5 Ways to Optimize UKG Pro Workforce Management for Healthcare
The upcoming deadlines for UKG Pro Workforce Management (fka UKG Dimensions and UKG Workforce Dimensions) migration were a hot topic during November’s UKG Aspire 2024, the largest annual conference for UKG customers. With just about a year until UKG Workforce Central is sunset for customers in the Kronos Private Cloud and the end of engineering for on-premise customers, now is the time for healthcare organizations to finalize their migrations—if they haven’t already—and start optimizing their new UKG Pro Workforce Management (WFM) system.
Haven’t finished migrating to UKG Pro WFM? Check out our free migration guide for expert tips on how to make the process easier for your organization.
UKG Pro WFM optimization is an ongoing journey that continues long after migration, especially if your initial implementation was a simple lift-and-shift. It requires constant development and organization-wide collaboration to ensure that the system is being used effectively to achieve the greatest return on investment.
For organizations looking to achieve greater efficiency, increased productivity, and better business outcomes, here are five key areas that will help you optimize UKG Pro WFM.
1. Build a Workforce Management Governance Strategy
While multiple teams share responsibility for workforce management, no one owns it in its entirety—which can result in confusion, operational inefficiencies, missed opportunities, and potential compliance issues. A well-defined governance structure helps prevent this by clearly establishing roles and responsibilities for each area, including HR, payroll, finance, nursing, central staffing, and executive leadership.
For healthcare organizations looking to avoid ownership pitfalls, here’s how to build successful workforce management governance that can help you streamline operations and maximize results:
- Implement a governance structure. This typically follows the organizational hierarchy and includes:
- An Executive Leadership Team that provides strategic direction.
- A Steering Committee that communicates this strategic direction while providing tactical guidance. A typical steering committee includes representatives from HR, Finance, Payroll, IT, Operations, and Data Analytics teams.
- The Capability Centers that handle day-to-day activities, like system maintenance, process operationalization, end-user support, and more.
- Address gaps in your current model. Evaluate your existing governance model for potential gaps and areas that need improvement to prepare for transformation—and perform regular checks afterward.
- Define roles and responsibilities. Use an accountability matrix and oversight plan to ensure each team understands workforce management concepts, goals, and their roles in the process to function efficiently. This should include training and development plans to enhance understanding.
- Develop communication and escalation plans. Implement change management plans, communication strategies, and escalation procedures to address potential challenges and pave the way for a smooth transition.
- Prioritize HCM/WFM improvement initiatives. Set clear priorities to guide the transformation process.
- Monitor and measure success. Track progress and assess ongoing performance to validate your plan or adjust as needed.
2. Optimize Operational Processes Across the Organization
While UKG Pro WFM is a powerful tool, it can’t solve operational challenges alone. Leveraged correctly, however, it offers the opportunity to better support operational processes while driving value and efficiency. To create this level of harmony within your organization, start by evaluating your current processes in areas like staffing, scheduling, and workforce planning. What's the process to find available capacity to fill an open shift? Focus on improving existing operational processes and workflows, outside of any technology, so UKG Pro WFM can complement your optimized workflows for smooth integration and efficient operations.
For example, UKG Pro WFM includes a new feature, Schedule Scoring, which looks at coverage, preferences, and budget considerations to show managers how effectively their schedule meets the department’s needs. This helps managers make real-time, informed decisions in the schedule build and balance process—including staffing and budget considerations. However, without the appropriate people in place to manage this feature, and many others, it will not be effective. You need a process to correctly align your people with your new technology.
3. Align Technology to Support Processes
If you want to truly optimize UKG Pro WFM, align the technology to support your organization’s workforce management processes. The key here is to design the system with user experience in mind, ensuring that every interaction adds value and reduces administrative burden.
Start by examining your core workflows and look for opportunities to drive efficiency. That might involve reducing the number of clicks to perform tasks, leveraging mobile functionality to enable better access and visibility, or optimizing notifications to get in-the-moment interaction with the solution.
Alignment between other systems, such as an ERP like Workday or Oracle Cloud, is also crucial to reduce manual effort and receive real-time data. The tighter your integration is between UKG Pro WFM and other systems, the more you’ll be able to reduce the number of people required to manage that alignment on an ongoing basis.
4. Increase User Adoption
Like any other system at your organization, user adoption is crucial for maximizing the benefits of UKG Pro WFM. When you focus on the people side of change, the project is six times more likely to meet objectives, five times more likely to stay within timeline, and two times more likely to stay on budget.
The path to successfully increasing user adoption requires incorporating change management and end-user education, with a heavy emphasis on strong communication to users. Establishing change champion networks, emphasizing ongoing sustainability communications, and providing ongoing updates about new features and functionalities all play a critical role in driving adoption.
Not only does this focus on user adoption help improve efficiency, but it also provides visibility to appropriate staff across the organization to fill open shifts and helps ensure you have complete, reliable data for leveraging analytics.
5. Use Advanced Analytics to Create a Data-Driven Culture
Once you’ve established WFM processes, aligned the technology to support those processes, and achieved higher rates of user adoption, you will be able to access real-time labor data. Not only will this help you unlock more informed decision-making, but knowing how to tap into the various types of data for different user groups can help you gain additional benefits like potential cost savings, monitoring capabilities, and productivity improvements.
To leverage this data fully, start by familiarizing yourself with UKG Pro WFM Analytics. There are various data access methods to explore—such as Dataviews, Report Studio, BIRT reports, Boomi integration, Core Analytics, Healthcare Analytics, and Data Hub—that you can use to be strategic in your analytics planning.
It can also be helpful to conduct a gap analysis of current reporting requirements, identify discrepancies, ensure alignment with UKG Pro WFM functionality, and evaluate available options. From there, you can define KPIs, set performance targets, prioritize essential reports and dashboards—and create a timeline and analytics roadmap showcasing the initiatives’ ROI forecast.
The Benefits of Ongoing Optimization
One of the many benefits of optimizing your UKG Pro Workforce Management implementation is that building a data-driven culture of improvement is a virtuous cycle. The more you use and optimize this technology, the more it will unlock opportunities for organizational improvement.
As governance committees evaluate and implement refinements to processes, technology, user adoption, and analytics capabilities, for example, they generate even more opportunities for optimization—which is why workforce management transformation needs to be an ongoing process.
Over time, this will allow organizations to move from manual, transactional workforce management processes to a more mature, iterative, and data-driven approach to workforce management transformation that can help unlock value, increase efficiency, and produce better business outcomes along the way.
If you want to learn more about how to optimize UKG Pro Workforce Management, contact Healthcare IT Leaders today to learn how our UKG experts can help.