At every stage in the employee lifecycle, employers need to communicate, collect and retain different types of information. UKG Ready’s attestation feature provides employers with an automated way to accomplish this for a wide variety of compliance and engagement scenarios. Gone are the days of messy spreadsheets, inaccurate records and inconsistent communications. UKG Ready’s attestation capabilities are a much-welcomed, automated solution that fit strikingly well into the day-to-day of both employee and employer. Here’s what you need to know.
Before we get into the details of how UKG Ready supports attestation, let’s take a quick step back and review the basics. Attestation is the process of certifying or verifying information. In the HR world, this process typically involves employers asking their employees questions like “Did you take your required meal break?” or “Did you witness any safety violations during your shift?” The questions vary, but the point is that attestation practices allow employers to pose questions that will solicit the answers, or attestations, they need for a number of reasons — the largest being compliance.
With risk of hefty fines or other legal complications, attestation can provide organizations with the records they need to prove their compliance, as well as the practices they need to better uphold labor laws, collective bargaining agreements and a bevy of federal, state and local requirements. If a government-mandated rest period is missed or a scheduling law is broken, attestation gives employers a better chance of knowing about it. Or, on the flipside, if compliance requirements are being met, attestation is that extra safety net that says, “Look, we’re doing this or that exactly as we should be.”
With that said, legal compliance isn’t the only reason organizations turn to attestation. It also plays an important role in helping employers enforce their own HR policies, manage timesheet accuracy, create a more engaging environment for employees and reduce workplace risks from illness or injury. We’ll get into some examples of how these use cases play out, but to do that, let’s shift our attention to how UKG Ready automates, streamlines and improves the entire attestation process.
Without an automated attestation solution in place, employers often spend a great deal of time collecting attestations manually from employees. And while employers may manage to gather a lot of the information they’re after, they may struggle to ask for and track responses with any consistency — much less respond to employee issues in a timely manner. As a result, audits, workplace safety, employee grievances and compliance become that much more challenging to manage.
By leveraging UKG Ready’s attestation feature, employers can automate and streamline many of the cumbersome processes associated with collecting, retaining, reporting on and managing attestations across an organization.
Using UKG Ready attestation, employers can customize a question or series of questions, along with response options, and pose them to employees at a point of data collection, whether that’s at the InTouch time clock, in the UKG Ready mobile app, UKG Ready Web Clock, or any combination of the three.
Employers can prompt employees to answer custom questions. For example, some states require employers to provide employees with paid rest and meal periods. To ensure that employees actually take these breaks, an employer could ask employees at the end of their shift (at clock-out) if they received their uninterrupted breaks. If the answer is no, another question could trigger, asking the employee to provide a reason for the missed break by choosing from a set list of reasons or by submitting a freeform explanation.
A similar series of prompts could also be used to screen employees at clock-in for symptoms of illness or injury, gather employee confirmations at the end of a pay period for hours worked, or even nurture employee morale with prompts like, “Congrats, you made it to the end of the week. Did you have a positive work-life balance this week?” Whatever the use case, the opportunity for employers to ask employees strategic questions is much easier to do as part of an employee’s day-to-day workflow at a natural point of data collection than it is as part of a one-off process.
In addition to promoting employees to answer questions, employers can also use UKG Ready attestation to automatically trigger follow-up notifications and reminders when a specific condition is met. For instance, if an employee missed a timesheet approval attestation, the system could be configured to provide the employee with an on-screen notification and email reminder. Or, if an employee answers a question a certain way, the system could automatically trigger an email to the employee’s manager letting them know there’s an issue that needs to be addressed. To take this one step further, a certain answer to a question could even set off a notification to a manager to take a certain payroll action, such as approve payment for a missed break so it’s not overlooked come payday. In other words, there’s a ton of customizations available to ensure that the right people are aware of what’s going on or what actions they need to take.
Automating notifications and reminders, as well as the collection of employee attestations is important, but so is being able to access and act on the data that’s collected. UKG Ready puts attestation reporting at employers’ fingertips, allowing them to monitor employee attestation responses in real time, identify trends, flag issues — and take action. Furthermore, should a lawsuit, audit or legal matter arise, attestation reporting ensures that employers have fast and easy access to the comprehensive reporting they need to demonstrate compliance. With all the data they need within reach, employers can feel confident that they’re managing employees’ information with that much more efficiency and effectiveness.
How efficient and effective are your attestation processes and practices? If you’re spending too much time managing employee attestations (or worse yet, not managing them at all), it might be time for help. To take advantage of attestation functionality in UKG Ready, contact us today. We’ll talk you through the capabilities and costs, answer your questions and ensure you’re set up for success. We look forward to hearing from you!
This blog was originally published on May 18, 2022, but was revised on March 05, 2024 with the most recent, timely information about the UKG Ready attestation tool.