Being able to self-serve in your UKG Pro® solution is the fastest way to accomplish your goals, but we know there’s a lot to navigate. In a recent webinar, Self-Service as a Strategic Tool in UKG Pro, we shared helpful tips, tricks, and techniques to help you configure your solution in ways that will not only increase efficiencies but improve processes for your entire organization. If you couldn’t attend, or would like a refresher,watch the recording at your convenience. If you’re short on time, we’re sharing the main highlights below:
Benefits of Self-Service
Not only can self-serving in your solution help you save time, it has many other benefits, like helping free HR to move into a more strategic role in the organization and increasing data accuracy by allowing individuals to own their own data entry. It can also help with providing 24/7/365 access, which is essential to your organization, and allow you to simplify processes to reduce errors. Together, all these benefits will improve the experience for employees and managers by enhancing efficiency and scalability.
Free HR to Move into a More Strategic Role
Self-service is not a new concept, it’s been around in the form of vending machines, ATMs, airline check-in, and more, so why should it be different in the workplace? We know users want to solve their own problems at their convenience, and the majority of our UKG Pro solutions have different self-service capabilities, such as UKG Pro Pay and People Center, UKG Pro Recruiting, UKG Pro Onboarding, UKG Pro Benefits Administration (formerly UltiPro Benefits Prime), and many more.
While HR administration may have previously been viewed as an administrative role with a focus on data entry, it’s now become much more than that. It’s evolved into a role where HR administrators are shaping business strategy and helping align talent strategies with business goals. They’re helping acquire, engage, and retain talent, shaping company culture, advising on policies and procedures, focusing on leadership development, and so much more. By putting data entry into the hands of the people that own it, it will free up HR’s time so that they can focus on those strategic priorities. Now, let’s get into how exactly to do that.
Increase Data Accuracy by Allowing Individuals to “Own” Their Data
Allowing individuals to own their data entry helps reduce errors because the data is not being relayed through multiple channels. There are several ways to help ensure data accuracy and prevent errors in the system, such as establishing field defaults, and establishing workflow approvals, so that approvers can sign off on pending changes to an employee record.
Creating workflow approvals will allow you to specify what types of changes require approvals. For example, you may not want to approve when an employee changes their home phone number or preferred name, but you’ll likely want to have approvals for a salary change or change to an employee’s job record. Approvers can cancel or deny a change, make changes to incorrect data, and you can build data approval exceptions to allow approvals to follow a different path. System administrators can also configure “Value Rules” under Platform Configuration to simplify data entry. This will build defaults into the system, for example, if the department equals finance, you can set the division to automatically default to admin. Exceptions to the rule can be created so it’s editable for managers, or if there are no exceptions to the rule, administrators can make the field “View Only” so it can’t be edited.
You can also build conditions around approvals, for example if a particular field or salary changes by a certain percent, you can add additional approvers for that change. The system can even be configured to have different levels of approvals depending on the condition. Once you’ve created workflows, you’ll want to assign a workflow administrator that has system configuration access to keep processes moving, cancel aging requests, and delegate or reassign requests if an approver is out of office.
If you’re still worried about data anomalies, you can help identify them with UKG Pro People Analytics alerts and payroll audit reports. For example, you can build an alert when a specific condition is met in the database, like if there’s a salary change that’s 10% or greater. Additionally, you can utilize the Smart Pay Analytics and Compare Data cards when running a payroll to compare the current payroll to the previous payroll, and identify inconsistencies. A best practice we would recommend is to turn on cascading where appropriate, which will allow managers to view direct and indirect reports.
24/7/365 Access is Essential
We know self-service needs to be accessible around the clock. Being able to retrieve data, reports, dashboards, and information on employee changes outside of normal business hours benefits the entire organization. When providing this access, you’ll also want to provide guidance to managers, which you can find in your UKG Pro solution under My Team > Manager Guide. The Manager Guide is a page where you can list out policies and procedures, along with any information necessary for managers to get their job done. We recommend utilizing a Communication Broadcast to keep managers up to date on important notifications. Administrators will have the ability to review sent messages, receive receipt acknowledgement, resend messages to individuals that have not acknowledge receipt, and save communication groups for future use. The Document Acknowledgement tool allows you to request acknowledgement of a variety of documents or company policies when a user logs in to the system. With this tool, administrators can personalize the message to individuals, set an effective date, expiration date, and more.
Lastly, the UKG Pro mobile app is critical for both managers and employees as it drives communication and collaboration, while providing round-the-clock access to important information. You’ll want to be sure managers and employees have access to the same functionality on the mobile app that they do on the web experience. It can be configured to allow employees and managers access to the inbox, employee directory, organization chart, pay, job history, and so much more. Managers can also access information about their team, such as employment and salary information, personal information, team goals, and more. Access to information can be configured based on your organization’s needs.
Play It Safe: Simplify to Reduce Errors
Think of your UKG Pro solution as your system of truth where you’ll house all data, and simplifying the system to reduce errors will provide the best possible experience for all users. You can customize the pages managers access by adding, hiding, or disabling fields, and you can also edit field labels or set certain fields as required. The Job Summary page is a great place to start. You can modify it to hide fields managers don’t need to see or disable fields you want them to be aware of but not edit. This can be done by navigating to System Configuration > Platform Configuration > Pages. You can then highlight the fields you’d like to configure, set visibility rules per role or role type, and save them. You can even change optional fields to required. If you choose to relabel a field, you can do that via Platform Configuration > Labels, just be aware that it will relabel that field throughout the entire system. Want to add a field? You can do that to allow reporting and workflow of that information.
We hope these tips, tricks, and techniques were helpful to you. We thank you for your interest and hope that by taking advantage of some of these configuration options, you’ll be able to eliminate your spreadsheets outside of your UKG Pro solution.
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