In this episode, I interview 2021 UKG Insider of the Year Marky Payne of Vancity. We talk about...
...among other things! Tune in to learn more!
Resources
Working Smarter Cafe Blog
UKG Kronos Community Articles. Please log in for access.
Change management
Training
In this episode, I interview 2021 UKG Insider of the Year Marky Payne of Vancity. We talk about...
...among other things! Tune in to learn more!
Resources
Working Smarter Cafe Blog
UKG Kronos Community Articles. Please log in for access.
Change management
Training
LAUREN: Hello and welcome to the Working Smarter Café Podcast, the show for UKG customers who seek product insight from the experts and who are interested in hearing from other customers’ experiences. I’m your host, Lauren Nawfel, and in this episode, we’ll hear from Marky Payne of Vancity. She’s going to share some valuable pre-go-live recommendations for Workforce Central customers who are interested in moving to UKG Dimensions. Hey, Marky.
MARKY: Hello, Lauren.
LAUREN: Hi. Thanks for joining us on the show.
MARKY: Not a problem.
LAUREN: Now to help listeners get to know you a little bit before we dive in, I’d like to play a quick game. This is called two truths and a lie, so can you share two things about you that are true and one that’s false and I’ll try to guess which one is false.
MARKY: Sounds good, Lauren. So I thought hard about this one, and I had a fun time to coming up with the two truths and a lie. So the three things about me, I love chicken feet, I used to dance professionally as a ballroom dancer, and I don’t cook.
LAUREN: I’m going to go with you don’t like to cook.
MARKY: That’s correct. I’m a great cook. I’m spoiling my family because anytime we go to a restaurant they, we have yet to find a restaurant where we would be wowed by the food, and I truly think it’s because I cook every day. I try different kind of dishes. I do not have recipes. I just go with my gut and what spices I have underneath my hand and, yeah, I love cooking. That’s how I relax.
LAUREN: Awesome. So you are a ballroom dancer, then.
MARKY: Yes, that’s what I used to do in my youth and absolutely loved it.
LAUREN: That’s awesome. That’s so cool. I love to dance as well, so fellow dancer over here. All right, well, thank you for sharing those things about yourself, so let’s dive in now and talk about Vancity. Can you give us a brief overview of Vancity and what the organization does for those who might not know?
MARKY: Absolutely. So Vancity is Canada’s largest community credit unit. We are a value-based financial cooperative, and we are serving needs of over half a million members. We were founded in 1946 to provide financial services to all people. There is a little tidbit about Vancity. We are, we have a very unique history in the sense that we are first leaders in certain areas of the business, and what one which was very interesting to me to learn was that in the ‘60s, Vancity was the first bank providing mortgages to women without a male cosigner, which means that in those days, even when women had an income, banks wouldn’t provide them any loans because it was too risky because it was expected of the women to quit work while they had children and, you know, then they would stay at home and they would not have a career.
But Vancity decided that they would recognize all members as equals and that they would serve women and provided the loan, so that was the sort of very first proud story for Vancity.
We have 54 branches across the lower mainland. We have around 2,700 employees, and we are consistently recognized as one of the top employers in Canada. I think that’s about it about Vancity.
LAUREN: That’s awesome. That’s really neat, and thank you for sharing that fact about, you know, mortgages for women without having a male cosigner. That’s really, really cool, a cool part of your history.
So you’ve been one of our more active UKG Dimensions customers. You’ve participated in press releases and customer stories and now this podcast, of course, all of which we’re very thankful for, so can you share what ultimately drew you to UKG Dimensions and influenced your decision to migrate from Workforce Central.
MARKY: Mm-hmm. So I’m with Vancity 14 years, and I’m part of the HR systems team, and when I started to take care of the Workforce Central, I learned that Vancity was actually a customer of Kronos and with Workforce Central since 2003, and when I took over in 2014, you know, really quickly realized that we are not using Workforce Central to its potential, and when we started to go deeper we discovered, you know, the system is truly so powerful, you just need to know how to configure. You just need to understand how does it work.
And so, we upgraded in 2014 to the Workforce 7, the 7.01. Whoever is right now a Workforce Central customer, at least the version 7, they know it used to have Java, and so that was really a challenge for us because it really slowed down the systems and I used to tell our managers, go have a coffee while the timecards load. So when the Java was going, you know, out of business, it was being discontinued, we had a need to have a look what can we do next, where we will move, what kind of system we will use, and around that time, the two years prior, the Dimensions had been introduced and we started to look at its functionality and would it be a good fit for Vancity.
And, yoU know, the more we learned, the more we liked how Dimensions was going, what kind of functionality it have, and we decided that that would be the right fit for us, and the rest is history.
LAUREN: And which modules do you currently have live?
MARKY: So currently we have the timekeeping, accruals, and analytics. We did purchase the advanced scheduling, but due to COVID we were not able to implement the advanced scheduling yet. Something interesting about our company, we do not use clocks, so our employees are not tapping in and out, therefore we are not using any geofencing, and everybody is paid from schedule. We would love to use mobile and we totally understand how this would work and how amazing it’s with Dimensions, that you don’t need to configure anything, but for internal reasons we cannot use mobile yet.
LAUREN: All right, thank you. And then jumping into project planning, can you explain a little bit about the different people that participated in the project to migrate to Dimensions, so your role, maybe who you worked with closely internally on your side as well as folks from UKG.
MARKY: Absolutely. Well, as you can imagine, even though we were going from Workforce Central, it still felt like a completely new implementation, so on the UKG side we had a project manager, we had an implementation consultant, and also interface consultant because we knew we will need to have at least five interfaces configured for Dimensions. On the Vancity side, we really truly took it seriously and we hired an external consultant who helped us with more configuration. It was somebody who was very intimately aware of how Workforce Central works, and so because Dimensions, their setup is very similar, we felt that it’s important that we have somebody who we can bounce off ideas for the configuration.
We also make sure that our payroll department was fully committed and we had one person from payroll fully committed to the system that was not processing payroll anymore. The Dimensions was their main focus for the time where we were implementing. Then I had two people from the HRIS team, and then throughout the Vancity we had, you know, people from IT. We had people from learning and change management to contribute in this phases of the implementation as they were needed.
LAUREN: Awesome. Thank you. Definitely it takes a team.
MARKY: Absolutely.
LAUREN: All right, so system configuration is always a big piece to consider, so do you have any advice or learnings that you can share about the best way to approach that?
MARKY: Absolutely. And I just want to say, you know, it’s something you learn about Dimensions immediately when you start to poke around what Dimensions is, is a business structure. It’s something you have to figure out before you start any configuration, and that was one of the reasons why we hired an external consultant to help us with that, because the business structure is the backbone of Dimensions. It drives everything from security to who has access to what to how you set up your locations within the systems.
We knew it’s going to take us some time, and I can tell you that we did not nail it on the first time. It took us four reiteration of our business structure to really find a way how we structure or how, what the business structure look like in Dimensions. We did have help from UKG. There is a formal process where you as a customer submit your, you know, business structure for a review to ensure that it truly is going to work and that the system will be fully functioning with your setup business structure, but there was a lot of thought that had to go into it. We had to ensure that we truly understand our needs, our future needs, so that the business structure wouldn’t meet this.
So it took us four to six weeks. It was something we thought, oh, maybe, you know, one to two weeks. No. It really, it took some time to figure it out, and so take your time because it’s one of the most important decisions you’re going to do and you cannot start any configuration until you have this nailed down.
LAUREN: So take away, save time and make sure you’re planning to consider the business structure.
MARKY: Mm-hmm.
LAUREN: So after taking care of the business structure, then, and addressing that big decision, what are the following things for customers to consider from a feature configuration perspective?
MARKY: Mm-hmm. So that’s where I think Vancity, we learn from our past, that we always separate our system configuration versus interface configuration, because they can go side by side but they are completely different and they require a little bit different testing. So we had a separate consultant on the UKG side and on the Vancity side who took care of the system configuration. That’s where our payroll person was also helping to translate all of our policies to ensure that the configuration in Dimensions would meet all of our policy.
And then I had a separate UKG and Vancity consultant who worked on our five interfaces. We had to build two different accrual export. We have a payroll export. We have accrual reset import. We did a schedule code import, and then we had our main employee data interface that set up everything in Dimensions from our HRS system. So these two streams were working alongside and made sure that, you know, our implementation was moving forward in the right speed.
LAUREN: Awesome. Thank you for that, for that insight. So let’s skip ahead a little bit, you know, and say configuration and all of that’s taken care of. What’s the next step, so particularly how are you ensuring the end-users accept the technology?
MARKY: Yes. So a little bit of history for Vancity, we, when we upgraded our Workforce Central to the cloud in 2014, we really underestimated the end-user and the amount of change the learning the end-user will need, and we definitely learned, so we ensured that we had our change team and learning team by our side during our implementation. We made sure that we involved the business, that we heard from our end-users what is important to them in a time and attendance system. We connected with them frequently to ensure they understood what is coming up when it’s going to be the launch, what is the expectations of employees and manager.
We had regular communication about the project, so when we went live, it was something that was anticipated. Everybody understood what is expected of them. And then learning, we ensured that we have learning that is not just one time but it’s something that our managers and employees can take whenever they need to. We had job aides internally, but we also have e-learning courses that any new managers as they joined or employees can relook and take at their leisure, and we also hosted e-learning sessions, especially to the areas of business which we knew may be problematic, or have more manager and employee self-service so that we wanted to have that personalized touch and to ensure that the launch of the new time and attendance system is successful, because at the end of the day, this is the system that pays people and we wanted to make sure that our first pay from our new time and attendance system is without a hitch, and that’s exactly what happened.
It was a non-event, and we had the minimum, you know, errors, minimum questions from the end-users. It was just really executed the right way, and the feedback from the end-users were such that they felt they knew what’s coming, they felt what was expected of them. They felt they knew how to navigate through the system, so there was no panic when it came to the end of the pay period and the hours were being submitted to payroll.
LAUREN: Yeah, that’s great. I mean, the more you educate people on a change just in general the more apt they are to, you know, to be on board with it and see the value, so.
MARKY: And to be heard. I think that was the biggest learning and the biggest engagement that the business could express what they are struggling with and it really made the difference that people were engaged and were excited for the new system.
LAUREN: Yeah, now continuing to look back on your experience, what insights do you know now that maybe you wish you had known before? So, you know, do you wish you had more foresight into something specifically, you know, before beginning the project?
MARKY: Mm-hmm. I think for us, you know, we are a systems team, and so we really truly concentrated on what are the features of the new system, what kind of interfaces we will need, and we did not fully understand what us as a company we need to go through from the legal perspective, risk perspective, compliance, internally to have the Workforce Dimensions approved as our, you know, new system because it is a new system that we host our time and attendance on.
So that was something we did not expect to take that much time. It’s absolutely something you have to do. You have to make sure that you talk to your IT, that your [inaudible] is completely satisfied with all the security measures implemented by the vendor, and so this was a little bit of a delay we did not count on. We sort of naively thought we are just going to hop immediately into configuration and did not understand fully our internal processes when it comes to a new system.
The other thing, I think it was the amount of time the testing is going to take us. UKG provides standard testing library, and not knowing in details what it was we were thinking, oh, we are just going to take these cases and that’s going to be our testing, but then we realized that because we have a lot of employee and manager self-service that is unique to us, we at the end had to rebuild our own test library and we had almost a thousand cases, you know, end-user cases, to ensure that all of our configuration is working as designed, that our policies are being translated by the system correctly. And it’s, it’s just one of those things that it took longer than we thought it would, like the creation of the test scenarios, but also the testing itself.
LAUREN: Yeah, so better understanding, then, what your testing needs, you know, were from the very beginning would have helped.
MARKY: Absolutely.
LAUREN: Yeah, so one takeaway there, and then the other takeaway that you mentioned was your internal processes, so, you know, that may be something that people, you know, might overlook, that sure, you may have to talk with IT, you may have to get together with these other folks to make sure that you’re all set to execute your plan, so I think that’s another great point you made.
MARKY: Absolutely.
LAUREN: So a few minutes ago you started to get into this a little bit, but now that you’re live on UKG Dimensions, can you share a little bit more about what employees think about the solution and maybe comment on any value that it’s provided to your end-users?
MARKY: Absolutely. So as I mentioned, we had the Java in our previous time management system, so immediately the speed of the system and the reactions when managers go and load timecard. I know it seems like a no-brainer, but that was just amazing and lovely and just immediately managers commented on that. The other thing is the landing page, that was something they really craved in Workforce Central, to have a landing page that we could bring some data points to our end-users based on their roles. And so, especially managers, they are really commenting on how great it is to have data views with graphs right on the landing page, and we control what kind of data views we push to the managers.
So I can tell you right now we are going to the P3, so we are pushing the overtime and amount of vacation the teams have, so that the managers, they don’t need to go to individual employee time cards and accruals. They can see it right on the landing page how many hours everybody has on their team. So these are the little things that makes the managers’ time just not wasted as to go one by one and then maybe jotting it down or create a data view. It’s right there and it’s visual, so that is something that the feedback was very positive. The tiles are improving all the time with the releases. As I mentioned, our company is heavy on employee and manager self-service, so the fact that there is the time-off request tile for the employees where they can immediately go and submit their time-off request is amazing. That is something that employees are using very heavily and it’s commented on as this is great, that I don’t need to go somewhere to create it, it’s right there on my landing page.
Also the end-user experience of the system and just how everything looks like it’s way better. We are huge on inclusivity and just knowing that Dimensions is built to make sure that it is inclusive, especially for the visually impaired employees we have. It’s really great to know and it’s one of the things we were super excited about. And one thing that we implemented for our employees was automation overtime calculation, and this is basically the first time where we can say because the system is calculating the overtime based on various rules, that our overtime is truly fairly distributed and consistently paid, so there is no more subjectivity and relying on managers to know the policy as to what kind of overtime to assign to the employee. The system does it for them. So that has been great, and it was one of the things on the manager’s shoulder to know the policy versus now the system is doing it consistently.
LAUREN: That’s awesome. So a few key things I heard there. It sounds like information is much more easily accessible for managers, and then on that theme of accessibility, you know, making it easier for your visually impaired employees to use the solution, and then overtime calculations for, you know, for fairness in pay and everything, so those are some great things. Thank you so much for sharing.
I have one final question for you. It’s a very important one to wrap us up. So I need to know, if you had to choose between either coffee or tea to drink for the rest of your life, what would it be? So basically I’m asking, are you a coffee or a tea person?
MARKY: This is a hard question for me. If I could divide it, before kids I would say tea all the way. After I had my kids, I have two daughters, it’s coffee. I start my day with coffee and my girls know, Mommy first need to have a coffee before we ask her any questions, so coffee all the way right now.
LAUREN: Oh, so you transferred, you’re a traitor. I’m on the tea side, so [chuckles]. I’ve already had three cups of my apple cinnamon tea today.
MARKY: I do try. My coffee is my morning and my tea is in the afternoon, and I love going to teahouses and have the traditional, you know, high tea in the ceramic porcelain, you know, the [inaudible] mugs, that’s definitely a highlight for me.
LAUREN: So, so both, then, we’ll say you’re a fan of both.
MARKY: Yeah.
LAUREN: All right. Well, thanks so much, Marky, really appreciate all of your insights and thoughts that you had to share today, so thank you so much.
MARKY: You’re welcome. It was a pleasure to be here.