Executive Summary
In operation for more than 40 years, Pine Cove Christian Camps is a growing and inspirational youth camp that employs more than 1400 full time and part time staff. To support Pine Cove's mission to help its staff grow personally and professionally, the camp transitioned from its old manual performance management practices to Halogen Software’s automated performance management solution.
In implementing Halogen eAppraisal™, Pine Cove was able to improve its performance management processes to:
- Increase employee engagement in the performance review process
- Gather performance data and use reports to guide talent planning and training initiatives
- Ensure managers and employees have ongoing discussions about performance and goals in weekly one-on-one meetings that are logged and tracked in the system
- Significantly decrease HR's administrative burdens
- Deliver increased time savings for managers, HR and IT staff
A Camp Focused on Employee Development
Pine Cove Christian Camps host fun-filled, life-changing experiences for campers of all ages. Founded in 1968 as a small retreat, today nearly 20 000 children, youth and families attend sessions each summer at its five Christian Youth Camps and three Christian Family Camps in the Tyler and Columbus areas of Texas. During the off-season, Pine Cove offers similar experiences through retreats, conferences and outdoor wilderness studies, accommodating an additional 30 000 visitors annually.
Pine Cove has a fast-growing resident staff who work year-round in a wide variety of areas, including: food service, camp programming, registration, human resources, maintenance, housekeeping, marketing, development, media, outdoor education, accounting, retail, information technology, and more. Pine Cove also hires college students for peak season summer positions to provide practical career experience in a camp ministry setting.
“At Pine Cove, we greatly believe in the development of our employees and in helping them to grow both personally and professionally,” says Stephen Hughes, Director of Operations. “That means helping to launch our employees into their careers at Pine Cove and taking pride in those employees who use their training here to pursue meaningful opportunities elsewhere.”
Pine Cove's former appraisal process was conducted using an Excel spreadsheet. The manual process required so much administration that instead of being used to drive management decisions, appraisals simply ended up filed away. Performance data was difficult to collect and analyze, which impacted Pine Cove’s ability to effectively drive employee development. Beyond solving their administrative and reporting problems, Pine Cove wanted to automate its performance management process and centralize the data so it could be more effectively used to drive learning and professional development initiatives for employees. According to Hughes, it was also important to find a solution that could replicate the organization's existing appraisal form.
Pine Cove initially researched six different vendors and quickly realized Halogen Software was the only one that met the organization’s unique needs.
The ability to incorporate the best elements from the old appraisal process, create tight links to professional development planning, and collect and report on data made Halogen Software the right fit for Pine Cove.
“Our existing appraisal form works for us, but it was obvious we needed to automate the appraisal process just in terms of productivity and strategic use of the information we collect,” says Hughes. “We love that Halogen eAppraisal allows us to input our own process and that its functionality goes beyond the appraisal form to include journaling and documentation of the appraisal process. That goals and development plans can also be addressed is also a huge plus,” says Hughes.
As Hughes also explains, “The reporting functionality in Halogen eAppraisal is a powerful tool that allows us to assess employee strengths and weaknesses and ensure an individual's skills are being optimized to their fullest potential.”
As well, none of the other systems Pine Cove evaluated had a notification component. Halogen eAppraisal's "reminder" feature was seen as a real boon to managers who were being asked to conduct performance reviews over multiple steps at the end of the year. Now managers and employees are automatically notified about upcoming tasks related to the appraisal process. The result is increased participation and on-time completion.
A Smooth Transition
Purchased and implemented within the first few months of 2008, Pine Cove’s HR and executive management team looked forward to seeing what the solution would do for the organization.
The first step in the implementation was to familiarize people with the system. Training sessions were conducted with the senior leadership team to encourage usage and build buy-in into the new performance management process.
After a short on-premise deployment, Pine Cove quickly switched to Halogen's on-demand deployment model. This transition enabled managers who are working remotely to access the system from just about anywhere, and has saved the organization resources since the IT team is no longer required to make updates to the system.
Halogen Tool Supports Focus on Professional Development
As HR generalist Jesse Garner explains, the performance management culture at Pine Cove now includes weekly one-on-one meetings with employees and managers. “Every week, full time employees receive one hour of dedicated personal development time with their manager. At least once or twice a month these meetings are used to reflect on goals and accomplishments. This kind of information exchange is really valued by our employees, and many managers use Halogen to input the data from these conversations into their goals and development plans.”
The administrative burden on HR has eased dramatically too, reports Garner. “Now we look at the data and ask ourselves: What can we target for improvement? How can we be better? Halogen eAppraisal is extremely helpful in this manner.”
Advancing Their Mission
Pine Cove is now looking to introduce Halogen Job Description Builder™ to tie job descriptions to the performance review process.
“Halogen supports our philosophy to develop employees while they’re here with us at Pine Cove,” says Hughes. “We want to help employees prepare for career progression. Tools like Halogen eAppraisal and Halogen Job Description Builder can help us uphold and deliver on this commitment.”
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