Eventide Senior Living Drives Employee Engagement, Higher Retention with UKG

Eventide Senior Living Communities is a faith-based, nonprofit senior healthcare organization that provides a full range of lifestyle and service options, including independent and assisted living, memory care, skilled nursing care, and transitional care. The senior living provider has 1,200 employees and serves more than 1,200 residents at its locations in Moorhead, Minnesota, and Fargo, West Fargo, Jamestown, and Devils Lake, North Dakota.

With its UKG solution, Eventide Senior Living has experienced:

Challenges

Prior to UKG, Eventide used separate systems to manage time and attendance, scheduling, HR, and payroll processes at its five locations. Wanting to bring everything together into a single system, the organization selected a human capital management (HCM) solution.

Within a year, Eventide found its solution disappointing, particularly its Payroll-Based Journal (PBJ) reporting capabilities. HR staff spent more than 16 hours manually manipulating the report to meet Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) reporting requirements. Wishing to streamline this process and improve other HCM functionality, Eventide sought a new solution.

Solutions

After a thorough review, the organization selected UKG as its vendor of choice and implemented the AI-powered UKG® HCM and workforce management suite to handle HR and people management processes.

“The connection between UKG and CMS, and UKG having built out the PBJ report closely with CMS to ensure it meets all of the requirements was a huge seller for us,” said Kayla Linn, VP of People and Culture, highlighting just one of the many reasons Eventide moved to UKG.

Results

Aside from its tremendous success with PBJ reporting, Eventide has experience other significant wins with its UKG technology. Initially, HR ran HPPD reports daily to track prior-day staffing to ensure it met budget as well as staffing levels required by the government. Now, Eventide is using the overtime analysis smart tile that gives managers daily visibility into this information. Each morning, the solution runs and then emails an overtime report to Linn and site leaders. With daily visibility into overtime hours for the week to date, they can proactively manage overtime relative to the budget and make strategic staffing adjustments as needed.

Timecard management also has been simplified. Previously, site leaders had to review each employee’s timecard line by line, day by day, to check for alerts about missing punches. Now, they can view a tile on their UKG home screen to see all staff members whose timecard punches are up to date, and they can approve timecards for these employees with a single click. Then, they can focus on the few remaining timecards with missed meal breaks or punches.

“This has simplified the process, making it easy and efficient for our leaders to, with a quick glance, approve their payroll and see where the missing items are,” explained Linn. “That’s been a huge win, to be able to get through the payroll functionality very quickly.”

The ability for staff to punch in and out using the UKG mobile app has streamlined the timekeeping and payroll process too. Although each facility has timeclocks, many staff ― from dietary and housekeeping to resident care staff at all levels ― prefer to track their time using the mobile app. With geofencing tied to a work location, employees can punch in and out and correct missed punches when they’re on site. Employees also can see when open shifts are available. Linn anticipates that soon, when employees are able to swap shifts and pick up shifts using the mobile app, their engagement with the solution will increase even further.

During the pandemic, Eventide used the UKG community broadcast feature to communicate with employees about COVID-19 testing requirements and where and when they could be tested. Employees were paid for their testing time and easily clocked in and out for this time using the mobile app. The organization frequently uses the communication tool to send out employee notices about benefits or payroll.

UKG additionally plays a vital role in Eventide’s recruitment and retention efforts. The solution is directly linked to Indeed, so job openings are posted quickly and seamlessly. “The system’s really easy to use, and we’re able to move our candidates through pretty quickly,” said Linn. “Everyone knows where the candidate’s at within the workflow, from interview scheduled to offer extended to pending offer.”

As Eventide transitions from a fully paper-based onboarding process to electronic onboarding with UKG onboarding, Linn expects they will see an enhanced employee experience as new hires easily and quickly complete the onboarding process online ― and realize significant time savings. Eventide already has witnessed the benefits of online open enrollment, with direct feeds to benefit vendors streamlining this process for both employees and HR staff.

The organization recently launched UKG Employee Voice™ to conduct employee pulse surveys to gain feedback on work-related offerings and topics. “Employee Voice has been an amazing tool,” said Linn. “The built-in artificial intelligence tells us what we are doing well, the areas we need to work on, and it also gives us themes from the hundreds of employee comments we receive. We can be really strategic on how we impact change and ultimately improve employee engagement and retention.”

Employee retention is an ongoing challenge in every industry but especially in healthcare. “If an employee has a good experience, they’re happy, and they’re not only going to stay with us, but they’re also going to provide better resident care, which creates happy residents and happy families, which is what our model is all about,” added Linn.

Another way the organization is improving retention and providing a differentiated employee experience is with UKG Wallet™, a financial wellness platform that gives employees immediate access to their earned wages as well as access to financial planning tools. “We took the opportunity to give our employees the opportunity to request pay on demand and access their earned wages when it worked for them,” said Linn. “We wanted to offer that as a benefit and perk for working at our organization, knowing many people we employ live paycheck to paycheck. UKG Wallet gives them flexibility to access what they’ve already earned earlier than our normal payroll cycles.”

Linn said that in less than one year, Eventide had more than 1,700 employee transactions in UKG Wallet, with employees accessing nearly $230,000 in earned wages, proof, she said, that employees find the tool tremendously helpful in both their personal and professional lives.

“We know UKG Wallet is providing value to our employees, and we’re happy to assist them in their times of need.”