People are a company’s most important asset. And making sure that employees stay connected and engaged at work often rests on HR’s shoulders.
New technologies enable HR teams to spend less time on manually-intensive administrative work. In turn, that creates more time to focus on people and ideas to help the business achieve strategic goals.
When Joe Taranto, HR Generalist & Project Manager at Rémy Cointreau, learned about ChartHop through an industry acquaintance, he immediately saw how it could help his team be a better partner to the business. Taranto explains: “It was easy to see how ChartHop would enable us to work with greater efficiency and deliver quicker and more streamlined insights.”
When Taranto first joined Rémy Cointreau’s HR team, he was tasked with managing the company’s 200+ person org chart. And he was doing it all in PowerPoint.
That meant manually updating minor changes like title updates and promotions, and things got complicated quickly when the company embarked on larger changes that resulted in new reporting lines, restructurings, and recruiting efforts. At that point, Taranto spent so much time dragging around boxes and shuffling people and teams across slides for meetings and presentations that it was all-consuming.
Specifically, Taranto spent 4-5 hours a weekmanually updating the org chart. Beyond costing $15K a year in productivity losses, this effort also prevented him from sharing key people insights in a timely manner.
“When a VP or director of a team needed an org chart, we couldn’t provide it on the spot if they weren’t already fully updated,” Taranto says. This inability to surface the most relevant and accurate information at the right time created a disjointed workforce planning process.
It created a workflow in which managers worked in silos on their hiring plans, which had a huge downstream impact for the organization. Taranto shares: “Managers would bring their plans into meetings with HR without full context into everything going on at the company. Then we’d try to make real-time changes in PowerPoint or even hand draw sensitive information to visualize proposed changes. It was just very time consuming and inefficient. We needed a better solution.”
What Rémy Cointreau needed was a solution that enabled them to visually represent their company, keep pace with organizational changes, securely house their data, and align their teams to one source of truth for that data. That’s where ChartHop stepped in.
Implementing ChartHop delivered immediate benefits for Rémy Cointreau. Taranto and the rest of the HR team finally had a tool that allowed them to spend less time and energy on manual, administrative work and more time using their people data to drive strategic insights for the business.
And Taranto isn’t letting any moment of his new-found time go to waste. He shares: “ChartHop allows me to focus on important projects like recruiting, workforce planning, and internal training.It allows me to do my job.”
ChartHop fundamentally changed the way Rémy Cointreau approaches organizational design – and it all started with having the right information at the right time.
When the team previously poured hours of time and energy into PowerPoint org charts, they also naturally exposed their work to manual error. Now, when anyone needs information on current team and org structure, they can trust ChartHop as a source of truth that will provide the most up-to-date and relevant information.
“With ChartHop, creating and updating our org chart is simple. It only takes a minute of my time,” Taranto explains. “We go in, click on a manager, and ‘boom!’ the team is there. You want a full visualization of the organization? No problem. It’s all available instantly in ChartHop. It just makes my job easier.”
ChartHop has also helped Rémy Cointreau plan more strategically. Previously, the company’s workforce planning process involved siloed and disjointed workflows, hand drawings of proposed structural changes, and piecemeal exchanges of information over email and ad hoc meetings.
Now, Rémy Cointreau’s HR team has the resources they need to be a true strategic partner in planning – and do so proactively. Having access to all of the company’s people data at their fingertips not only saves time, but it also helps the Rémy Cointreau team “put our best plans forward by providing a clear outline of what different teams or the company as a whole could look like,” Taranto shares.
For example, when Taranto identifies opportunities for changes to hiring plans, he can use ChartHop data to build a solid business case and move the organization forward. That means rather than waiting for individual managers or team leads to propose headcount changes, Taranto can use ChartHop to proactively forecast hiring plans, collaborate with managers and get their feedback in real time, and then align the team to those changes.
“ChartHop helps streamline the planning process. When managers see the proposed changes in ChartHop, they’re amazed by how easy it is to chart out plans for the future. And it takes seconds to incorporate feedback,” he adds.
Critically, ChartHop’s workforce planning tools not only gave valuable time back to Rémy Cointreau, but it also led to a more intentional hiring plan thatsaved $450K in reduced headcount spend.
For Taranto, the role of HR in any thriving business is clear: “Be a true business partner to the organization.” That means proactive, data-informed workforce planning.
However, getting to that state is not always easy to accomplish. It requires technology that automates manually-intensive, administrative work to provide time and clarity that can be spent on delivering high-impact solutions.
Taranto concludes: “ChartHop is like a digital playground where we can come up with plans and see their impact on our business in real time. What previously would have been discussed in a back-and-forth email thread, a PowerPoint, and a drawing, is now presented in a way that enables our team to propose changes that propel our business forward.”