Setting Up Your Workplace: Known Places and Geofences

Geofencing may involve "fences", but it doesn't have to be limiting when you know how to use it. Senior Product Manager, Jaclyn Aiken, joins us today to discuss how UKG Pro WFM customers can apply and adapt geofencing to meet their unique workplace needs. Whether your employees clock into a grocery store or a warehouse, geofencing helps increase accountability and offers useful analytics. 

You can read more about Geofencing here.

Transcript

Savannah Guenthner: Hi everyone. Today I'm sitting down with Jaclyn Aiken. Jaclyn is a Senior Product Manager with UKG and for this episode, she's our resident expert on geofencing in the UKG Pro WFM solution.

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Savannah: Thanks for being here today, Jaclyn.

Jaclyn Aiken: Thanks. I'm glad to be here.

Savannah: Can you tell me a little bit about your time and experience at UKG so far?

Jaclyn: Sure. I've been with UKG for about 5 years now, entirely working with our mobile apps. So, before we had the UKG Pro app and the UKG Dimensions app, I've been working closely on the product to bring those together into the UKG Pro app. I've worked very closely with our geofencing functionality, even being the main Product manager bringing in our QR code geofencing, which I'm sure we'll talk more about. So, I've been working with our geofencing functionality and rules within WFM for the last five years.

Savannah: I bet that's kept you busy. I was working on an article about geofencing recently. I was excited to see the QR code additions. I can't wait to dig into that. But just in case everyone's not familiar with the concept, let's start with the basics. What is Geofencing?

Jaclyn: So geofencing is basically setting up some kind of virtual boundary around a location. So, for GPS geofencing, it's like imagine drawing an invisible fence on a map. So, if your employee isn't within that boundary, the system would recognize that and then reject that punch. So in WFM, that often means that the employee could only clock in or clock out if they're within whatever boundary that's set up for them and for that job.

Savannah: OK, gotcha. So, it just adds the like accountability aspect of like, yes, this person is actually at work physically. And I imagine there's some security elements as well.

Jaclyn: Yep, they're where they're supposed to be.

Savannah: What customer industries do you find tend to gravitate towards this feature?

Jaclyn: So most industries that gravitate towards geofencing of any kind really are those that have mobile, distributed, or frontline workers. So, a lot of retail, a lot of healthcare, a lot of manufacturing customers use our geofencing functionality. And like you said, it adds that accountability.
 They’re supposed to be where they punch in, and it improves security and compliance for employees’ employers that want to make sure that they're supposed to be where they are when they're starting their day.

Savannah: That makes a lot of sense. I mean, so many of our customers have work schedules and industry standards to contend with that aren't necessarily the same, but they all kind of find fall under this category where geofencing makes sense. So, like what are some of the ways that geofencing can be personalized for their needs — say between a coffee shop versus a construction site, or something like that.

Jaclyn: So a construction site and a coffee shop are really great examples. So, if you think construction sites tend to over time… they're not always in the same place. So maybe an organization has a construction site A, construction site B, and you want to make sure your workers are in the right place when they're clocking in.
 So you might set up a temporary geofence that's based off of GPS, and so you would set up like a lat/long location and make sure that that user and their device is in the place that they're supposed to be.

Whereas, a coffee shop is pretty static, right? It doesn't change location very often, and a lot of them have Wi-Fi connected in those areas. A lot of folks like to go to coffee shops and be able to, you know, log into work and get some things done while they're there. So, if you have a Wi-Fi network set up, you can you can ensure that your employees are connected to the Wi-Fi of your coffee shop before they can punch in. Make sure that they're in the right place because you have to be where the Wi-Fi network is in order to sign into it.

Savannah: OK, yeah, so I saw there’s geofencing available for mobile and web. Do people usually use them in tandem, or do they gravitate towards one more than the other? What context do they make the most sense in?

Jaclyn: So Geofencing really shines on the mobile app because the phone is the device that employees are using all of the time. Almost everyone has a cell phone that can use or use Geofencing. Almost all of them have the hardware to make GPS and QR code scanning seamless. You can identify Wi-Fi networks, you can find a lat/long location, and you can scan a QR code with the camera. So, mobile's really the place where you want to do the majority of your geofencing. Now technically you can use GPS or QR code geofencing from a laptop. But in reality, it's kind of clunky. Most laptops don't have the same level of location accuracy as a cell phone, and if we're being honest, scanning a QR code from the laptop camera isn't exactly smooth. So, while they work, they're not great experiences. And Wi-Fi geofencing is also mobile only. So that's not supported on desktop, it's only supported on mobile.

Savannah: Hmm, so mobile gives you the most options overall, it sounds like.

Jaclyn: Yup. I can add to that mobile offline punch functionality also supports geofencing. Offline punch is a feature that's not available on web. So, if you are using offline punch, the punch will be saved to the employee's device. It'll then be uploaded to the server and once it's done being uploaded to the server, their system can check if the punch matches the geofencing requirements and if it doesn't, it gets flagged for manager review. So those two features will contain them together on mobile.

Savannah: OK, gotcha. This kind of digs, this kind of bounces off of that. So, most of these workers that we're talking about are frontline workers. They're in the field every day or they're in the coffee shop every day. But what about for a managerial role where sometimes they'll be able to work from home to do stock lists, to do site plans – is there a hybrid work option for this?

Jaclyn: So it depends what you set up. So, there's not a great option for folks who are working from home. You'd have to set up a known place specifically for them, and then setting up potentially a separate job so that they're working that from home job from that known place. Otherwise, you might get those folks being able to punch from home on the days that they're not supposed to be working at home. So, I'd be generally wary of setting up known places at folks homes or your employees homes because it kind of defeats the purpose of how geofencing is supposed to bring in that security of punching in the right place.
 We have used geofencing for, for example, for travelling nurses who go to different maybe nursing homes or dialysis centers are great examples of this where they set up QR codes for those specific places and that's been a successful way to geofence for f olks who are traveling to different locations.

Savannah: Oh, that's a really interesting functionality. And so I guess that kinda leads me into what kind of insights can you get out of using geofencing? 

Jaclyn: Yeah, so geofencing, while it can prevent bad punches and buddy punching and things like that, it also creates that data that help leaders understand work patterns in their areas. So, there is a mobile usage data view that that folks can create within WFM and you can see where employees are actually starting their shifts. You can find if your geofencing window is too large or too small. If there's a lot of punches that are being rejected, maybe the radius you've selected, if it's a Geo GPS geofencing, maybe that's too small and you need to widen it a little bit. You can also find out which locations have higher punch exceptions. So, if you're getting a lot of bad punches in and the Wi-Fi isn't working as expected, or you have multiple Wi-Fi networks in the area, maybe that's not working as well.

But also, you can find trends whether or not you have a bunch of folks that are, you know, often arriving late or often arriving early and tying that to their geography. So, if you have a lot of folks in the same area that are all late, maybe you as an admin can figure out why that is, but you can see that trend data in the mobile usage data view.

Savannah: Awesome. So, I'd love to talk about like what does it take to get this set up? Who does a customer go to talk to and set this up? What kind of testing is done to get their geofence to cover the right space? 

Jaclyn: So setting up geofencing is relatively straightforward. You can talk to a partner or someone to set it up for you, but for the most part it's pretty straightforward to set up. So, you first need to set up your known places. That's something within WFM. That's where you'd pick the locations of your business, and then from there you would decide what geofencing methods you'd want to use. So, there's like I said, there's QR code geofencing, there's GPS geofencing, and there's Wi-Fi geofencing. Each of those requires a couple of different configurations. For example, GPS geofencing requires a lat/long location and a radius around that that defines the boundary within which the employee needs to be in order for their punch to work. Wi-Fi requires the Wi-Fi network information that the employee needs to be on in order for their punch to clear and QR code needs the generation of that QR code which can be done directly within the WFM system.

So, once you figure out what setup geofencing method you want to use – and you can use multiple so you can have Wi-Fi or Geo or Wi-Fi or GPS or Wi-Fi and GPS, you can do both of them at the same time. So, once you figure all of that you assign those to the different jobs, and then you can configure the rest of those boundaries and rules that make sense for your business. So, it's really just about deciding where your locations are and how strict you want to be. Once it's set up, you'll see the benefits of that right away.

Savannah: I think I heard you mention that there's a job specific aspect to this as well. You can make it different per role.

Jaclyn: Right, so if you have, you know, multiple locations and in location A you have, let's say you're a grocer and location A is your actual grocery store where you have your cashiers and your and the folks that are working in produce and the deli, you make sure that those jobs can only punch in at that location.
 But then maybe you have a distribution center and so you have manufacturing workers and distributors that are coming and going. Maybe you have a floor manager, those types of jobs you would associate with that location so that those jobs are only able to punch in that location.

Savannah: Thank you so much for your insight. I feel like geofencing is one of those things that comes off as it seems complicated, and then again, it's really simple because there there's so many options, but it's really just so it can be set up for any sort of frontline worker's needs. Which I love to hear. Is there anything else that people with geofencing capabilities can look forward to in the future that you can share?

Jaclyn: I think right now we don't have anything on our roadmap that's coming new with geofencing, but we're always open to more ideas on how our customers are using geofencing and any enhancements that they'd be interested in seeing. Anything like that. I'd love to hear more about and see if it's something that we can bring to our roadmap and bring to customers.

Savannah: What is the best way for a customer to reach out if they have an idea?

Jaclyn: So the best way to reach out is going to the Ideas portal or posting in the UKG Pro Mobile Community group.

Savannah: Amazing. Thank you so much for your time, Jaclyn.

Jaclyn: Yeah, thanks for having me.

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