Named by Forbes as one of America’s Best-in-State Employers in 2023, East Alabama Health is an award-winning health system that employs 3,800 people and operates two hospitals, a cancer center, and several medical clinics and physician practices in the state of Alabama.
With UKG Pro Workforce Management, East Alabama Health has experienced:
Challenges
A longtime UKG customer dedicated to constant innovation, East Alabama Health is driven by a passion for excellence in patient care and commitment to providing an unparalleled working environment for its employees. To best support its people and supercharge its great workplace journey, the health system needed the most robust, modern, cloud workforce management solution deployed across its locations.
Solutions
Given its long history and close partnership with UKG, East Alabama Health migrated to UKG Pro Workforce Management (formerly UKG Dimensions) to boost its people-centric culture and drive operational efficiencies.
“Our people and patients mean everything to us. It’s important to empower our employees with innovative technology like UKG that makes their lives easier so they can focus on providing high-quality, compassionate healthcare,” said Genia Odom, director of workforce planning and payroll at East Alabama Health. “Pro Workforce Management gives our frontline staff the flexibility they deserve to balance the demands of their work and personal lives while helping us save time and money by identifying areas where we can be more efficient.”
“In our industry, covering shifts is not optional, it’s mandatory. UKG allows us to be forward-thinking in how we support our employees’ needs while never missing a beat when it comes to delivering exceptional patient care.”
Labor Analyst
Results
One area where East Alabama Health felt it could be more efficient was in understanding the impact of incremental, or casual overtime, which the health system defines as overtime that is less than or equal to three hours per employee per week and is often the result of people clocking into shifts early, then clocking out late. Leaders also wanted to know if people were properly taking their meal breaks and, if not, how that impacted employees and the business.
“UKG did an extensive data analysis and determined that, during a 52-week period in 2022, we incurred more than $688,000 in incremental overtime,” said Chaisen Gulley, database coordinator at East Alabama Health. “Over a one-year span, after implementing advanced scheduling for flexibility and attestation to ensure better compliance, our combined annualized savings on overtime and meal deductions was $246,100. That would not have happened without the hard work and dedication of our internal team as well as the partnership with our UKG team who understood our unique business needs and took the time to work with us.”
As an employer of choice in an industry that continues to experience staffing shortages, East Alabama Health knows giving its people greater flexibility and more choices when it comes to shifts — including opportunities for meaningful overtime — not only creates better habits and workplace practices but helps engage and retain its hard-working staff in support of its great place to work commitment.
“In the past year, we started offering self-scheduling and shift-swapping, and we just recently rolled out an open-shift incentive program that gives employees a financial incentive for selecting shifts that are in greatest need of coverage,” said Casey Rollins, labor analyst at East Alabama Health. “In our industry, covering shifts is not optional, it’s mandatory. UKG allows us to be forward-thinking in how we support our employees’ needs while never missing a beat when it comes to delivering exceptional patient care.”
“It's also amazing how advanced Pro Workforce Management is,” added Odom. “We have a lot of younger workers, many right out of college, who have grown up using their smartphones and expect us to be technologically driven. The UKG Pro mobile app has been instrumental in allowing us to meet our people wherever they are, through their device, in real-time.”
Another area where UKG has driven measurable change is payroll.
“UKG has been a game-changer for our payroll team,” said Penny Stewart, senior payroll coordinator at East Alabama Health. “It used to take days to process payroll and that’s been decreased to several hours because UKG has automated so much of the data that feeds into our payroll system. It’s wonderful to have so much time back to devote to our people and patients instead of processes.”
