I recently had the pleasure of attending Ultimate Software’s annual customer event Connections in Las Vegas. This was a special one as it marks Ultimate’s 30th anniversary and it was big with 3,800 customers attending and 4,500 people in total. That is a great turnout and just for the record, Ultimate now has ~6,600 customers which is really quite a large number in the industry.
They kicked thing off outlining some of their 2019 highlights. Last year they processed $464B in payroll, delivered over 700 features of which 410+ came from customer ideas. On the satisfaction from they had a 92% UltiPro customer satisfaction rating and 96% customer retention. Those last two numbers are important as it demonstrates the happiness that their customers expressed with the solution.
If you know anything about Ultimate Software, they are all about culture and have year over year been recognized as one of the top companies to work for. Again, this is important because a happy workforce makes happy customers. This year, Ultimate’s culture earned them #2 on Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For list. In 2019, they also received the following awards:
- Great Places to work – Best Workplaces in Technology #1
- Great Places to work – Best Workplaces for Women #2
- Computerworld 2019 Best Places to Work in IT #1
- 2019 People Magazine – Companies that Care - #2
New Company – Ultimate Software and Kronos will merge
Just in case you haven’t heard, Ultimate Software and Kronos will merge into a new entity (at this time a new name has not been announced). The merger will close at the end of March 2020. The new company will have ~12,000 employees worldwide and will be adding ~3,000 in the next couple of years. The combined company will have annual revenue of ~$3B. Currently Ultimate has $1.4B and Kronos $1.5B. The new company will serve ~22,600 customers. Currently Ultimate serves 6,600 customers and Kronos - ~16,000 with a small number of customers overlapping.
This merger is all about growth – they believe that it will create the industry’s most powerful suite of applications. The merger will provide massive scale and resources that will fuel innovation. As they are both great at customer service, you should expect them to be able to continue to provide exceptional service. In the end, they feel that they will be setting the standard as one the greatest people companies in the world. According to CEO Aron Ain “this is not a cost cutting story; it’s a growth story.” They are committed to investing an additional $350m year in HCM products over what the two companies spend currently, and will add 3,000 more employees over the next 3 years.
Below you can see how they intend to bring the various products to market. The large company category will be getting Workforce Dimensions for workforce management and UltiPro for HCM. Small to Medium sized companies will get Workforce Ready for WFM and either UltiPro or Workforce Ready for HCM depending on their level of complexity.
CEO Address
Aron Ain introduced himself to the Ultimate audience as the new CEO for the new company for the first time and he was very well received by Ultimate’s customers. For those who might not have been aware, he has spent 40 years at Kronos and has done just about every job from service to support to sales to marketing to finance and even cleaning bathrooms. In 2005 he became the CEO of Kronos and will now be the CEO of the new combined company. For customers of Ultimate, this is great news as he is a great person who will keep that fantastic culture intact. “Every day I walk into the door I'm thinking about what kind of leader I want to be”.
If you have ever had the opportunity to meet Aron you know that he is a true leader who is humble and very thankful to his customers and his employees. He has been leading the charge at Kronos for a number of years to offer a high-performing workplace to attract and retain the best employees and has actually written a best-selling book on the subject WorkInspired: How to Build an Organization Where Everyone Loves to Work - Because putting your people first isn’t just good for employees — it’s good for business.
Both Kronos and Ultimate have great cultures and an excellent record for customer satisfaction and retention so it is fantastic to see that the new company will be led by such an inspirational leader who believes so strongly in culture. If anybody can bring the 2 cultures together, I can’t think of many people who could be as well suited. In his keynote Aron left us with this thought, “I want to be remembered as a good husband, father and friend. I don’t really care if I’m remembered as a great CEO.”
Why is culture so important for Ultimate and Kronos customers? First, a truly passionate employee delivers an unmatched customer experience. Secondly, an inspired workforce will always deliver an exceptional product offering that will be consistently innovated on. And finally, because Kronos and Ultimate already know how to keep a highly engaged workforce, they are in a position to leverage their know-how to help their customers achieve the same result. Clients of either company can feel quite comfortable that they will continue to experience superior customer service, support and solutions.
Product Vision
The UltiPro platform is here to stay; it's here to grow; it's here to improve. With that said, John Machado (CTO at Ultimate) spoke about their vision for the product which is based on 4 pillars:
- A Mindful AI: Their focus is on providing the most complete AI in the industry with deep capabilities built in to anticipate, automate and amplify.
- A user experience that embodies a people focused culture: Through a partnership with Level Access they have focused on achieving a goal to make UltiPro readily accessible to users with disabilities—enabling digital technology to become a profound empowering force in their lives. Ultimate have gone through a full audit and believe that they have a user experience that is familiar, nimble, inclusive and adaptive.
- A redefined people and workforce management solution: Designed to inspire, serve and guide action and performance.
- A connected and resilient platform: This is open, extensible, intelligent, self-healing and secure.
Product Innovation
Cecile Alper-Leroux (Vice President, Human Capital Management Innovation) and Robin Stimac (Vice President of Product Management) took to the stage to show how UltiPro has been designed to help the user through all stages of their Lifework Journey. What is Lifework Journey you say? According to Cecile, products were designed to focus on from hire to retire, and then the industry moved to work life balance. Both of these didn’t really match the stages an employee moves through (and each employee can move back and forth throughout their career) so their research created the Lifework Journey. According to Cecile, "The LifeWork Journey recognizes that we are constantly in flux and at every moment we go through different stages. We have to understand where people are at each stage so that we can provide exceptional experiences for our people at work. We need to create exceptional experiences at each of these milestones." Here are some examples of the stages with what the priority is for the employee, where their motivation level is and what actions they take and finally the solutions that UltiPro provides for the employee at each stage:
At Risk:
- priority is getting paid
- motivation is fear/preservation
- their action is to follow orders
One of Ultimate’s Solutions: On-Demand Pay is now available in UltiPro through a partnership with Rapid! on Demand. 3 in 5 Americans live pay check to pay check and 85% of employee are in fear of losing their jobs so this is an important addition to help employees from being trapped by payday loans or other expensive options to bridge the hardship
Security:
- priority is stability
- motivation is comfort
- their action is to build capital
One of Ultimate’s Solutions: Privacy Manager which is designed to help employees feel secure at work by keeping their data safe. The new Privacy Manager allows employees to have their data erased or take it with them when they leave your company.
Growth:
- priority is discovery
- motivation is reward
- their action is to take risks
Sample Ultimate Solutions: Coaching and Feedback Interpretation with Continuous Performance Development coming in Q3. This product does a few things and was best explained to me this way; let’s say that I want feedback from my manager about a recently completed project, I can in the app ask something like “I would love feedback on the roll out of our new employee rewards program”. My manager can then begin to type in feedback BUT she used some toxic language like “I thought that the timing was Stupid” – obviously, this isn’t an encouraging word and the system would provide an alert to my manager to change it. It also provides real-time guidance to the manager about the quality of the feedback prior to it being sent and gives suggestions like – “this response is focusing on the negative, you would be better to provide some constructive ideas on how it could be done better in the future”.1:1 Meetings and Goal setting are also included in Continuous Performance Development
Self-realization:
- priority is trust
- motivation is respect
- their action is to share ideas and create
Sample Ultimate Solutions: OKR’s ,1:1 Meetings, Knowledgebase. Inside the Continuous Performance Development product is a 1:1 Meetings section that provides feedback on the manager’s individual performance on their 1:1 activities. In addition, it uses natural language processing and analysis to give real-time suggestions to the managers when providing feedback to their employees, increasing the quality of these meetings with the goal of improving the development of the employee. Managers and employees can track individual goals and key results, and the knowledgebase makes it convenient for employees to self-discover quickly and easily and address their needs.
Influence:
- priority is to inspire
- motivation is amplify one’s impact
- their action is to lead others
One of Ultimate’s Solutions: UltiPro Perception Action Planning coming Q4. This is based on employee feedback surveys and sentiment analysis. The product uses natural language processing to interpret the employee feedback and suggest how to act on the results. Through a partnership with Mercer, Perception gives customers benchmarking statistics for comparison.
Legacy:
- priority is to contribute
- motivation is to have purpose
- their action is to sponsor others
One of Ultimate’s Solutions: UltiPro Giving is a new addition this year that allows employees to make charitable donations towards campaigns, all on the Ultimate app. The donations will automatically process a payroll deduction. This is a simple and effective way for employees to contribute positively to causes that have meaning for the employee.
Customers
Listening to clients experience with a solution provider is one of my favourite parts of any conference. Without exception, I heard Ultimate clients passionately describe why they chose UltiPro over competing #HCM platforms and it was very apparent that Ultimate’s partnership approach is a genuine differentiator. A few sound bites that stuck out for me were when speaking with one current client, she said that when she learned that the company she was considering applying for did indeed use UltiPro, the incentive became greater to apply as she had used the product with a previous employer! Another client (with approximately 600 employees) spoke about their tremendous success after implementing UltiPro. They said that they had saved 3,600 hours due to the efficiencies in the system and have recognized $2 million in labor savings in 18 months. They were also very pleased with the data visibility and transparency that was made available from UltiPro’s Business Intelligence. Another standout was when one client measured success of their recruiting and retention efforts by asking their employees “is this the best place you’ve EVER worked?” They did see a resounding improvement in the scores for that question and have in-turn, improved both their recruiting but more, importantly their retention results.
My Take
It is amazing that Ultimate is already in their 30th year and with 6,600 customers and a very high retention rate of 96%, it is apparent that they are widely accepted as a great partner. Going forward is an exciting story for both Ultimate and Kronos customers. Kronos customers in the large company category will be happy to be able to get what should become an integrated solution with the depth of Workforce Dimensions and UltiPro. Ultimate customers will now have access to a world class WFM solution. This bodes well for strong growth and exciting product development in the future.
