Kronos has given its Workforce Ready HR suite a visual overhaul and added a new tool called Workforce Auditor, which uses big data to spot behavioral anomalies among groups of employees. Here are the details from Kronos's announcements at this week's KronosWorks conference in Las Vegas.
Highlights of the new Workforce Ready user interface include:
Streamlined navigation driven by an open drawer concept, dynamic headings with recently accessed items, and a new start menu to drive ease of use through simplicity with the ability to customize hot links and key navigation areas important to the organization, its employees, and job applicants.
A cohesive interface with hot action bars ensures workflow paths are consistent across all Workforce Ready modules to deliver an intuitive user experience regardless of task or user.
Enhanced dashboards and personalization features simplify access to critical workforce data and accelerate how tasks are completed through engaging action buttons and consistent icons while eliminating the need for pop-up menus. Continued personalization helps drive user adoption and employee self-service around activities such as benefit selection, time-off requests, editing time cards, and monitoring accruals.
The new UI will be applied to customers' implementations without causing changes to configurations, dashboards, reports and security settings, Kronos says.
Meanwhile, Workforce Auditor "identifies patterns of timekeeping and scheduling behavior within an organization that are unusual and links them to specific workforce activity," according to the announcement:
Workforce Auditor has been tested on a wide range of Kronos customer data and has revealed signficant amounts of previously unknown findings for each customer. For example, a state agency uncovered a specific crew with a disproportionately high rate of mandatory meal break cancellations indicating that workers were potentially working long shifts with no break, when that may not have been the case. And a retailer identified specific stores where managers were consistently adjusting employees’ time-worked data and breaks to benefit their own performance.
These examples are common among large and complex workforces, which present considerable challenges for an organization seeking to comply with federal, state, and other labor law regulations; standardize best practices; and limit time abuse. Even with layers of protection and controls in place, organizations can find themselves facing regulatory challenges or leaking profits.
Analysis: Kronos's Announcements Speak to A Bigger Picture
While the updates should be of interest to Kronos' installed base, both announcements speak to larger trends in HR technology overall, notes Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller.
"It is good to see usability improvements by software vendors in general, and today it is Kronos with the user interface of Workforce Ready," he says. "We see user interface evolving faster than ever. When in the past a two to three-year refresh cycle was acceptable practice, user interfaces today are stale after two or three quarters. UI innovation matters, as it increases end-user productivity."
Nearly all business users have other tasks to perform besides using their HR systems, "so making them productive on the little time available for HR functions is key—even more when it comes to time and attendance," Mueller adds.
In turn, Workforce Auditor ties into "the trend of intelligence moving from in front of the LCD to behind of the LCD, or in other words, from human intelligence to software intelligence," Mueller says. "While potentially scary and a concern, we expect business users to leverage these new capabilities as they are pressed for time, and any working insight will be highly welcomed and leveraged. The emphasis is on 'working,' as users will embrace working solutions eagerly, but discard those quickly that don't give them a leg up in regards of time and decision quality."
You can also view tools like Workforce Auditor as "the beginning of augmented humanity—where we're using big data patterns to help augment decisions," says Constellation Research founder and CEO R "Ray" Wang. "It helps customers take advantage of best practices and identify potential opportunities. More important, it proactively helps customers avoid any regulatory issues."
