Client
HABEN, a rapidly growing property and asset management firm.
Challenge
Disorganized procedures, lack of centralization, and difficulty with compliance tracking during rapid growth.
Key Results
- Successfully tripled the workforce with a standardized onboarding process.
- Centralized nearly 400 policies, processes, and procedures.
- Established a “go-to” single source of truth for a geographically diverse business.
- Transformed compliance from manual “wet ink” signatures to trackable, quiz-based knowledge retention.
The Challenge: Scaling Up Without a Single Source of Truth
HABEN, a rapidly growing business, was facing a critical operational challenge. As Antony Keenan, COO, explains, the company was “going through a period of rapid growth” and “tripling the size of [the] workforce.”
This scaling created immediate pressure on their internal processes, which were decentralized and difficult to manage.
“Prior to Way We Do, all of our policies and procedures were kept in various folders, team members’ emails, or they weren’t documented at all,” says Keenan.
This disorganization meant that critical processes were inconsistent. Compliance-based tasks that required sign-off were “done with wet ink and… weren’t easy to track.” As new people joined the business, it became essential that they could access and follow standardized processes to ensure a “uniform and consistent approach” as the company scaled.
The Solution: A Proven, Centralized Platform
The decision to choose Way We Do was straightforward for Keenan, who had “actually implemented… at a previous company” and was already familiar with its capability. HABEN needed a “centralized place for all of our policies, procedures, checklists, and limits of authority,” and Way We Do was identified as a “fantastic solution to solve for a lot of our needs.”
The implementation was “quite seamless.” HABEN utilized Way We Do’s consulting services to accelerate the process. “We were able to just send all of our existing policies and procedures to Way WeDo. They uploaded them for us,” Keenan notes. “So we had a really great head start.”
The Results: Standardization, Compliance, and Seamless Onboarding
Immediately after implementation, the Way We Do platform became “the go-to place for knowing how to do things at Haben.” Today, the platform houses almost 400 policies and procedures and is “used frequently throughout every day” across the company’s various divisions.
Hero Feature: Scaling Onboarding with “Activated Checklists”
For HABEN, the most transformative feature was the “Activated Checklist,” especially for managing their rapid growth.
“We’ve developed a people onboarding checklist and that’s been a key tool for us as we’ve scaled up… this checklist ensures that we have a seamless onboarding experience with a myriad of things that need to be done for a new employee.” – Antony Keenan
This single checklist manages the entire onboarding journey, from “recruitment to paperwork, setting up IT and systems through to making sure that they have access passes and keys.” Because “multiple people are involved in that onboarding,” the Activated Checklist became the crucial tool that “keeps track of all of that,” ensuring no steps were missed.
From “Accept Buttons” to True Knowledge Retention
Keenan also highlights the platform’s continuous improvements as a key benefit. A new “Quizzes” feature, in particular, was a “great initiative” that fundamentally improved their compliance.
“Now we can test people’s knowledge retention instead of just pressing the accept button on policies,” Keenan says. This moved HABEN from passive acceptance to active, trackable understanding.
A True Partnership
Beyond the software, Keenan praises the support team. “They’re fantastic, they’re very accessible, and they really do feel like an extension of our own team,” he says. “They really partner with us to help develop new solutions for problems that we’re trying to solve for.”
When asked to sum up Way We Do in three words, Keenan’s answer is immediate: “Standardized, Flexible, and Compliance.”
