The Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) is a network of free open-enrollment college-preparatory schools in low-income communities across the U.S. KIPP SoCal Public Schools, an independent nonprofit organization in East Los Angeles, California, educate 9,500 students at 19 tuition-free charter public schools and employ more than 1,000 teachers, administrators, and support staff.
Challenges
Although KIPP SoCal was using automated solutions to manage its workforce, considerable manual work was still required. The HR staff manually prepared and mailed onboarding packets to new hires, a costly and time-consuming undertaking when hiring 100 new employees at once.
The accruals system didn't consistently manage accruals according to KIPP SoCal's policies. Even though employees could see their accrual balances, these balances weren't always accurate. The HR staff manually assigned accruals for new hires and staff members moving into noninstructional roles. Payroll staffers had to monitor time off or contact managers about employees' approved time off, as employees sometimes took time off without approval. Lacking visibility into current, accurate accrual balances, HR might unknowingly pay out inflated leave balances to departing employees.
Creating reports for the KIPP Foundation also took one HR staff person a full week to review numerous spreadsheets to locate and then enter the correct data.
Solutions
To take advantage of accurate, real-time data; improved reporting; and greater efficiencies, KIPP SoCal implemented the UKG Ready® suite of solutions for use by its teachers, after-school instructors, HR/payroll and finance teams, and administrative staff members.
The UKG® solution interfaces with Lever, a recruiting and hiring system, and with Helios, a teacher credentialing solution, further streamlining processes. With the Lever integration, information on new hires automatically flows into UKG Ready, and onboarding information is emailed to new employees, saving valuable staff time and improving the new-hire process.
"Part of our focus at KIPP SoCal is let's work smarter, not harder, so let's aim to automate as many processes as we can because we know when things are automated, there's less room for error," said Bertha Hernandez, Data Manager at KIPP SoCal.
“Part of our focus at KIPP SoCal is let's work smarter, not harder, so let's aim to automate as many processes as we can because we know when things are automated, there's less room for error.”
Bertha Hernandez
Data Manager
Results
Reporting data is readily accessible now. Solution users don't need to be experts to build reports, and staff members can easily navigate the solution to access them.
"UKG reporting has definitely made our lives much easier because data is so accessible," explained Hernandez. "We have to report data to the KIPP Foundation, and now we can build it in UKG and share it, and people can navigate to it in their own site when they log in to UKG."
KIPP SoCal has created audit reports to track onboarding, accrued time, terminations, HR actions, and to-do lists, among others.
With UKG Ready simplifying performance management, KIPP SoCal anticipates tracking attendance of teachers as part of their performance, to understand whether teacher attendance is impacting student performance.
The organization can configure the UKG solution to meet the KIPP Foundation's reporting requirements and easily report information to the foundation in its report templates.
"Now with UKG, I can do custom fields where I can adjust data to reflect the value the KIPP Foundation wants, without me doing extra work," said Militza Munoz, HR Systems Analyst at KIPP SoCal. "If I have to look for a specific group of employees, in UKG I can look for just those people. With the other system, I had to look up employees one by one."
The time needed to generate reports for the foundation has been reduced from one week to a day and a half, a 70% reduction in time. Labor audit reporting for the Los Angeles Unified School District is more efficient too, with labor codes tied to specific programs.
As KIPP SoCal adds schools, its HR and administrative staff is confident the UKG Ready solution will smoothly incorporate workforce data from additional schools, supporting KIPP SoCal's growth.
