they applied to.

Other Viewpoint HR Management capabilities, which will come soon for Spectrum, include employee self-service capabilities for common HR requests. From submitting time off requests and expense reports to accessing benefits information and printing paystubs, W2s, 1095-Cs, T4s or other paperwork, HR Management in Spectrum empowers employees to manage their own information, helping to take the burden off HR staff. As a result, employees can access their information whenever they need to, and a single source of data connects employees from the field to the back office, enabling the entire organization to work off the same information in real time.

Day Two keynote speaker Chris Gardner spoke to dealing with tough times like we’re in now during the current pandemic.

“At the very beginning of this pandemic, I heard people saying, ‘we’re all in the same boat now.’ I will submit to you that no, we’re not in the same boat, we’re in the same storm,” he said, noting that some folks have luxury of being able to quickly adapt and work from home, while others, including first responders and healthcare workers didn’t, and still others lost jobs and livelihoods altogether. These “hard pivots” are things that none of us chose, but we have to work through.

Gardner knows about having to make hard pivots. He grew up in foster care with his mother in prison and never knowing his father. He is a survivor of domestic violence and sexual assault, a veteran who lived on the streets as a single parent without a college education and faced discrimination because of the color of his skin. Yet, he found a way to pivot when life stacked the deck against him and found ways to make it work – even with his hardest pivot later in life when he lost his wife of 20 years to brain cancer. He wrote a book about just one year of his experiences, “The Pursuit of Happyness,” which was turned into a critically-acclaimed movie by the same name starring Will Smith.

Gardner had high hopes as he looked to the next generations of workers and leaders and how they’ve essentially grown up around adapting to significant changes— from world events to innovations and more — and striving to be the best version of yourselves, and doing the things in life that you’re passionate about. “I’ve never focused on the odds,” Gardner said. “I am all about evens, as in ‘even though,’ ‘even if,’ ‘even when,’ ‘even where,’ ‘even you, ‘even me.’ Because I believe if you change the narrative, you change the outcome.”

• A look at Viewpoint’s Field Ticketing solution and other new Field Service offerings in development now;
• Ways that today’s contractors are digitizing their jobsites to boost project productivity and accuracy through real-time data;
• Improving service management processes by giving technicians the tools they need to be more responsive in the field, including streamlined word orders through Spectrum’s Service Tech Mobile solution;
• How strategic, tech-aided strategies like cloud data hosting, single sign-on and multifactor authentication can help keep contractors’ data — and businesses — safe;
• How technology is empowering project managers to self-serve their own needs faster and make better project decisions;
• We heard again from Viewpoint clients Adolfson & Peterson Construction and Great Basin Industrial as they shared their personal success stories of technology adoption and modernization; and
• A powerhouse panel of female industry professionals discussed the increasing leadership roles that women are playing in construction, and the importance of developing new mentors and pathways for women to advance their construction careers. Identifying and developing mentors early and joining associations and groups that promote career growth and opportunities for women are strongly encouraged activities for women in today’s industry, noted Kristen Williams, a principal with Leighton Group, Inc.

Missed the conference or couldn’t make it to a specific session? With the exception of our guest keynote session by Chris Gardner, we should have all sessions available on demand shortly. Be sure to check back at the Collaborate 2020 site to see what you missed. And check out our full Collaborate Recap blog for more conference highlights.