UKG Grows Revenue, Unveils Vision for ‘Life-Work’ Products

UKG said quarterly revenue increased to $798 million during its fiscal second quarter, which ended March 31, 2021. Subscription revenue grew 12% year over year, which the company credited to new-customer orders and increasing purchases by existing  customers.

The announcement came just weeks after the company concluded its UKG Connections virtual conference, where it unveiled Life-Work Technology, a new overall theme for its products. Essentially, the company aims to bring people and HCM technology together so that employers can support the balancing of work with personal life.

Life-Work Technology is “an entirely new vision for designing HCM solutions,” said Vice President of Products and Innovation Cecile Alper-Leroux. By factoring in the emotions and preferences of users, it allows them to work in a way that’s suited to their own habits and preferences.  

UKG describes Life-Work Technology as an “approach.” It combines an understanding of people, their work histories and aspirations with data about individual work patterns, efficiencies and behaviors. It will “lead to a more human-centered work environment and experience, supporting employee’s individual life/work journeys with our solutions,” Alper-Leroux said.

Life-Work Technology’s introduction took much the same approach as did SAP SuccessFactor’s unveiling of Human Experience Management in 2019. At the time, Amy Wilson, SuccessFactors’ head of product, referred to HXM as “an evolution of our platform” as opposed to a re-build or re-branding. Around the same time, Oracle announced features for HCM Cloud that highlighted a focus on improving the employee and candidate experiences.  

The Life-Work capabilities UKG showed off include:

• UKG Pro Candidate Cultivation is designed to help organizations build engaged connections with key candidates over time. Recruiters can set up repeatable campaigns and automated reminders, and schedule events that will help foster connections. In addition, organizations can connect with passive candidates to build pipelines by function, position or location. 
• UKG Pro Workforce Continuity provides insight into an employer’s readiness and ability to respond to unplanned events. The Workforce Continuity Hub helps HR distribute personal impact forms and safety check-ins to monitor employees’ safety and ability to work. It also provides insights about current crisis events via a single dashboard. That way, administrators can identify business impacts that require immediate attention, minimizing disruptions.  
• UKG Pro Gig Explorer helps companies tap into the “non-traditional talent” of their workforce by creating a database of short-term assignments that employees can take on in the name of hands-on learning. Among other things, employees can self-select temporary assignments outside their normal role. 
• In Service Delivery, UKG People Assist is being developed with an intelligent chatbot capability that understands not only questions, but the intention behind the question. Employees can use bots to search for information in the platform’s knowledge base, and track the status of existing requests.

The company is also embedding AI-based recommendations in its Pro Pay module to ensure accuracy. Smart pay analytics are designed to help payroll managers uncover areas to focus on (such as employees with hours that may be under- or over-reported) to make sure payroll is correct.  

UKG Customers Back Merger

“We sold more new business than planned, and the migration of existing customers to our flagship cloud solutions continues to give us opportunities for sales of our full product suite,” said UKG President Chris Todd. The merger of Ultimate Software and Kronos to form UKG has generated “positive merger momentum” among customers, he said.

During the quarter, UKG brought around 650 customers live around the world, serving industries including retail, manufacturing and healthcare.

Separately, UKG began a strategic collaboration and technology partnership with WayUp, a developer of virtual diversity and inclusion recruiting solutions.

Through the agreement, UKG customers can connect UKG Pro with WayUp’s and access the company’s more than 6 million candidates, 71% of whom have self-identified as being part of an underrepresented group. WayUp will join the UKG Marketplace this summer.

Image: UKG