Innovative tile manufacturer and retailer, Fireclay Tile needed to build out its team to keep up with rising demand. Managing the details of connecting, insuring, onboarding, and paying their people was quickly becoming too much to handle.
Business Issue
The company had budget in place for competitive benefits, but precious little time to manage the myriad of details that went along with it.
Solution
Putting Zenefits’ tools into the hands of employees helped reduce the time management spent on running legacy and non automated HR programs. The ease of use for individuals to quickly review their insurance options, make selections and updates — all online — resulted in the added benefit of drastically reducing the administrative friction generated by their old HR system. Based on this, Fireclay continues to expand its use of the Zenefits People Platform. In 2014, Fireclay added HR for easier new hire onboarding. And in 2018, the company has extended its one-stop leverage of the Zenefits People Platform to add Payroll support and even provide access to 3rd party tools including Carta, Expensify, and Asana — all from one platform.
A big ‘ah-ha’ for me was the
mobile experience. All the access at my fingertips is amazing!
CEO
Comprehensive benefits
Fireclay offers its team a full set of benefits from health, dental, vision and life insurance, to savings plans for health and commuting, as well as long term disability, matching 401k, no-interest loan programs, education reimbursement, and more.
Tragically, in 2016, the company needed to use their Life Insurance coverage when one of its senior leaders died, and another team member was diagnosed with a fatal illness that same month. “There will never be any way to compensate for the loss of those people in our lives” said CEO Eric Edelson “but I am grateful, that through Zenefits, we had insurance in place to help them and their families.”
Simple employee onboarding and team connection
Today, Fireclay welcomes new hires with online access to everything, from welcome emails to required form completions like background checks, I-9, and automated deposit information. Furthermore, they store key company handbooks and team profiles in Zenefits for easy access to information it’s ever-growing team needs to know.
“A big ‘ah-ha’ for me was the mobile experience” said Edelson. “All the access at my fingertips is amazing; I can share information with our employee owners on our business, and connect with them individually to celebrate milestones and successes. I’d never thought about that as being important in an HR tool before, but now I realize it is invaluable.”
Effortless, integrated payroll
In 2018 Fireclay expanded their use of Zenefits to include payroll. “Historically, we’ve had ADP managing our payroll and Zenefits managing our people. Now Zenefits Payroll can fulfill all our needs from our out-of-state compliance to time and attendance, so we’re going live with Zenefits Payroll and are happy to have everything all in one place.”
The addition takes even more administration drag away from the Fireclay leadership, as insurance co-pay; healthcare, commuter, and tax deductions; as well as payroll and raises all get connected from a single system of employee record. “We just rolled out raises to 45 people last week. That would have been a nightmare to do manually. But with Zenefits, it was easy.”
Supporting a bigger purpose and peace of mind
Fireclay is focused on being the best in what it does — creating and selling beautiful tile — but equally important to the company’s ethos is how it does it. They spent five years working to gain B Corporation certification, which means doing good for the environment, their people, and their local communities.
In fact, they use Zenefits People Platform to get the metrics that matter most to keep them focused on the doing right things, ranging from transparency for their employee owners to ensuring equal pay practices and a fair environment.
“Now that I’ve spent time using Zenefits to help me run and grow our business, I can say that it’s helped me find my zen.”
