Ceridian Reveals Moves in Pay and Succession

Ceridian is looking to bring relief to two areas of HR angst next year: financial wellbeing (or, more precisely, how employees are being paid) and the way future successors are identified and prepared.

At last week’s Insights 2018 customer forum at Caesars in Las Vegas, the Minneapolis-headquartered global human capital management technology company unveiled two new solutions: On-Demand Pay and Succession Planning. Both solutions are being added to Ceridian’s Dayforce platform and are scheduled for general availability sometime next year.

In the case of On-Demand Pay, employees will be able to request through a mobile app the transfer of earned wages to a digital wallet, so instead of waiting for payday, workers can access the funds immediately.

The solution seeks to address the financial stress many employees face today, especially those who are living paycheck to paycheck. One 2017 CareerBuilder/Harris study reports that as many as 78 percent of full-time workers put themselves in that category.

While several niche players have already entered the market with solutions that give employees early access to their earned wages–FlexWage, DailyPay and PayActiv are a few that come to mind–Ceridian is thought to be the first major HCM vendor to formally announce plans to bring this capability to its platform.

Dayforce’s ability to perform continuous calculations allows workers to see how much they earned up to that point in time and request the money, explained Ceridian’s Chairman and CEO David Ossip (pictured above speaking at Insights 2018), adding that the tool also gives employers the ability to pay contractors on a more timely basis.

Dayforce Succession Planning, meanwhile, attempts to tackle the need to find the right people within the organization to fill key roles in the event of an expected or unexpected departure.

“It allows companies to prepare for career pathing and organizational change,” Ossip told the audience. “You can see where people stand in terms of performance, potential, readiness and flight risk [at every level of the organization].”

Leagh Turner, who joined Ceridian in August as its president, noted that the two announcements, along with the company’s focus on analytics, closely tie to the company’s vision of the future of work.

“If we assume in the future world of work that many jobs will be offloaded to AI, and as a result of this we will have contingent labor perform information work and we will be promoting and grooming in-house talent to do the long-tale innovation, high-imagination work, then it only makes sense that these three components would be introduced simultaneously,” said Turner, who previously served as SAP’s global chief operating officer for its strategic customer program.

Both On-Demand Pay and Succession Planning, Turner said, leverage the platform’s “single data-store” approach. Because pay and time are connected to one another, she explained, Ceridian can successfully drive an on-demand pay process that’s “consistent, accurate and continuous.” Succession Planning, meanwhile, provides leaders with insights as to what makes a person uniquely capable, how they compare against their peer group and how they can be groomed for a position over time, she said.

Chief People Officer Lisa Sterling expects that both tools will eventually be put to good use at Ceridian.

In the case of On-Demand Pay, Sterling said, a large portion of Ceridian’s workforce are in non-exempt roles, especially in support and operations. “For some,” she said, “the tool provides an alternative to getting a loan, giving people who can’t wait until payday accessibility to a little cash.”

At the end of the day, Sterling said, it should lead to great employee engagement. “If they feel we’re taking care of them,” she explained, “they’re naturally going to feel more engaged.”

As for Succession Planning, Sterling believes the “formality” it brings to the process will especially be felt at lower levels of the organization.  “Right now,” she said, “we do succession planning at the most senior levels, but I don’t know that it’s being done as effectively as it could be at the lower levels.” She believes the capability will help improve that situation.

By giving people visibility to this information every time they log in, it makes the process “a lot more real to people and should go a long way to changing their thinking,” said Sterling, who was recently named 2018 Working Mother of the Year by Working Mother magazine.

Ossip also mentioned at Insights–which attracted nearly 3,000 attendees–plans to launch products in benefits-decision support, engagement surveys and compensation benchmarking.

Gartner Research Vice President Ron Hanscome described these latest announcements as a “balanced response” to a combination of customer needs, market trends and competitive pressures. “They are continuing to add talent-management and analytics capabilities to Dayforce as their customer base embraces the concept of a comprehensive HCM solution for predominantly hourly workforces,” he said.

In particular, he added, its “plan to add on-demand pay functionality to Dayforce has the potential to help organizations in a number of industries improve engagement for their hourly workers.”

David Shadovitz
David Shadovitzhttp://54.82.85.82
David Shadovitz is editor emeritus and former editor and co-publisher for HRE.