Bubbles Academy

Bubbles Academy is an arts-integration early childhood education center that ignites wonder in young children and their families. As they grew from one to three locations in the Chicagoland area, they needed strategic support to manage their increasingly complex operations while maintaining their focus on early childhood development and community impact.

Problem: Onboarding and Payroll Struggles

• A standard timesheet couldn’t accommodate the complexity of multiple rates and locations. Teachers were using spreadsheets to track hours, often resulting in missed entires and too much emailing back and forth.
• Paper checklists were being used to track background checks, new email addresses, and classroom training - but a growing staff meant that the leadership team was overwhelmed with multiple new hires at once, and new staff experiences were inconsistent and piecemeal.
• Open Enrollment was a constant source of stress since it only came around once a year, and with a new 401(k) program due to be implemented soon, the owners needed a better way to communicate benefits and track staff costs.
  

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Our Approach

We interviewed current staff to understand what stood out to them about their first days at Bubbles: the best parts of the culture, the questions they had to figure out along the way, and moments of magic during their training. We also conducted an audit of all the compliance needs, software systems, and “things to know” for each position. Then, we scoped out several HRIS platforms to find the best fit for Bubbles’s unique needs.

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Our Solution: A New HRIS and Onboarding Process

We implemented GoCo as the platform to solve all the above problems.

• The integrated payroll offered enough complexity to track types of classes AND locations, even with unique rates for veteran teachers. (We also created a new Class tracking setup in Quickbooks to be able to report on each location’s individual expenses and revenue.)
• We built workflow templates and magic documents to automate processes: for example, a new email workflow provided employees their temporary password, a list email policies, and instructions for adding a branded email signature
• The benefits module offered easy-to-understand information for staff about their benefits, automatically reminded them to enroll, and provided an employer-side cost analysis.
  

We created an employee binder full of child development resources, example curricula, guided teaching artist reflections, and a compendium of administrative policies - and then worked with the leadership team to develop training modules around each area, ensuring that employees received in-person training to complement the new written resources.

And, we created an Asana Project template to kick off each new hire’s onboarding, allowing every team member to track onboarding status and increasing accountability for completing tasks.

The Outcome

New employees gained trust in the onboarding process before they even set foot in the door on their first day, with a welcome email that explained what to bring, what to expect, and where to park (complete with a map to employee parking). No more scrambling to pull together materials or create logins: new teachers are greeted with a bag including their Bubbles t-shirt (in the correct size), their new employee binder, a note from their new staff buddy, and a copy of Beautiful Oops - a book which encapsulates Bubbles’ approach to learning and growth.

Now, rather than be overwhelmed by new information (or forgetting it after the first week), teachers have resources to refer back to after their initial onboarding sessions, and they have a dedicated place to store their class notes, professional development handouts, and observation feedback forms.

And while veteran teachers who used spreadsheets in the old days still marvel over the ease of the new system, new teachers don’t even know what they’re missing. They simply fill out their timesheets with ease and get paid on time.

By rebuilding their onboarding and HR systems, Polaris has helped Bubbles Academy build a stronger foundation for sustainable growth, allowing them to focus on what they do best—nurturing creativity and learning in young children.

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