Fortune Names UKG One Of America’s Most Innovative Companies

MARCH 30, 2023/–Fortune has named UKG, a leading provider of HR, payroll, and workforce management solutions for all people, one of America’s Most Innovative Companies. Developed by Fortune and Statista, the inaugural list honors U.S.-based companies across all industries for excelling in three areas: product and service innovation, process innovation, and innovation in culture.

“This award is a testament to our commitment to creating great workplaces for all people by partnering with customers to transform work through our HCM suite and partner ecosystem,” said Hugo Sarrazin, chief product and technology officer at UKG. “All U Krewers — regardless of team, department, or role — are urged and expected to come up with creative solutions that advocate for our customers, enhance their experiences, and push our solutions to remain at the forefront of purpose-driven HCM. This culture of innovation is woven into our DNA at UKG, and it’s how our employees show up every, single day.”

As part of its commitment to innovation, UKG had a record-setting 2022 for R&D investment — which represents the industry’s largest investment focused solely on HCM and workforce management cloud solutions. UKG continues to announce solutions, programs, and enhancements to help its customers simultaneously improve productivity and their employee experience, including:

• UKG Talk, a communications and collaboration platform built specifically to help frontline employees connect with one another and their teams, even though they may work different shifts across a variety of locations;
• UKG Wallet, a comprehensive approach to financial wellness and on-demand earned wage access that modernizes on-demand pay;
• UKG Great Place To Work Hub, an industry-first solution that combines decades of Great Place To Work benchmarks and Trust Index™ survey results with UKG Pro HCM data to help leaders unlock drivers of engagement and performance; and
• UKG FleX, a modern technology platform that helps organizations evolve with the needs of their people by connecting the business with popular and emerging consumer and workplace applications.

Beyond innovation within its own walls, UKG is heavily invested in driving innovation to the far reaches of the market by nurturing hundreds of relationships that positively impact the entire HCM ecosystem through:

• UKG Labs, a virtual laboratory of early-stage companies from around the world to accelerate the growth of startups that serve people through software;
• The UKG Diversity Accelerator Program, which channels resources to a diverse-owned and diversity-focused technology ecosystem while helping maximize supplier diversity in the HCM market; and
• A culture-focused partner ecosystem recently formed by UKG, which is a group of strategic consulting partners to guide and support executive leadership during multiyear, culture-focused change management initiatives, that draws on successful practices of its own award-winning culture.

UKG also holds formalized events to unlock the creativity, diverse perspectives, and a shared passion to serve customers from its more than 15,000 U Krewers worldwide. Its quarterly Spark Tank innovation events, open to all employees, crowdsources new concepts to ensure the company remains at the forefront of innovation and the customer experience. The best ideas from Spark Tank are then brought to a 48 Hours programming competition, where UKG software engineers work to bring the ideas to fruition through a continuous, two-day challenge.

One innovation to come from 48 Hours is UKG Pro Giving, which stems from the company’s desire to help organizations around the world give to the causes that matter most to them. Giving enables organizations to easily set up charitable campaigns and inspire their employees to donate to various groups. To date, more than $7 million has been donated to various charities via the Giving platform, which UKG offers for free to its customers.

“When designing the UKG HCM suite and our future product roadmap, we don’t settle on the current trends. We’re constantly thinking ‘What more can we do to put people at the center of our design?’, looking years down the road to anticipate challenges customers might face before they happen, and leveraging emerging technologies to help them be ready for when they do,” said Sarrazin. “As a people-focused tech company, our innovation doesn’t stop at our products, either — it extends to the way we serve our customers, develop the ecosystem around us, and further a culture of innovation that our employees thrive on.”