Regis Mutual Management

Customer profile

Regis Mutual Management Limited (Regis) are experts at creating and managing hybrid discretionary mutuals.  Paul Koronka, CEO of Regis, has over 40 years experience in the mutual sector of the financial services industry and has been involved in the creation and management of 19 mutuals. The company offers full management services to help people and organisations to save time and money, reduce their exposure to risk and ensure that their best interests are being served. Their mission is to provide organisations with more choice in how to protect their risk through the application of a hybrid discretionary mutual which offers a robust and trusted alternative to insurance companies with shareholders or, as they call it, insurance but redesigned for the member.

Regis was formed in 2007 and now manages eleven mutuals in the UK and Australia. Each of the mutuals are unique, they represent a diverse range of sectors including independent retailers, City of London Livery Companies, Fire and Rescue Authorities (FRIC) and Australian universities. Regis is split over four sites – London, Tonbridge, Portsmouth and Sydney, Australia – the company employs around 160 employees.

Business challenge

With employees spread across the south of England and internationally in Australia, Regis had initially set up manual HR processes across its multiple locations. But to support the growth of their business, the company wanted to centralise these.

They also wanted to make sure that, as they continued to grow, they could keep information flowing efficiently, build strong employee engagement, and encourage the cohesive feeling of the whole company being one family.

Overview

Helen Peckham, Head of Human Resources at Regis, spoke with us about her experience of IRIS HR Professional. Helen said:

“Before IRIS HR Professional, Regis was using spreadsheets and handwritten paper forms to manage its HR processes. When I joined in 2016, the company had already implemented IRIS HR Professional so it could keep a central record of people data and processes, simplify absence management, as well as offer additional HR tools to support company as it grew.

“When I joined, I was keen for us to get to know the system better and understand what else we could do with the functionality to support the business. That’s when we started to implement additional HR processes, such as onboarding.”

Results

Helen continued: “There are lots of reasons why IRIS HR Professional has proved to be a good fit for our company – one of the most significant being that it’s reduced the number of errors in our payroll.

“Personally, I like the features like mail merge and quick reporting (which is a huge help to our payroll tax reporting). Our processes are more efficient, we have a central place to store and access our employee handbook, and the salary modelling functionality is a huge help for our annual salary review.

“The way the self-service functionality hands responsibility to our employees for updating their personal details is also great for us. Particularly, when we’re onboarding new employees – asking them to use the system to update fields like their emergency contacts gives them chance to get to know the system straight away.

“Our employees have also found IRIS HR Professional quick to pick up. We simply give our new starters a quick overview in their induction, asking them to start managing their own personal records, including absences, and we generally don’t have any problems.

“Arguably though, the biggest benefit for us is how IRIS HR Professional helps us adhere to our regulatory obligations. The best example is that we’re obliged to record CDP hours for our team members. We need to evidence that our employees are competent to do their jobs, and this evidence is heavy reliant on us providing the correct training and development. So, we need a decent record of this to make sure we’re on target to meet the requirements over the year. Before IRIS HR Professional, the responsibility was placed on the employee themselves to keep track. But now, we can record this data on the system and run a report at any time to check progress against our requirements.”  

Conclusion

Summing up, Helen explained: “IRIS HR Professional has been a great support to our growing company and I’d like to invest more time in better understanding its functionality because I know it can do so much more. Finding the time to explore the possibilities is our only real challenge – there’s a lot more IRIS HR Professional can do to enhance our HR offering.”