Your workflow is sputtering. You can feel the lag caused by your kinda-sorta-knowing-what-you're-doing approach. You spend most of your time submitting UKG help tickets and waiting for callbacks. What you're doing isn't working but what other option do you have?
Keeping your Workforce Management (WFM) platform skills fully charged can feel like a full-time job. Between upgrades, service packs, and routine configuration work, ensuring your system is working in sync with your workforce goals is critical.
Fortunately, there's an army of qualified people ready to cut your learning curve and your frustration in half. They are called UKG consultants.
Still, if you aren't used to working with a consultant or a consulting team, making that leap can feel uncertain, even stressful. Here are a few signs, it's time to shore up your workforce gaps with added expertise.
5 signs you need outside expertise:
1. Your post-pandemic staff is fractured. If you are like many companies in healthcare, manufacturing, casinos, or retail, chances are you are operating at a fraction of the staff you had before the pandemic. You may have lost your Kronos Admin or a portion of your UKG knowledge bank.
Solution: Hire a consultant and get your issues resolved once and for all. There are several ways to structure a consulting contract to fit your needs. Hours can be limited and specified with contract work, hours can be calculated as part of a monthly retainer, or a consultant can come in a work as a full-time member of your team. An experienced consultant can knock out your day-to-day UKG issues, update your configurations to fit your new workforce, and ensure you are crossing your T's and dotting your I's on compliance—especially COVID-related compliance.
2. Your system to-do list isn't getting done. We all want to DIY our solutions — especially the ones with price tags. Still, your system configuration work keeps getting pushed to the back burner.
Solution: Give your To-Do list to an experienced consulting team. Poof—and your list gone! Chances are, you will have what you need in a matter of weeks rather than living in limbo for the next year.
3. Staying in limbo is costing you. One of the best ways to stop procrastinating and make a decision is to do the math.
Most IT departments can’t take on additional configuration work or analyze the business processes attached to their technology.
Solution: Calculate the hourly pay total of each person internally who would have to invest time in learning how to solve the problem? How does that number compare to a UKG expert who could remedy the issues—and boosts optimization—like, um, yesterday?
You might also calculate how much the unfixed issue is costing your organization each week. Each month? Annually? That ongoing cost is likely far greater than the cost of hiring a consultant who could save you on labor and potential compliance missteps.
4. Your team dreads preparing payroll. If you are like a lot of teams reliant on manual or make-shift processes, there's a good chance you dread preparing payroll. So calculate how many hours it takes you and your team to finish a manual payroll and scheduling process each week.
Solution: A few hours with a UKG expert could automate critical areas of your system. The ROI: Managers will get valuable time back that they can spend elsewhere.
5. What worked then isn't working now. The world has changed dramatically in the past two years. As UKG consultants, we often see managers and payroll teams become tethered to outdated, inefficient processes.
However, with further exploration, many HR, IT, or Payroll managers confess they can feel the efficiency lag on their workflows.
Remember, it's common to get attached to our processes. However, if that process doesn’t align with or support your UKG investment and targeted outcomes, it may be time to shake things up.
If any of these "signs" have you nodding, don't sweat it—you've got plenty of company. We all put decisions and changes off until we can't live with the pain of not changing. The good news? Putting fresh eyes on your problem can be a game-changer for your workflow.
It's been quite a year. If your staff isn't as UKG savvy as it used to be, if you have skills gaps, Improv can be an efficiency gamechanger!
Let’s talk today.