UKG provides solutions to Coast Mental Health

VANCOUVER – UKG, a leading provider of HR, payroll, and workforce management solutions, announced that Coast Mental Health, a nonprofit provider of support and services to people living with mental illness, is leveraging the power of the UKG human capital management (HCM) suite to address the complexities of its unionized workforce, inspire employee productivity, and boost the quality of the organization’s services.

Vancouver’s Coast Mental Health offers housing, education, employment, and support services to individuals with mental health challenges. Prior to UKG, the nonprofit relied on manual, time-intensive HR processes that made it difficult to provide an engaging workplace experience and focus on employee development.

Seeking to become more efficient and resource-conscious with its payroll, workforce management, and HR practices, the organization chose UKG for the value of its comprehensive HCM solution in supporting the entire employee experience – from recruiting and onboarding to scheduling and learning.

“UKG has elevated the productivity of our entire organization and helped us provide better service to our clients,” said Deborah Maynard (pictured), CHRO at Coast Mental Health. “Managers have more time to support their people, and staff has more time to focus on clients. Our technological leap with UKG came at a time when we started delivering more comprehensive services to our community, and it was critical to reduce the administrative burden on our people.”

Operated by a unionized workforce, managers at Coast Mental Health previously had to manually maintain time, attendance, and pay rules for three unions and were required to undertake time-consuming, complex calculations each pay period, such as determining who was entitled to paid lunch and who gets paid a premium for certain hours and jobs worked. That all changed with UKG.

“The work experience for our managers has been life-changing because our UKG solution makes all the calculations automatically and flawlessly,” said Maynard. “Managers are saving significant time and stress each pay period and employees are happier because they get paid what they expected and are entitled to.”

Maynard says UKG has also improved the employee experience by giving staff access to self-service tools so they can access important HR information at any time, from any device.

“Having a centralized system gives our people easy access to all parts of the solution, either online or through the UKG mobile app. They can see and edit their personal information, upload documents to their profiles, easily access their schedules and timecards, and request time off. They can also take training related to accreditation within our learning system, and we’ll soon be moving our health and safety training there as well. This access makes them feel empowered, and managers can more confidently lead their teams with real-time information.”

Coast Mental Health additionally credits the scalability of UKG with keeping administrative headcount stable while the organization grows.

“We’ve increased our employee base by about 30% since going live on UKG without creating any new administrative positions in HR,” said Maynard. “We’ve also found additional savings by being able to quickly identify payments not entitled under the collective agreement, and by substantially reducing the number of manual checks we need to produce.”

“Our HCM solution allows an organization to roll out its HR strategy across the business because we address the needs of each worker,” said Chris Todd, CEO at UKG. “Coast Mental Health has taken important steps to be an even more valuable resource to the community while also positioning the organization as a trusted employer that pays its people correctly. Organizations around the world turn to UKG because of the way we simplify this core responsibility and free up managers to focus on taking care of their people.”