Learn how Preferred Parking saved 84 hours per month on payroll processing for their 200+ locations and reduced onboarding time by eight hours per employee after moving back to isolved.
If you’ve ever parked at a Carolina Panthers game, pulled into the Spectrum Center for a concert or spent any time in the Carolinas, chances are you’ve been a Preferred Parking customer.
With valet, lots, garages and more, the intricacies of talent and workforce management are quite complex. Not only does each property require unique upkeep, but also requires keeping up with complicated HR, payroll, talent and workforce management needs. It’s why when new leadership moved HR and payroll to Paychex, they spent just one year there before moving back to isolved.
“There are many moving pieces to parking payroll and HR operations, and isolved helps us manage it uniformly. So, when I was taking back payroll, I required it to be with isolved,” said LeAnne Phifer, senior manager of employment and office services at Preferred Parking. “One particular garage manager, for example, may oversee multiple garages. This means we need to properly attribute time and attendance percentages to each specific location. And to further complicate matters, one of those properties might be owned by us outright while another may be one we service for a third-party owner—so the labor needs must be allocated properly.”
“Managing locations for other owners means HR as a service is a line of business for Preferred Parking, and isolved makes it incredibly easy to allocate payroll, talent, and overall HR accurately across any location or employee type.”
— LeAnne Phifer, Senior Manager of Employment and Office Services at Preferred Parking
Preferred Parking employees are often required to clock in and out of different locations. With 24/7 operations, isolved allows them to do that on the go while isolved Time & Labor Management automatically accounts for first-, second- and third-shift pay differences. Various pay structures are adjusted automatically based on location. This was a very different situation before isolved.
“I am very pleased with isolved,” said Phifer. “The platform is very user-friendly and employees are comfortable with it. When I started, the company was doing payroll in-house and everything was manual. There were paper timecards all over the city of Charlotte. I’d get 100 timecards to manually tally. We needed to get with the times and get the process automated. I went from spending 24 hours a week on payroll back then to three hours a week, from start to finish, including time and taxes.”
In addition to location-allocation, Preferred Parking employs a diverse range of employee types, including full-time maintenance workers, 24/7 call-center representatives, and part-time employees who check parking lots and event staff who collect funds and direct traffic. While Preferred Parking employs 120 employees year-round, high-volume days, such as Panthers games, may see upward of 100 event attendants “on the clock.”
“Event-attendant numbers obviously dipped tremendously during the pandemic, and now we are trying to build back that talent pool,” said Phifer. “During the height of the social-distancing measures, we relied heavily on isolved’s expertise in the Paycheck Protection Program and maintaining business continuity amid unprecedented times. I attended isolved webinars on how to move forward almost weekly from March to May 2020.”
Now that events are back to “normal”, Preferred Parking can easily onboard new employees digitally. This helps meet the consumer-like expectations of employees and gets people working and paid faster. Quicker onboarding also enhances Preferred Parking’s customer experience through fully staffed and expertly managed operations.
With isolved, Preferred Parking saved 84 hours per month on payroll processing and reduced onboarding time by eight hours per employee.
“I love the onboarding experience,” said Phifer. “Rather than doing paper onboarding, new-hire paperwork and filling out state and federal tax forms manually, isolved has saved us at least eight hours per employee when it comes to onboarding.”
The next step is to transition employees from isolved Go (isolved's now-retired mobile app) to isolved Adaptive Employee Experience, a progressive web app designed to keep employee tools always accessible.
“People are creatures of habit. When we moved from paper time clocks to app-based time clocks many years ago, there was resistance,” said Phifer. “Now that we’ve moved from an app to the Adaptive Employee Experience, the user experience is improved, but it will take some time to get employees comfortable again. We’re excited, though, for employees to have the same experience on their phones in the field as they do on their desktops, with connectivity never being a problem."
Elevate Your People Strategies
Customer: Preferred Parking
Location: North Carolina / South Carolina
Industry: Professional Services
Employees: 220
Streamline operations, reduce risk and deliver better employee experiences with scalable solutions designed to put people first.
