Supernova Award Category

Tech Optimization and Modernization

The Problem

Traditional HCM has focused most heavily on managing employee data and improving employee performance. However, with competition to retain talent on the rise across all industries, today it is crucial for businesses to not just focus on boosting employee performance, but to also listen to the “voice of the employee”—and focus on understanding how the company can improve the experience of its workforce. According to an August 2016 study by The Center for Generational Kinetics, three out of four employees said that one thing employers could do to make them stay with the company longer is to listen to and address their concerns. Understanding employee sentiment through feedback and survey tools—and acting on that knowledge—is directly tied to increasing talent retention and driving performance. In order to understand how employees truly feel about an organization, companies need more than simple multiple-choice employee satisfaction surveys or costly consulting engagements, where the results can be delayed for many weeks or months after the survey.

The Solution

An important step in building a great workplace is understanding what employees care about. To address this challenge, we launched UltiPro Perception, a leading enterprise-grade employee engagement solution composed of elegant surveys, sophisticated analytics, and configurable dashboards all designed to deliver real-time analytics and provide critical insights in seconds. With UltiPro Perception, Ultimate customers are able to quickly and easily survey their workforce, collect employee input (through both quantitative and open-ended questions), understand employee sentiment, and track the effectiveness of teams and managers. Perception’s analytics technology automatically surfaces over 70 themes that identify what employees are discussing and over 100 emotions to compute an Emotional Promoter Score. In an instant, managers know their teams’ top concerns and the intensity of how they feel, and can act upon those findings to improve employee satisfaction and retention.

The results

Before: Companies were limited to simple multiple-choice employee satisfaction surveys or costly consulting engagements which didn’t integrate with their HCM solution.

After: UltiPro Perception automatically and continuously integrates with our HCM solution, offering sophisticated technology with over 70 themes that identify what employees are discussing and over 100 emotions. Moreover, customers may deploy an unlimited number of surveys – a cost-effective means to continuously and accurately gain ongoing employee feedback.

Before: Traditional surveys were standardized and sometimes cumbersome to administer.

After: With UltiPro Perception customers may utilize our template questions, customize them, or author their own questions. Perception supports all screen formats and devices in multiple languages. Surveys may be anonymous or identified, and integrates with a customer’s employee directory to guide survey deployment.

Before: Survey results could be delayed for weeks or months, valuable time lost in trying to understand and boost employee performance.

After: UltiPro Perception gives customers real-time analytics in order to quickly and easily survey their workforce. Managers receive an automatic EPS calculation, based on both quantitative and open-ended responses, which provides a complete picture of employee engagement along with real-time actionable insights for improving employee satisfaction and retention.

Metrics

A large electronics manufacturing company with over 180K employees deployed a global census survey using Perception in 32 countries and 18 languages, with their hourly factory workers taking the survey on a kiosk, while the office based employees were able to take the survey on their desktops and mobile devices. Results included:

• A surge in survey response rates from 45% to 65%
• A reduction in the survey taking time from 20 minutes to 8 minutes and from 80 questions to 30 meaningful and adaptive questions
• Elimination of administrative complexity and billable consultant hours
• Savings on significant costs for additional cuts of the data they needed to better understand their workforce

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A very large multinational bank adopted Perception for all their global and country specific survey needs. The administrative team consisted of only 4 core members, managing survey efforts covering 160K employees spread over 46 countries. Results included:

• Over a span of 2 years, the team successfully conducted a global engagement survey with a 70% response rate, as well as 22 more targeted surveys for various regions, countries and business units, saving on millions of dollars in eliminated consultant fees.

The Technology

UltiPro Perception

Disruptive Factor

In terms of standard survey tools used by businesses across industry sectors, our competitors provide simple survey tools that report statistics but don’t create an understanding of responses. They provide numbers not answers, as characterized by:

Reliance on quantitative analytics

Qualitative capabilities limited to word clouds

Results requiring costly manual interpretation

No or limited HCM/HRIS integration

No or limited enterprise configurability, security and role-based access

Lack of support for large, complex organizations

By contrast, UltiPro Perception is the only solution that provides the following benefits:

Tightly integrated with an HCM solution

Built from the ground-up to understand the key insights from employee sentiment and intent, based on a decade of pioneering Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning research

Providing plain-English, actionable insights personalized to individual managers

Delivering real-time insights to reduce turnover and increase employee engagement and morale

Ultimate Software was the first to launch predictors for retention and performance and the first to offer a technology that recommends specific actions to managers to help them better lead, engage, and retain individuals within their team. UltiPro Perception provides intelligent, people-center technology that serves as a critical element in maximizing employee satisfaction and retention.

Shining Moment

When UltiPro Perception was deployed in a large manufacturing company, the HR project team received personal “thank you” notes from the CEO as well as several senior executives at the company for their help in getting them the story behind the story in an unprecedented two weeks – valuable information that senior leadership never had access to before.