Having been an accidental blogger over the past 3 years, I have always found it frustrating that I can’t fully say what’s on my mind. There’s the obvious risk of a trip to prison (especially when I worked for a publically traded company), and as an employee of a software company, your personal perspective is always bounded by the organization’s strategy and goals. Not a great formula for objectivity as a blogger.
Earlier in the week I tweeted about my visit to the headquarters of Dayforce in Toronto. They are a critical and strategic partner for Ceridian, and it was my first opportunity to see for myself what they are up to. As a 7 day veteran of Ceridian, my objectivity is rapidly evaporating. So before it’s completely gone, I wanted to make a few observations as a member of our HR technology community that strives to help customers grow stronger.
1. User Experience is all about the Game:
I occasionally get frustrated over the fact that user experience is often evaluated more on beauty than functionality. And we all want to work with something that’s pretty — it’s human nature — but just because there’s a chart on the page, it doesn’t actually mean that the application is more effective.
When I had the chance to look at the form that acts as the centerpiece of scheduling in Dayforce Workforce Management, it took my breath away. Not only did the form look great — an elegant presentation of the employee with a quick path to some useful demographic data, but they also had effectively read the mind of the end user. Optimizing and finalizing a work schedule (after the automated engine does its thing) is no simple task. But this single form allowed for the myriad of tasks that needed to be performed happen so intuitively that it was simply beautiful. Which, my friends, is a rare thing to say about software that administers anything in our business.
Better yet, as the user manipulated this data, the real time nature of the interaction was elegant. If something was changed related to an employee’s schedule, the images and/or color dynamically changed to show if there was an issue (for example, if extending the shift drifted into unavailable time for the individual). No need to enter data, wait for a response, repeat. Best of all, it was downright fun to watch as the scheduler issued a request to an on-call worker to come in which was delivered to that person’s smartphone, accepted, and updated in the system in under 30 seconds. David Ossip, the founder of Dayforce tells me that the concept is called gamification which made perfect sense — using game design techniques for non-game applications. And what user doesn’t want to use an app that feels a bit like a game? Words with Friends, anyone?
The whole experience got me to thinking about my niece (stay with me!). She worked at the Gap a couple of summers ago, and was totally frustrated because on a good week, she was working about 8 hours. She was available, wanted to work and was skilled — but it seemed that she didn’t have the right connections with the managers in the store to get more hours. In a world driven by Dayforce, she could monitor store needs in real time (right from her iPhone) and grab work whenever she wanted it. One of the folks at Dayforce told me that some employees are spending more time on the workforce app than they do on Facebook!
2. Workforce Management Carries A Lot of the Payroll Load
While I’ve been working with payroll systems for nearly 30 years, I don’t have much experience with workforce management. As I spent some time reviewing the design for the payroll portion of the Dayforce product, I marveled a bit at how the work they’d done for WFM was completely reusable for payroll. Some of you are probably saying, “Duh, Larry” — but for me it was a bit of an eye opener.
A single platform for pay rules that drive scheduling coupled tightly with the gross to net engine not only will dramatically reduce the effort to deliver world-class payroll functionality but will also eliminate a common disconnect between operations and payroll — how did the gross get calculated? More importantly, it’s a huge jumpstart on one of the most complex parts of designing a payroll system. That, along with great tax functionality from BSI means that this thing is being buit very quickly.
3. Payroll Managers Want to Have Fun Too
There have been very few ‘from-scratch’ payroll systems built in the last few years and the vast majority of payroll managers are working with software that, while very effective at accurately processing payroll isn’t always that much fun to work with.
The real-time nature of the gross-to-net calculations in Dayforce combined with the modern user interface components mean that like their colleagues in recruiting, organizational development or compensation, payroll managers are going to get in on the action!
So as I head into week 3 at Ceridian, I’ll just have to go back to my world as a software company executive with an agenda — but I’ve put it out there and as the evolution of these products continue, you can judge my assessment.
