People and Change: Natasha Malloff

As Director, Health, Wellbeing, and Benefits at UBC Human Resources in Vancouver, Natasha Malloff provides strategic leadership and expertise in evolving workplace wellbeing practices and initiatives, as well as in the oversight of the UBC benefits program, covering over 16,000 faculty and staff and a retiree and survivor benefits program. Natasha has been supporting the Integrated Renewal Program (IRP) and Application Ecosystem Program (AEP) in the development of the benefits and time and attendance foundations in Workday and as project sponsor for the tuition waiver program development as part of AEP. In addition, she is the central HR department’s Transition Network (TN) lead.

The transition to Workday will transform and modernize the way we do our work across UBC. Having deep involvement in Workday and AEP, Natasha sees the opportunities around the changes to include streamlined, integrated, and automated workflow processes, as well as providing greater consistency in practices, visibility of information, and systems functionality for faculty, staff, and managers/leaders in a secure online environment. As Workday will be upgraded twice annually with new features and capabilities under the future Integrated Service Centre (ISC), our systems will continuously improve and leverage leading practices from other higher education institutions who have implemented Workday. Consequently, Natasha is excited about the ability for the organization to focus more on innovative and collaborative activities in support of our UBC strategic priorities, while drawing on improved Workday reporting and data capabilities for better decision-making and action planning.

As UBC Human Resources is a key sponsor of Workday and supporting IRP with functional expertise, they have a deeper understanding of the opportunities with Workday enabling our ability to provide enhanced support to the UBC community in the adoption of Workday. Working in an integrated and collaborative approach with IRP Organizational Change Management (OCM), HR’s Transition Network includes both central and distributed captains who are sharing their learning, knowledge, and preparation of the changes. The TN members are preparing themselves to support their local unit through training and knowledge sharing, thereby building change capacity to support end-users while key TN members will provide more complex functional expertise and knowledge to the UBC community in coordination with the new ISC, post go-live.

The biggest challenge of this large-scale change is related to the size and complexity of UBC, and getting adoption of the changes across our campuses and remote sites. By mobilizing coordinated communications and transition planning with IRP OCM’s guidance, leaders and TN members can enable UBC community members toward understanding the importance of the change, and through key training, be ready to adopt Workday. This takes commitment, time, and desire to transform our approach to how we work. Cognizant that change can be challenging and stressful, Natasha is also focused on ensuring we are paying attention to our wellbeing in the workplace. HR’s Health, Wellbeing, and Benefits unit in partnership with IRP OCM is offering Stress and Resiliency programming for IRP transition and project team members.