Rocketship shoots for star teachers with Fairsail HR
- Summary:
- Rocketship wants to spur children from disadvantaged areas to academic success and chose Fairsail HR to help its teachers and staff achieve peak performance
If talent management is crucial in a fast-growing startup, it's probably even more critical when that startup is a chain of public charter schools on a mission to transform the educational achievement of 5 to 11 year-olds from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Rocketship Education opened its first school less than a decade ago in a low-income San Jose neighborhood, in the heart of Silicon Valley. It now runs ten schools in the San Francisco Bay area along with two in Nashville, Tennessee and one in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It will open more next year including its first in the nation's capital, Washington, DC. Financial backers include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and former tennis ace Andre Agassi.
Rocketship aims to set children on a path to a college education by focusing strongly on developing skills in math and reading, while demanding high levels of commitment from staff, pupils and parents. The schools make intensive use of computer-based learning and tests to help track pupils' progress and support individualized attention.
The approach is popular with parents in the areas it serves, who feel that the traditional public school system has failed to foster their childrens' achievement. But Rocketship's approach has its critics, too, who claim the curriculum is too narrowly focused on simply improving scores in reading, writing and math.
Talent development
Whatever your point of view, the Rocketship approach clearly demands enthusiastic, highly skilled teachers who can grow into leadership roles as the not-for-profit operation continues to open new schools. So I was intrigued when HR vendor Fairsail brokered a meeting with Rocketship's VP HR, Dynasti Hunt during a recent visit to San Francisco.
Hunt told me that talent development had been a key factor in Rocketship's decision to adopt the cloud-based Fairsail HR information system.
I think about having a system in which we're not able to just think about how we manage people, but how we're able to take information about our staff and use that to really cultivate and retain top talent.
The new HR platform has made it possible for Rocketship to move away from collecting performance evaluations in individual Google spreadsheets to a more intuitive, integrated system that makes it easier to see global trends, she told me.
With Fairsail, someone like me as the VP of HR can pull a report that not only gives me one person's review but will give me everyone's.
What I want to be able to do is take that back to my senior leadership team and say, the competencies that we're really struggling with across this group of employees is X, so let's figure out what the professional development needs to look like. How do we push in differently on this particular competency?
We weren't able to do that before, because it would take us weeks at a time if we were even going to try it.
Staff also value the self-service access they get to the Fairsail system, she said, although this is a starting point for conversations rather than simply an automated tool, she added.
They have a mini-360 view of how they're doing and they can take that snapshot and build a development plan from there that they can share and get feedback on, whereas before they weren't able to do that.
I will say, with the way that we built the system, that no system, no matter how awesome it is, can take the place of the conversation. Fairsail should be the stool to support those meaningful conversations and our team is doing that.
Mobile access
Fairsail inherits all of the mobile capabilities of the underlying Salesforce platform that it's built on. Hunt explained that having a strong mobile app is something that appeals to Rocketship's mostly twenty-something employees.
For our teachers, it's great to be able to pull up the app on your mobile phone, do what you need to do, and then keep moving.
You pull out your phone, you may check your Facebook, you may check your Fairsail, you're going to keep moving. That's our population of employees.
It makes sense that we would have a system that does that for us, versus something where you're still having to use a ton of paper or that you're tied to a laptop. That's why the mobile app was huge.
Being cloud-based supports staff mobility between different schools, which Hunt told me is especially valuable for Rocketship's expansion.
Because we have schools, not just in the Bay area but also in Nashville and Milwaukee, going to DC, and continuing to grow across the country, we have to have a system that can move with our employees.
When the employee moves, all that information moves with them. If something is different in terms of a policy or procedure in Nashville versus say in the Bay area, all of that's already set up in the system. So to the end user, to an employee, they don't see any difference.
Being able to just get stuff done and get back to their teaching work is a crucial ingredient, she added.
That's huge, because when you think about it, we are in the business of making sure that our teachers are really our best talent and that we're giving them everything possible to be successful in the classroom with their students.
When you're a teacher, from 7am until 5pm, you're so busy that we had to have a system that was going to allow our teachers to feel like, it's seamless, it's easy, I get the information that I need, and I feel like I'm still a part of this organization.
Flexible innovation
The HR team is also becoming more efficient by setting up workflow within the system.
We're doing this e-form, where when someone gets married or when someone has a baby, they fill out the form, but [in doing so] they fill out the process that it triggers for us.
The employee doesn't realize this, but when my team gets the notification a couple of things happen. There's one person on the team who is making sure the proper paperwork is processed, that we have everything on file — the HR compliant side. There's another person on the team whose trigger then says, 'I need to put together a Rocketship baby package' — we have all this baby attire that we have branded for Rocketship.
So it's the little things like that, that we hadn't thought about before, or we were just getting random emails about. It helps us because then we can actually track, did we send that package, did we get the paperwork on file? Now we can do both sides of the process — it's the technical HR side, but it's also the employee experience side.
In choosing Fairsail, Hunt said that she believes Rocketship has chosen an HR system that will serve its needs through the next two decades of growth.
The amount of flexibility — I won't say the possibilities are endless, but right now they do feel that way in terms of where the system is going and where we're going.
A system that's going to go to a certain point and then you're going to hit a wall, it's probably not a system that you want to use.
We are an innovator. We want to be at the forefront of things. That means that we have to have a system that can grow and innovate with us. Fairsail has been able to do that and so it's just been a huge win for our organization.
My take
Huge enthusiasm from an evidently delighted customer with ambitious plans to change the world.
Image credit: Dynasti Hunt outside the Dreamforce 2015 developer zone by @philww.
Disclosure: Salesforce is a diginomica premier partner.