Why is Above The Dirt switching their current payroll card?

For the past five years, Ganaz has been hard at work at becoming the most accessible people management platform in the agriculture and food processing industries. Fast-forward to 2022, and we believe we’ve managed to come up with some exciting solutions — both for farmworkers and their employers! 

Our goal has always been to streamline the onboarding and managing of employees while also making sure they reap just as many benefits in the process. And hard-working, honest employers like Above The Dirt are a great example of the quality-of-life features we're bringing to our partners and their employees! 

Above The Dirt — The “Before Ganaz” Picture

Here at Ganaz, we love working with employers that appreciate their hard-working employees — which is why Above The Dirt was immediately a perfect fit. Like all great modern ag employers, they had already done a lot to streamline their operations, making employee management easier for them and the workers' experience hassle-free.

However, there’s always room for improvement. And the folks behind Above The Dirt knew exactly where their current methods were falling short — which is why they turned to Ganaz for their onboarding and payroll management needs. As you’ll see soon enough, many of the issues that Above The Dirt was dealing with are something most agriculture employers will recognize.

Mountains of Paperwork

Above The Dirt has been trying to move towards a more electronic approach for a while now. After all, paperwork is notoriously difficult to deal with — especially when you need to keep track of so many important files, deal with lost papers, and sort out the inevitable mistakes made when the paperwork was first filed.

It's no wonder either, considering the limitations of handling employees through traditional paperwork. You're going through packets of documents for each employee; they're scanning their documents, and then you have to turn all of that into an employee file. It's exhausting, to say the least.

While Above The Dirt made their hiring forms electronic, the process wasn’t perfect; their software partners had managed to create something workable, but the hiring still wasn’t streamlined. According to Sherri Burris, their HR Compliance Office Manager, it would still take a whole workday to process fewer than two dozen new hires:

“...20 people would come on in to be hired, and it literally took an eight-hour process.”

Plus, Sheila Waulters, AP Manager, describes how they were having the same issues with their payroll cards. They had to make photocopies of them, then register the cards online or via phone — all of that before even handing them out to employees. 

“I think the biggest issue we're having with our current payroll pay card is just that it also is a very manual process. We take those cards, make photocopies of them, we have to register them online, call in to register them, then we hold on to them and hand them out to our employees when they come in for their first paycheck.”

Lack of Customer Support

While we’re on the topic of Above The Dirt’s previous payroll cards — it’s worth pointing out they had a ton of trouble with their customer support. Primarily, with the fact that their previous provider didn’t ensure they had adequate customer support. 

Just like many other AG employers, Above The Dirt had plenty of Hispanic, Spanish-speaking employees. And even though their previous card provider had an option for non-English speakers in their customer support — the person who would answer was just another English speaker! 

“...they didn't have the right people answering. You would choose Spanish, but it was still an English [speaking] person that came on.”

Yep, that’s right; that payroll card program had no Spanish-speaking personnel to help Above The Dirt employees over the phone! And with Above The Dirt being reasonable, thoughtful employers, they had only one choice — they’d sit down with their workers and try to help them communicate their problems to English-speaking customer service staff.

Now, put yourself in their shoes — one of your employees hasn’t received their payment. Or they’ve lost their card. Or it’s been stolen from them — or they need their card reissued for some other reason. The employee only speaks Spanish, and they only have access to English customer support.  

The guys at Above The Dirt did what you’d do — they had to sit in on the calls as their employees explained their issues, even communicating for them and with their permission when necessary. As Sherri Burris put it:

“... It could take 15 to 30 minutes put on hold. I'm going through all the questions, or they keep pushing you off to different people. That takes time away from that worker, and it takes a lot of time away from my office people.”

Needless to say, all of this took a heck of a long time. And the farmworkers weren't satisfied because they were tired of playing Charades with customer service staff that didn't speak their language. This is far from ideal, considering that even H2-A workers are able to shop around when dissatisfied in the current job climate. 

Plus, Above The Dirt wasn't happy because they had to spend 15 to 30 minutes on each of these situations — and they had to, because they value their employees.  

Ganaz To The Rescue

As you might have guessed, Ganaz turned out to be the easiest solution to all of these issues — and then some! 

Paperless Onboarding and Management

One of the main draws of Ganaz is our platform’s ability to simplify people management in agriculture through software, saving employers time, money, and energy. Among other features, we provide paperless onboarding and employee communication — which is exactly what got the attention of Above The Dirt first. 

The primary reason they signed up with Ganaz in the first place was the onboarding and communication features. Onboarding speed and efficiency was a crucial pain point for Above The Dirt — and one that they successfully resolved with Ganaz.

“What drew us to Ganaz was the speed of the development of onboarding.”

Our platforms’ onboarding feature turned out to be a huge time saver for Above The Dirt. The ability to stop relying on paper for document retention, the quick scanning of worker IDs and the hours saved by using a single electronic signature all added up. 

Soon enough, Above The Dirt was able to completely do away with time-consuming data entry. According to Sheila Waulters, their AP Manager, the onboarding tasks that took them 30 minutes before Ganaz now only required a couple of minutes at most.

“...It was an easy process for us to do our onboarding. It was quick, it was simple, and Ganaz has been great to work with; very responsive in their customer support, and those are the main reasons that we went with them.”

Ganaz provides a fully customizable and digitized onboarding experience — for instance, you can create different hiring packets for H-2A, full-time, part-time, or seasonal workers. 

Effortless Communication

Apart from streamlined onboarding, Above The Dirt was also drawn to Ganaz by the prospect of effortless workforce communication. Our platform makes sending auto-translated bulk messages to both current and previous employees as easy as pie. And being able to share vital information with employees was something Above The Dirt appreciated as well. 

“..the features of the Ganaz MasterCard, it's just a more robust system. Being able to get text messages in the WhatsApp platform, [and] being able to send information to our employees.”

Through our platform, employers can send a thousand auto-translated texts in a single click — something that might otherwise take hours of valuable time and energy. 

Better Payroll Cards

Up until now, we’ve only talked about why Above The Dirt decided to use our HR management software. But we still haven’t answered the titular question — why did they decide to switch out their previous payroll card program for the Ganaz Mastercard® Payroll Card? 

Well, once they signed up to our onboarding and communication platform, they realized that we could help them with payroll cards as well. And our focus on employee communication helped them realize that we've applied the same logic to our payroll card features too. 

First of all, Spanish-speaking employees can be far more comfortable calling Ganaz directly to let us know of any issues that need to be resolved; we’ve got Spanish-speaking customer support staff precisely for such occasions. 

Due to this, they don’t require any handholding from Above The Dirt management on support calls anymore. This is saving even more for Above The Dirt — not to mention the fact that their farmworkers are much happier with their payroll cards as well. 

And it’s not just about the customer support either. ABT employees appreciated their new payroll cards because they came with higher daily withdrawal limits compared to their old cards. If they wanted to get more money from an ATM in one trip, they could do so easily with the new cards! 

With all of that in mind, it’s no wonder they switched to Ganaz — in the process of adapting to our onboarding, communication, and payroll card services, both the farmworkers and their employers from Above The Dirt benefited hugely. 

As Sherri Burris put it:

“I feel that they're on the same page with us wanting to make things easier – that Ganaz is with us every step of the way and constantly picking our brains, so I just I feel a lot better going this route instead of wrestling with our past one.”

The Ganaz Mastercard® Payroll Card is issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC, pursuant to a license from Mastercard International. Mastercard is a registered trademark, and the circles design is a trademark of Mastercard International Incorporated.