UKG Ready August Release – Recommended features inspired by YOU
Brad Nycz, UKG Ready® suite executive relationship director and former customer, has chosen to highlight nine upcoming enhancements from our August release. The best part is that each feature was inspired and voted on by customers just like you. Excited to see what was delivered for you based on your feedback? Keep scrolling to find out!
Suite Experience
Susan, an HR manager and administrator for ABC Cereal, is delighted that she has Broadcast Messaging at her disposal to share important messages with her team. However, it left her a bit crunchy to find out that some of her employees were using it to broadcast invites for after-work gatherings. While Susan absolutely loves that her team wants to create connections and get together, she knows that type of invite is better suited to email. Susan was thankful to hear that in the latest UKG Ready release, she can control by security profile who can use the Broadcast Messaging functionality. She switched the setting so that only her HR team can leverage it, giving her team the ability to control and create clear and consistent messages for her organization.
Where to find it: Cross-Product Release Notes
Who will use it: Admins
Workforce Management
Stewart is the system admin for ABC Cereal and is the go-to time and scheduling whiz when his managers have questions. Stewart is always on the lookout for ways to save his employees time. He was delighted to see three new features in the Workforce Management Spotlight video that will do just that. Explore how Stewart helped his team by sharing some of the latest workforce management enhancements.
- Erica, a regional manager, never liked how the timesheet change request selected the date as the start of the pay period, and her employees forgetting to update the date was a constant headache for her. Stewart showed her how a small update on the change request now leaves that date blank, allowing her and her employees to choose the date — and save her time and sighs.
- Susan, Stewart’s counterpart in HR, always wished you could add a leave of absence (LOA) case directly to the timesheet, since she and her team and managers often find out about these cases while in the timesheet review process. Being the good steward that Stewart is, he brought the good news to Susan that in this latest release, a new sync LOA option is available in the timesheet. When Susan or other managers select this option, they can either create a new LOA case or edit an existing case.
Where to find it: TLM
Who will use it: Admins, managers
- The last workforce management enhancement was something Stewart had been eyeing in the Ideas section of the UKG® Kronos Community for a very long time. Stewart’s passion is crafting the perfect schedule, but he always cringed when he needed to create new schedules, since the various shift attribute fields had to be manually added and defined in the schedule shifts. He was thrilled to find out that the product team listened and delivered, so the staffing matrix and an updated import file have been enhanced. He now can define the following fields: Lunch From/Lunch To, Lunch From/Lunch To, From/To, Day Type, Shift Premium, Skill, Additional Cost Center, Credential Type, and Certification.
Where to find it: Scheduler
Who will use it: Admins, operations, managers
Recruitment, Benefits, and Performance
Sean, the VP of HR for ABC Cereal, is about to unveil a new division of ABC Cereal to produce a new oat milk product line. The line will operate as a completely separate entity, so Sean would like the applicant site to have its own look and feel, different from ABC Cereal’s. At a previous customer meet-up, Sean thought that he might have to deploy a workaround, since he knew the UKG product team was hard at work developing this much-anticipated feature. Luckily for Sean, Susan saw that in the latest release, customers using the recruitment module now can have multiple career portals and have them branded as different career sites. Now the new product line can make a splash and attract talent with its unique branding.
Where to find it: Recruiting
Who will use it: Recruiters, applicants
Open enrollment season is almost upon us, and Susan is doing the most to ensure her employees are set up for success. She just listened to the latest Working Smarter podcast to understand the latest benefit trends, and she is reviewing the release highlights. Now she can let her benefits admins know that there are some wonderful reporting features that will help them through this season, including more columns that will be available on the benefits plans report and enhanced reporting to audit open and approved requests in one report.
Where to find it: HR
Who will use it: Benefits managers, admins
Retaining talent is top of mind for Sean, Susan, and the rest of the HR team at ABC Cereal. A key part of that is ensuring employees are paid equally and fairly and ensuring the performance cycle runs smoothly. With performance cycles starting in September, the HR team at ABC reviewed the latest enhancements available to them to ensure they are providing their managers with everything they need to be successful. The latest enhancements include:
- A new option to automatically add increase amounts from a single value matrix to the managers’ compensation worksheet. This provides consistency and supports streamlining the compensation process.
- A new Reassign To-Do item on the All To-Do items report now allows users to reassign reviews so that the performance review cycle doesn’t stall if someone is unexpectedly out or is unable to complete the review cycle.
- There is a new refresh workflow button that allows you to make changes and adjust workflows during the review cycle.
Where to find it: Compensation and Performance
Who will use it: HR
Appendix
- For 24/7 access to release notes and user guides for the classic user experience, log in to your account and go to Our Company > Download Documents > Service Provider Documents within the UKG Ready solution.
- For 24/7 access to release notes and user guides, log in to your account and go to My Info > My Learning > Product Documentation within the UKG Ready solution.
- Bookmark the Release Readiness page in UKG Kronos Community for everything you need to learn about what’s new and what’s next.
- Visit the Announcements group in UKG Kronos Community to stay up to date on published release notes and future release dates.
- Alert groups provide you with important notifications on critical system updates. Not sure which alert group to join? Click here.
- To share ideas about new UKG Ready features or enhancements and to vote on fellow users’ ideas, log in to UKG Kronos Community and visit the IDEAS section.
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The content from this blog post is courtesy of Brad Nycz, executive relationship director and former UKG customer. Brad identifies key features in recent releases, and Amanda translates them into story form. We hope you enjoyed this article on Release 82! Please stay tuned for more real-life, relatable examples about UKG Ready features in action.