Richmond Football Club saves hours on rostering and award compliance thanks to Deputy

Richmond FC is more than an iconic, premiership-winning club. The organisation also runs amazing fitness facilities for the community through its subsidiary, Aligned Leisure, helping members stay active, fit and thriving. 

When asked what makes Richmond FC special, Grace Benson, their People and Culture Advisor, doesn’t skip a beat. 

“So I started here at Richmond five years ago. I was a uni student then, and I've never left, so you can tell it's an amazing place to work. As a club, we have a big focus on well-being and health…it’s so important to us.”

Alex Lamborn, Human Resource Manager for Aligned Leisure, adds, “What makes me proud to work here is the focus that we have on our employees. Because when our people are happy, our members are happy.”

So you might be thinking, with both a football club and a range of fitness facilities to run, there must be a lot of staffing complexity — and you’d be right. 

Across Richmond FC and Aligned Leisure, they have a huge variety of roles they need to schedule: from retail roles in the Roar Store to trainers, gym managers, lifeguards and swim instructors. With that comes a long list of complex award requirements they need to ensure compliance with.

For Alex and Grace, two of their biggest priorities are award compliance and payroll — which can be so complex without the right tools.

Alex says, “We operate across 10 different awards across about 1500 employees…It's complicated. There's tons of information that you need to cipher through to determine how to pay people correctly.” 

Grace adds, “We are in such a fast-paced, changing environment. There's always a new role, always a new position that we need to get up and running in a short amount of time. What Deputy allowed us to do is we can set up these new positions and have our pay sorted within a couple of minutes…For me personally, it has been a massive game changer.”

Grace explains that, before Deputy, their process for managing awards and payroll was incredibly time-consuming, with so many parts of the process to get right, and it could lead to pay taking weeks to go through.

“The other complexities we have with Richmond is that we have a lot of employees that work across different awards…If they're working as a sports trainer, it's a different pay to a massage therapist. So the great thing about Deputy is that it allowed us to be so confident that when our sports trainers are working as sports trainers, they'll be paid as a sports trainer and vice versa.”

Alex says that when they were comparing all the different tools for rostering, time tracking and award compliance, “Deputy shone through as a clear leader.”

“When we looked at Deputy, what really shone through was it's a user experience. We sat down, we went through the online demo and it was very clear that its usability was very clean. We found that it would be very simple to learn from an employee perspective.”

One of the biggest criteria for Richmond FC and Aligned Leisure was a smooth change management process, with dedicated support to get everything set up exactly the way they needed it. Alex says that Deputy absolutely nailed it.

“One of the things I found was really good with Deputy was they actually had training sessions for our managers…Our managers were taught how to use the system and then it flowed down to our employees…People had the app prior to going live. We had all their profiles set up and ready to go…It was seamless.”

Employees now have one simple app for claiming shifts, swapping shifts and staying connected with their team.

Meanwhile, on the award compliance front, Alex sings the praises of Deputy and their implementation team, who have made it easy to manage all 10 of the different awards they use across the club.

“When you see Deputy in action, when you see a complicated timesheet come through and you can see that the timesheet is [automatically] broken down into six different pay conditions…it's amazing to know that it's doing it all correctly and it's taking that load off our team to manually work out that information.”

On top of that, he estimates that each of their managers save about 2 hours a week on rostering. 

“Since we've implemented Deputy, a big change we've seen is the ease for managers to roster their teams. The ability to copy weeks or months from one period to the next…we find our teams have done rosters for the next six weeks in probably the space of 30 seconds…And the budgeting side of things as well is fantastic for our managers — to be able to see how they're rostering versus their budget in such an easy, user-friendly way.”

“When I look at the efficiencies that Deputy brings, and especially with automatically handling a lot of the complex payroll work, we've been able to reinvest that time…For [our leaders] getting more time back in their day means more time that they can be spending with their teams, helping our members, which is a big gain for us.”