Upping the game across the entire end-to-end employee experience

The myCareer team in the NSW Department of Customer Service (DCS) is the creator, administrator and proud guardian of a platform providing People & Culture support to seven diverse ‘clusters’ of government agencies — each with its own unique interface and expectations. From a starting point of multiple, unintegrated systems and time-consuming, error-prone manual processes, the team used Cornerstone to digitise the entire employee lifecycle — from finding and recruiting talent through onboarding, performance management, learning and offboarding.

They have made every process more nimble, accountable and efficient. They’ve also created a fan base of employees who flock to myCareer daily to help self-direct their own careers and growth. Most recently, the team have implemented Cornerstone Content Anytime (CCA) to support their content strategy and offer their people curated learning content, covering themes such as well-being, burnout and development training. DCS originally selected Cornerstone in 2015 on the strength of its ability to grow with and integrate every element of the People & Culture unit’s requirements and for its leading Learning & Performance Management System. Since then, the system, now known as myCareer, has proven itself for performance and adaptability.

myCareer has been responsible for vast improvements in efficiency, an unprecedented level of employee engagement and a raft of creative new functionalities. myCareer has more than 30,000 logins every month, averaging 32 minutes per user session.

The myCareer system, grounded in the full suite of Cornerstone solutions, has transformed People & Culture operations:

Before Cornerstone, DCS had no single formal learning platform and multiple LMS and payroll systems that weren’t integrated with HR information systems. Performance reviews were paper-based, and participation rates were low. To tackle some of the most critical touchpoints in the employee lifecycle first, implementation kicked off with Cornerstone Learning and Cornerstone Performance.

Learning – from compliance to self-driven

Launching Cornerstone required not only a massive migration of data from various legacy systems. It called for a concerted culture change, moving people from a largely reactive ‘compliance’ mentality to a more proactive ‘how can I drive my own career?’ mindset. An entire library of online learning, both professional and personal, was opened up to staff. People & Culture ‘playlists’ were introduced to help guide learners to timely topics, with staff encouraged to take advantage of their own choices at their own pace.

The team now curates experiences with custom pages and themed playlists on topics such as myWellbeing, burnout and development training rather than having learning content sitting in isolation in the portal. The result is that employees are able to easily find relevant content to consume when they want, how they want and where they want.

Latest Results

Performance – new effectiveness and insight

The launch of Cornerstone Performance also brought big benefits. Performance reviews which were once paper-based and poorly completed are now consistently achieving high completion rates. And the talent review module is particularly prized for its ability to help assess performance across the organisation and identify critical roles for succession. With the subsequent implementation of Cornerstone Recruitment and full Cornerstone HR, including Cornerstone Connect, Onboarding and Succession, myCareer now supports the entire employee life cycle. And it has produced some pretty gratifying outcomes.

Recruitment – a dramatically improved experience

Digitisation of the recruitment and onboarding process has made a world of difference to recruitment efficiency and candidate experience:

Number of clicks for an application: from 37+ down to 19 or fewer

Average time to hire: from 55–60 days to 33

Average time to onboard: from 2 weeks or more to 3 business days.

Cornerstone hasn’t just transformed the core DCS employee processes and experience. It has spurred innovation and helped DCS deal with unprecedented challenges.

Cornerstone’s forms and custom pages allow the myCareer team to create bespoke functionality any time, easily, in-house. And these simple tools have helped bring one particularly inspired idea to life. myWellbeing is a new tool to support employees with short, bite-sized learning to help build self-awareness and support their own well-being and the well-being of teams. Employees can also access a new 1:1 well-being check-in from this page to help guide well-being conversations.

Custom pages and forms are supremely simple functionality but are a breakthrough way for DCS to roll out People & Culture initiatives, HR programmes and compliance to support their employees. The tool has had over 14,000 page views and 2,000 course registrations and completions since launch (most employees accessed the site within the first two weeks).

Where the Cornerstone system really came to the fore was during the 2020 COVID-19 crisis that forced a virtually overnight transition to employees working from home. With easy-to-use Cornerstone tools in place and accountability already intrinsic to the system, the myCareer team was able to rapidly:

What could have been (and for many organisations was) a nightmare of systems, coordination and documentation challenges, DCS was able to pull off virtually without a hitch.

DCS has had more than 200,000 courses registered and completed in myCareer in the last six months, uplifting the results for development after the People Matters Engagement Survey for employee development.

After the success of myWellbeing, the team has also launched myDiversity and is now working on future tools and products for leadership, privacy, customer and digital capability programmes.

myCareer and Cornerstone have become critical components of DCS’s commitment to employee engagement. The sheer volume of myCareer usage underscores the system’s popularity and effectiveness: each month, the platform clocks over 30,000 logins with a hefty average of 32 minutes per session. And amazingly, a tight team of only five myCareer specialists is able to service the department’s seven clusters of government agency users and its 17,000+ total employees. But beyond the numbers alone, myCareer team members say they get great satisfaction from providing a system and capabilities that the people they serve so appreciate.