If you were not aware, UKG came to be as a merger between Workforce Management powerhouse Kronos and HCM and Payroll leader Ultimate Software 18 months ago. Both companies had an excellent culture (they were both consistently in the very top echelon of the Great Places to Work ratings year over year). This hasn’t changed under the new merger which is excellent news for UKG customers as they always look to infuse this into their products and services (which can be an enabler for any client to maximize their own employee experience).
UKG has a global reach and a large customer base with product offerings including Payroll, HCM, Workforce Management, and HR Service Delivery. They are one of the few solution providers that can handle all company sizes from small business, mid-market and enterprise.
Below are some interesting statistics:
- 40+ years of Global Presence
- Over 70,000 clients in 165 countries
- Over 45M people using UKG solutions daily
- $3.26B annual revenue in FY 2021 and growing
- $2.2B spent on R&D in the past 5 years
- Solutions available in 12 languages
- Almost 15k employees (up from 12k in Dec 2021) - hiring over 1k new employees per quarter
- 25 Offices in 15 countries including, USA and Canada, EMEA, Asia Pacific, and Latin America
Their modus operandi is “Inspire every employee. Support every business. Elevate every workplace.” The values that they care about the most are:
- United - through Inclusion and collaboration across the company
- Kind - by being trusting and caring about every employee
- Growing - through being agile
UKG Leadership Team
UKG is laser-focused on its mission and is supported by a very seasoned leadership team comprised of executives from legacy Kronos and Ultimate as well as a number of seasoned pros from well-known firms across a number of industries who couldn’t resist contributing to the mission at hand. Click here to see the full leadership team - below are a few that I wanted to highlight:
- Their current CEO, Aron Ain is moving to the role of Executive Chair where he will be supporting customer engagement
- Chris Todd is moving as of July 1st from President to CEO in a well-planned out transition
- The very experienced Pat Wadors has joined as Chief People Officer
- Michael C. Bush serves as chief executive officer of Great Place to Work (an acquisition UKG made to integrate best practices into the entire UKG suite)
- Brian K. Reaves, (ex Dell and SAP) serves as Chief Belonging, Diversity and Equity Officer
- Hugo Sarrazin, (ex McKinsey & Co) heads up the technology team as Chief Product and Technology Officer
- Jody Kaminsky, serves as CMO where she brings the vision of UKG to life
UKG currently have a 94.4% customer retention rate which clearly demonstrates that they walk the talk.
Product Strategy
At the core of the strategy is a focus on helping the employee (which I believe is essential in today’s climate). In my view, the requirements for an HCM solution have gone well past supporting the back-office functions of HR. Now, HR needs innovative ways to support the entire experience of the employee on an individual basis, a Life-work approach that UKG infuses throughout its technology. UKG has 3 core strategies:
- Continue to do what they do best: Excel at meeting employees’ core foundational life-work needs. Think pay and time, the most important part of the foundation, incorrect pay and time calculations will make you lose an employee almost immediately!
- Create Life-Aware™ experiences to help employees realize their potential. If you are not helping your employee to grow both personally and professionally, you really should think about this ASAP. Employees are loyal to leaders who take a deep interest in them as a complete person. On top of the standard HCM suite components of talent acquisition, talent management, benefits, HR service delivery, voice and talk technology, UKG is embedding within each suite, technology to allow Belonging, Diversity, and Equity to be fully realized, Great Place to Work datasets to truly create a world-class experience for every employee and Artificial Intelligence with a feedback loop to power employee, manager, and organizational development.
- Create a new Large Enterprise Suite that delivers unique value to their installed customer base. What they are doing is creating a complementary suite solution for their largest enterprise customers that includes pay, time, and HR service delivery. In the first few months of offering this, they have seen massive uptake with enthusiastic feedback.
Product - The focus is on helping the employee
UKG believes these things, which are shaping their product development:
- Everything about the way we work is fundamentally transforming
- The line between life and work is continually being redrawn — work patterns have changed
- People’s priorities have shifted with an emphasis on purpose and values, flexibility and agility, health and safety
- The relationship between people and organizations has rapidly evolved, requiring a deeper understanding of one another’s purpose and motivations
- People are expecting more of their organization’s leaders
- Individuals and teams thrive when leaders cultivate a workplace environment for all
- Optimizing productivity and business outcomes is now intrinsically linked to a workplace culture that invests in people, diversity and belonging
- Giving every employee a voice is necessary to unlocking people and organization potential
- Organizations that actively listen to their people and combine this feedback with analytics from HCM and WFM systems will be the most successful
In summary, as I said earlier in this article, tactical/operational systems that only serve to automate processes like HR backend needs really won't cut it with this new paradigm. A complete and modern system needs to serve all employees as people.
Rather than me trying to explain how their Life-Aware™ solutions will create the employee experience, I thought that this slide does it best.
So what has been added specifically to the product line?
UKG has 2 main products - one for larger clients (200 employees +) which is UKG Pro(HCM) and UKG Dimensions (WFM) - which will merge into one suite of products and UKG Ready (HCM and WFM) for customers with less than 200 employees. I will break these down separately.
Enterprise Suite Solution
They have created a single app that will be used for both solutions so no need to switch between apps in order to curate a great experience for the user. It will have one unified Inbox with all HCM and WFM actions and to-dos. On top of that, insights and data analytics will be coming from both the HCM and WFM data to give deeper insights.
Some of the highlights inside the solution are as follows:
Career Designer: This is designed to provide opportunities for your employees to self-reflect and define where they want to go next. This is currently in Alpha and is being tested with 13 clients. Their feedback will be rolled into the Beta and general release version.
Pay Equity Dashboard: Exactly as the name suggests, it is a way to deliver insights into any pay gaps that may be apparent in your company. UKG’s close the gap initiative points out that the average female earns 18% less than male employees doing the same job.
Incentives & Rewards: This is designed to let organizations add incentives to shifts to encourage employees to pick up ones that are hard to fill. One of their healthcare clients said, “In a labor-crunched market the ability to offer incentives to meet coverage and fill less desirable shifts is a differentiator for our organization.”
Giving: Allows organizations to create campaigns that align with their values & help create a sense of belonging for their employees. So far UKG has processed over 450,000 giving transactions, totaling over $7M in campaign donations across their customer base.
Smart Pay: Flags payroll errors prior to a payroll run eliminating issues with incorrect pay for your employees.
Coaching & Development: This is designed to move the conversation from an annual performance review to an ongoing conversation which should help improve employee satisfaction; through its embedded NLP engine, it also makes suggestions and coaches managers on how to give feedback.
Position Automation: Complete with analytics, this solution gives a holistic view of your entire organization by position, person, and job which can help you identify vacancies.
Auditor: Built to identify out-of-compliance activities such as wage theft or other unethical behaviors, it identifies patterns outside the norm before impacting engagement, compliance, and labor costs
UKG Ready Solution (SMB Suite)
This suite is designed for the small business up to 200 employees and comes with HR, talent, payroll, and time in one solution. Currently, there are over 34k companies using this application with 90% giving it a score of 7 or higher out of 10.
Here are a few new additions to this suite:
Benefits: This was introduced in January 2022. With the acquisition of EverythingBenefits, they have embedded that technology into the benefits enrolment experience.
Learning: The new Learning module helps employees build the skills they need to continue to grow and develop in their career. UKG says that the main selection driver is that it offers a fully integrated learning path for each employee and it is a single system.
My Take
The merger of these 2 companies has indeed been a growth story (from 1.9B when they first merged to 3.26B and growing). It is great to see that they are focusing on the employee experience with all of the additions that I have outlined above. I believe that there is, even more, coming in the pipeline to enhance this even further - we will just have to wait to see what other exciting things arrive when I get briefed again in November at their customer event in Las Vegas - UKG Aspire.
