Consistent and strong communication is at the heart of every successful organization — and face-to-face communication is a big part of achieving this. However, while the benefits of a one-to-one exchange cannot be ignored, you’d be hard pressed to find a business that doesn’t rely on technology in some form or another to help them communicate more effectively.
At B2E Solutions, we’re no stranger to communication. Our team excels at it, and our human capital management (HCM) solution, UKG Ready, is decked out with an impressive amount of communication friendly features. There’s more than we can share here, but let’s dive into a few fan-favorites that’ll make your communication efforts that much better, faster and easier.
1. Notifications
Whether you use our Payroll solution on its own or you leverage our entire UKG Ready Suite, our Notifications feature will hands down make your life easier. Notifications allow you to automate communications based on a specific action or trigger. For example, if you want to notify employees when their pay statements are available, you don’t need to contact them one by one. Rather, you can set up a Notification that automatically triggers an email, text, UKG Ready inbox communication or any combination of the three based on payment dates or other parameters. You can also tie Notifications to Workflows to improve communication at various points in a multi-step process. For instance, you can set up Notifications to alert different managers when it’s their turn to complete a performance review or let employees know when a time-off request has been approved.
2. Tags
Personalizing your communications helps employees feel like they are more than a number. But, when you’re automating messages or sending emails at scale, it’s more challenging to give employees that reassuring one-to-one feeling. Tags, a helpful neighbor to Notifications, allows you to insert recipient- or situation-specific information into communications. By selecting from a list of preset Tags, you can quickly automate the inclusion of custom information, such as dates, gender pronouns, names, employee ids, cost centers and more. And, although personalization goes well beyond inserting a name or location, Tags are an easy, automated way to pop a little customization into automated messages.
3. Announcements
Sometimes you need to get the word out. Announcements allow you to broadcast free-form communications to an intended audience. Want to announce the release of a new employee handbook? It’s as simple as customizing a message, filtering who it’s visible to, attaching your handbook and scheduling your Announcement. From here, the right employees will see your Announcement in multiple locations — on their UKG Ready dashboard, as a pop-up at login, and within the navigation menu. There’s a ton of flexibility; we’ve seen companies communicate everything from timesheet reminders to wacky office days, trainings and more.
4. Broadcast Messages
While Announcements are an effective way to send communications that show up inside of the UKG Ready platform, there are times that you may want to reach employees outside of the system. Broadcast Messages allow you to do just this by sending communications via text and email. Schedule your Broadcast Messages for a specific date and time. Send them on-the-fly when something important comes up. Use them as a way to deliver Notifications. Even leverage Tags to pull in little personalization. Whatever the case, there’s so much you can do!
5. Twilio SMS/Text Messaging
Text messages are a pretty immediate way to reach people. In fact, 95% of text messages are read and responded to within 3 minutes of being received. Using the UKG Ready Twilio integration, you can extend the power of text messaging to key functionality in the UKG Ready platform, including Tags, Broadcast Messages and Notifications. You can even enhance Workflow-powered Notifications with Twilio’s two-way SMS functionality that allows managers and employees to approve or reject certain time- and scheduling-related requests with a quick and easy text response.
6. Events
Similar to Announcements, the Events feature in UKG Ready helps you communicate important happenings via in-system communications. That said, Events and Announcements are not one in the same. Unlike Announcements, Events do not have native broadcast capabilities like pop-up and dashboard reminders. Rather, Events provide employees with a one-stop location within UKG Ready to access a company calendar with the activities, trainings and date-specific affairs that apply to them. With this said, you can always put a little rocket fuel behind your Events by tying them to Notifications, asking employees to add an Events widget to their dashboard or incorporating them in your Company Hub … which leads us to our next point.
7. Company Hub
A Company Hub is a dashboard template that you can customize and update with corporate communications, such as company event information, videos, news and announcements, documents for employees, corporate policies, employee accomplishment highlights and more. You can truly make it your own, giving your employees a designated location to access company information and critical corporate communications.
8. Surveys
Communication is a two-way street and employees need to know that their voice is heard and appreciated. UKG Ready Surveys allow you to create, customize and distribute multi-question surveys to employees. Surveys not only allow you to quickly collect and evaluate information and trends, but they also provide employees with an easy way to share their thoughts and opinions. Get creative with the types of questions you ask. Perhaps you ask new hires questions about their onboarding experience or you gauge overall employee satisfaction with inquiries about personal fulfillment and purpose. Whatever you decide, just remember — a Survey, in and of itself, is just another way to communicate that you care.
9. Attestation
Attestation is the process of certifying or verifying information, but it can also serve as another way to communicate with employees. Using UKG Ready’s attestation capabilities within the Time & Labor solution, employers can customize questions (as well as response options) and pose them to employees at a convenient point of data collection, like within UKG Ready’s mobile app or at clock-in or clock-out. There’s a ton of applications to consider.
For example, UKG Ready’s attestation capabilities are great for gathering employee feedback on compliance-related questions, such as whether or not an employee was given their required rest break. However, it’s also great for engaging employees with communication prompts like, “Congrats, you made it to the end of the week. Did you have a good work-life balance this week?” Or, “We’ve detected an issue with the timesheet you submitted. Please confirm your hours worked.” Like many of the communication features in UKG Ready, attestation is incredibly flexible. Determine what you want to communicate or what you need your employees to communicate to you — and let our automated attestation solution do the rest.
10. Checklists
If you use our Human Resources solution, you’ll have access to Checklists. Checklists allow you to create to-do lists and assign them to employees. This feature not only helps you communicate action items, but also track if requests are in-progress, completed or overdue. This feature is a dream come true for managers that need an organized tool to manage projects and employee accountability. You can make Checklists as simple or complex as you want. Send a one-time checklist to track that employees download and complete a training material. Or, build out comprehensive onboarding Checklists to ensure that new hires complete each and every task that’s needed to hit the ground running.
11. Visual Reports
With real-time visibility into your system analytics, you can take the guesswork out of managing your people. That said, data can be overwhelming. If you and your team have to comb through lines and lines of information, it’s tough to understand and then communicate what needs to happen to move your people and your business forward. Luckily, UKG Ready takes a visual-first approach to data. With our visual reporting capabilities, users can pull interactive charts and graphs directly into their homepage or a custom dashboard, helping them understand, interpret and communicate information faster. From here, it's easy to schedule email reports to keep managers and employees up to date — and the communication flowing!
12. Mobile app
With the proliferation of mobile devices, it’s more important than ever for businesses to prioritize mobile-friendly technologies. The UKG Ready mobile app provides managers and employees with on-demand access to UKG Ready. Not only can users accomplish key payroll, HR and timekeeping tasks right from the convenience of their mobile device, they can communicate wherever and whenever. Want on-the-go employees to complete a questionnaire? Just schedule an Announcement instructing employees to do so, and they can conveniently complete your request right from their mobile device. Employees can even set their mobile notification preferences to receive updates like shift-swap requests and important manager approvals. Employees are already used to doing everything from checking their email to ordering groceries and watching their favorite show from the convenience of their mobile device — so why not make mobile a key part of your communication strategy?
We can help
UKG Ready can help you automate, scale and streamline time-consuming communications. It takes care of the tedious and repetitive communications, so you have more time to engage and collaborate with the people that move your business forward. If you have questions about how to take advantage of all the great UKG Ready features we discussed, send us a note today!
Editor's note: We updated this blog on Aug 27, 2024, to reflect the latest information and product capabilities.
