A trusted HR partner

In 2017, Julia Malaga, chief financial officer at Golda Och Academy, selected ADP as its HR service partner. Here’s how Julia utilizes ADP TotalSource to streamline the school’s HR functions, access enhanced benefits, and receive expert compliance guidance so she can support Golda Och’s mission.

Professionally, one thing that inspires me is working for an organization where — even though I’m not on the front lines of service to achieve our mission — the work I do behind the scenes furthers that mission by empowering our people to directly provide that service. It’s really inspiring and motivating to me to be able to do that creatively, to constantly look for new ways to do it more efficiently, and to do more with less. That way we can move those resources from the back office to the magic that happens in the classroom to achieve our mission.

Julia Malaga, Chief Financial Officer
Golda Och Academy

ADP elevated our benefits offerings

Golda Och Academy is a pre-K-12 private Jewish day school. We have 460 students and have been in business for 55 years. Our mission is to provide a value-based education to nurture and inspire a generation of future leaders in our country. We encourage critical thinking, community service and mutual responsibility.

I started exploring outsourcing HR about 10 years ago, as we were having challenges offering competitive benefits for our employees. As a religious organization, at one point in our history we received an exempt status from the state unemployment program. I felt being able to offer unemployment issuance protection was important, and this was the harbinger to explore other opportunities. I learned about the HRO PEO model from a colleague at another school who had been working with ADP TotalSource for a number of years.

My primary focus was to offer a competitive benefits package and leverage outside resources more effectively than we could do on our own. We had been seeing 20 percent increases in insurance premiums every year, with a limited ability to offer a broad range of benefits. The colleague I mentioned explained that they were able to offer Fortune 500-caliber benefits for roughly the same cost as what we were paying.

We ultimately selected ADP TotalSource as our HR provider. Given the significant savings on health insurance we were able to cover the cost of the whole program — including the ability to provide workers’ comp and unemployment insurance. Offering more for our employees for the same amount of money is why we selected ADP TotalSource. We’re now more competitive versus public and private schools in terms of attracting talented educators.

Regular compliance expertise

We focus our resources on the school and our teaching staff, not the back office. As a result, we have a small, multi-functional business office and do not have a specialized HR director. I have played that role as the chief financial officer, but it has become a bigger challenge with constantly evolving compliance and regulatory issues. We also had a significant workload on managing our benefits plan, negotiating our renewals, and handling open enrollment. With ADP TotalSource, we are now able to use technology to streamline the open enrollment process through their online self-service functionality. We also rely on ADP to help keep us compliant with HR and benefits administration. This has been really invaluable to us and one of the biggest value-added features.

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