Kronos Workforce Ready (which begins at $6 per employee per month) is solid human resources (HR) management software that's good for small to midsize businesses (SMBs). Kronos Workforce Ready is affordable and offers a lot of functionality, but its vast set of features can make it complex for some SMBs to use. Competitor BambooHR offers about the same functionality as Kronos Workforce Ready, but BambooHR's features are easier to use, which garners it our Editors' Choice award in our HR software review roundup.
This is no accident as Kronos is not only a long-time HR tech vendor but it also specializes in selling cloud-based people management services to much larger enterprises. The company heavily leaned on that expertise when building its product. While the end result is a highly configurable service, Kronos' own description of "SMB" being a moniker that can apply to companies with up to 2,500 people shows that what it calls a small business, many others might call an enterprise.
Configurability is the keyword here. System administrator-level users can adapt Kronos Workforce Ready's basic workflows and templates to conform to how their company runs the people side of its business. In that respect, it's similar to other highly configurable cloud-based services such as APS OnLine (Visit Site at APS) and SAP SuccessFactors, which also target smaller businesses. The amount of heavy lifting needed to implement and manage Kronos Workforce Ready, however, could make for rough going for small businesses that don't have a dedicated HR manager or staff.
Kronos Workforce Ready includes analytics, an applicant tracking (AT) system, core HR, hiring and onboarding, payroll, performance management (PM) and reviews, recordkeeping, scheduling, time and attendance, time-off management, and a companion mobile application. It has distinct user levels for system admins, managers, and employees. All users log onto the same online portal, with their access restricted by job responsibility. Employees see their personnel files, pay stubs, and benefits, and can use the service to review schedules and request time off, change personal information and benefits, and more. Managers can use it to access their own personnel files and to manage team members or direct reports, including for hiring, approving time off, and conducting performance reviews. HR executives or other system admin-level users have access to the service's top-level dashboard, which they can use to set up policies, rules, shortcuts, templates, and workflows.
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Revamped User Interface
The user interface (UI) features a home screen that has a main navigation menu across the top. Clicking a tab opens a list of sub-apps down the left-hand side, many of which link to additional subfunctions. The rest of the home screen is devoted to My Dashboard, a bulletin board-style display that can be set up to show the tabs with which the user interacts most often, a to-do list, and quick links. One thing the dashboard doesn't have is a news feed, a feature that competitors such as Namely and Sage Business Cloud People (Get Price Quote at Software Advice) have added as a handy communication channel inside the service.
Click through to any of Kronos Workforce Ready's main tabs and the pages look like spreadsheets, with tools at the top for sorting or filtering data. Setting up these spreadsheets to execute actions is more challenging than in some other core HR tech; those hide the databases these systems work off of under a more user-friendly design. To its credit, Kronos Workforce Ready has a Search function at the top right-hand side of every page that makes it easy to look up FAQs in case you get lost. The software also includes a unique alternative to a Back function that its rivals don't have. Switch from working in one tab to another (for example, "Current Time Sheets" to "Manage Payroll") and the activity you just left stays open in the bottom half of the screen, highlighted in light grey. Click on any part of the grey and you return to the previous screen.
Because Kronos Workforce Ready has a built-in AT system, admins can add a new employee through it or do so manually. Use Recruitment > Applicants to access the AT system to see a list of people who have applied for a position and their status in the hiring process (Applicant Account Created, Interview, etc). Click the Resume icon for a candidate to see additional information about them. If a prospect makes it through the interview process, then admins or managers can use the drop-down menu at the top right-hand side to click on "Hire This Applicant."
New employees can also be manually added by using My Employees > Employee Maintenance > Hire to bring up an online template. In this template, you input the new person's name, contact information, base compensation, tax information, and other information. Click "Add Employee" and the new hire is automatically added to the company's personnel database, accessible from My Company > Employee Directory or My Company > Organization Chart. Both the directory and organization chart can be sorted any number of ways and data can be exported to eight file formats including PDF, XML, and XLS.
Performance reviews can be configured to match a company's review process, including 360-degree, peer reviews, and self-reviews. The system allows for custom creation of employee evaluation forms and can store such documentation securely online. Kronos Workforce Ready's goal-tracking capabilities are designed to influence the performance management process, but some might find them a bit basic compared to highly customizable platforms, such as Namely. System admin-level users can set up processes and guidelines by going to Company Settings > HR Setup > Performance Review, and then choosing from categories such as Competencies, Core Values, or Goals to create review rules. Come review season, a manager can use My Employees > Employee HR Maintenance > Performance Reviews to add or schedule a review.
In the past year, Kronos has added Google G Suite ($12 Per User Per Month at Google Workspace) integration, which lets you incorporate calendars, documents, spreadsheets, and even maps into your HR management. Additionally, the company added a feature called Kronos Workforce Ready Payroll Services, which lets you turn your payroll data into real-time reporting in order to stay up to date. The tool features a self-service option for employees and admins, which lets users submit direct deposits and view pay statements, without needing added permissions.
Benefits Administration
Kronos includes significant benefits administration (BA) and management features within Kronos Workforce Ready as well as integrations with third-party benefits providers through add-ons in the Kronos Workforce Ready Marketplace app store. In the main desktop UI and in the Kronos mobile apps, benefits admins can track compliance reporting and benefits enrollment across basic health plans and insurance, including dental, disability, life, medical, and vision.
The major Kronos UI update back in 2015 also came with usability and reporting enhancements for benefits management through increased automation in benefits program design and configuration, along with expanded benefits reporting. The self-service aspect of the platform is lacking when it comes to the somewhat complicated benefits selection process for employees compared to Editors' Choice Zenefits (Get Price Quote at Software Advice) . But Kronos Workforce Ready does include compensation management and an offboarding process for terminating benefits. BA functionality in Kronos Workforce Ready doesn't come with a lot of bells and whistles, and it isn't as customizable when it comes to variables rates and custom benefits. But it's also not lacking any core features in the category.
Shift Scheduling
Kronos Workforce Ready also features a scheduling solution that is available as an add-on or as a standalone app. For $5 per employee per month, your team will gain access to a clean and easy-to-comprehend scheduling dashboard that can be configured according to your company's specific requirements. Whether you're coordinating shifts by location, staff members, or shift type, you'll be able to drag and drop elements into the appropriate places or automate your scheduling by using templates and auto-schedule features. Whenever you're looking at a specific schedule, you'll be able to see employees listed along the left-hand side of the screen, alongside the number of hours for which they're booked. If you don't need that level of employee insight, then you can also adjust this widget to show other data (e.g., budget allocation).
What's great about Kronos Workforce Ready's scheduling app is that the "Schedule Settings" feature lets you make wholesale changes to individual calendars without interrupting the rest of the schedules in your software. This means you can have multiple schedules running at once with different rules. You can update things such as cycle length, lunch hour, number of shifts, time zone—all without upending everything else in the system. You'll also notice that Kronos Workforce Ready provides different views for different length events. For example, one-day events don't need to be located on the same calendar as year-long schedules, so this makes data comprehension much easier than it is on tools that lump everything into one overview dashboard.
Creating templates is also as easy as pie. You simply build a specific template and set it to "Multiple" for as long as the schedule requires, and then you drag and drop in names where they belong. This is a much easier approach than with other tools that require you to pull in schedule templates from Microsoft Excel.
Kronos Workforce Ready is missing a few important elements that come standard on tools such as Editors' Choice scheduling software Deputy (Visit Site at Deputy) . For example, you can't try out the software for free before making a buying decision in Kronos Workforce Ready. And you won't get free 24/7 support. Also, the tool doesn't offer a news feed or chat functionality that would let employees converse with one another.
Mobile App and Analytics
Kronos Workforce Ready's Android and iOS apps have some (but not all) functions of the website. For employees, this includes the ability to request time off, check schedules or time-off balances, and read to-do lists or company messages. Manager-level users can use the apps to edit time sheets, approve time-off requests, and look at a limited number of reports.
Kronos sells the Kronos Workforce Ready platform directly to companies with 100 to 2,500 employees. Prices begin at $6 per employee per month based on such things as apps used, number of employees, and level of service package. Those prices put it in the middle of the pack of core HR software for SMBs, which is cheaper than BambooHR and SAP SuccessFactors but more expensive than WebHR (Visit Site at WebHR) and Zenefits Z2. The Kronos Workforce Ready Marketplace app store sells add-on apps for benefits enrollment, background checks, and other HR services. Admin-level users can also find it by using Our Company > Marketplace; any apps they already use will show up in the dashboard. Finally, for companies with more than 2,500 employees, Kronos sells a separate HR management service called "Workforce Central" that's built on different software architecture and, thus, is not part of this review.
Through its partnership with analytic.li, Kronos recently beefed up its analytics suite to let you turn this trove of data across all desktop and mobile apps into actionable insights. Users can access financial data, predictive modeling, incentive performance, demographic data broken down on the micro level (by department, by group, etc.), and even recruitiment statistics. This is a nice addition for a software bundle that's already offering a do-it-all approach to HR management.
Startups and small businesses without a dedicated HR staff might be overwhelmed by the mountain of options and the amount of configuration needed to get Kronos Workforce Ready up and running. But stick with it and you'll get core HR with an AT system, payroll, and other critical HR apps baked in, at an affordable price.
Kronos Workforce Ready is highly configurable, affordable human resources (HR) software that's aimed at small to midsize businesses (SMBS). The functionality it offers makes it robust, but it can also can make the software more complex to use than other HR tools.
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