By now, you may have heard the news that the Login As Employee feature will be coming to your UKG Ready® solution with the April release. This highly requested feature brought excitement during the Q&A portion of the Ready Roadmap session at Aspire, the UKG customer conference, in November 2022. And based on the crowd cheering and clapping in the room, the product team went back to the drawing board (or coding program in this case) to deliver this functionality to you.
Think about times when an employee has had an issue you’re trying to troubleshoot. You do your best to gather the details before opening a support case or troubleshooting on your own, but sometimes this can present challenges. You could set up test employees to align security profile access to the user, but the account information and data of the test user don’t always tell the whole story to troubleshoot correctly. Virtual meeting platforms that allow screen sharing also help to walk through the issue, but finding the right time to connect can be difficult, especially for employees who work different hours than their manager or the HR team. But with the shadowing feature, admins gain on-the-spot access to login in and see exactly what that employee experiences when logging into their UKG Ready account. Additionally, it can be used to help provide a training experience that directly fits the employee’s needs and access.
Getting Started
Before you can reap the benefits of this new feature, a few steps will need to be taken to configure it. It’s essential to determine who would need this type of access. Since some areas need to be configured, you can restrict access to only those who need it.
First, the feature must be enabled in the Security Profile of those who should have access. This security setting will allow users to view the Login As Employee widget in Global Setup. Even though the security profile allows for this shadow feature, it doesn’t automatically allow them to log in as employees – an important detail to note. The Login As Employee widget is the key to defining who should have that access. Once those individuals are selected, they can log in as employees through either the Employee Quick Links or the Employee Information Report after adding the “Button: Login As Employee” column. This will open a new tab with the shadowed access. To exit the view, you can either close the tab or access your menu, click on your picture or initials, and select Close Account View.
Here’s a quick recap of the configuration steps:
- Navigate to Admin > Profiles/Policies > Security > Select the desired Security Profile. Under the Global tab, enable the Company Setup setting for Login As Employee.
- Navigate to Admin > Global Setup > Company Setup. On the Company Info tab, select the enable login as employee checkbox in the Login As Employee widget. Note: If the widget does not automatically appear, you can add it to your screen under the Edit Tabs option.
- In the same widget, select the admin users who will be allowed to log in as another employee using the feature.
Those with access to this feature will only be able to log in as employees they have access to through group management. When the user logs in as an employee, they’ll see exactly what the employee sees based on their security profile and permissions configurations, allowing for more security around what account information can be accessed.
Speaking of security, you may be wondering what happens when an administrator who is shadowing in as an employee makes a change to the user’s account. Any changes made while logged in as the employee will occur, but three new reporting columns can be added to any of the audit trail reports to show who made those changes. The columns include the shadow user’s username, first name, and last name. This will give admins and employees peace of mind in knowing that changes cannot be made without knowing who made them. Are we excited yet?
This feature was made possible by you and your amazing feedback. The Ideas portal on the UKG® Kronos Community is a great place to make your voice heard, so submit ideas, vote for existing ones, and provide feedback for the product team to help make your most wanted features a reality just like this one. To learn more about the feature, explore the release notes available in your UKG Ready system under My Info > Help > Download Documentation.