Last week a few members of our Silver Cloud team got to attend the Dayforce Community Connect for Q3 of 2024. For those who haven’t been, Dayforce’s Community Connect days are their way of spending time with the community, learning from them, sharing insights and future roadmaps and giving us all some time to network and get to know one another. Although it’s a community event, we got to both attend and share what we found out with you.
So here are some of the highlights from Dayforce Community Connect September 2024:
Recent innovations from Dayforce
Dayforce hosted a full session about recent innovations, what they’ll be releasing soon and what they’re working on in the background. While we won’t get into every piece of that now, we will cover a few of the interesting concepts covered. After all, the Dayforce team has been hard at work and there would be far too much to cover.
So let’s talk about the recent innovations they are most excited about!
First up, Co-Pilot and intelligent search. The introduction of natural language processing and the AI assistant, Co-Pilot are great additions to the Dayforce package.
Next is People Analytics Measures – these Measures can be used to not just track KPIs but to proactively interact with them. It uses machine learning-enhanced prediction to offer you nudges and let you know when certain thresholds are being met. And you can keep data cards with these Measures on your homepage so you don’t have to constantly be hunting down or creating reports.
Finally, we have Dayforce Learning. It’s a unified learning and development experience that enables a wide range of learning, empowering organisations to become skills-based businesses. It includes access to over 90,000 content titles and comes with compliance support.
Earned wage access and Dayforce Wallet
Earned wage access (EWA) was a hot topic at the Dayforce Community Connect event with multiple roundtables across different industries taking place. In each roundtable, the attendees discussed what they thought about EWA, whether they’d used on-demand pay before and what they felt the barriers to it might be.
The conversation revealed some very interesting questions about the responsibility businesses have toward safeguarding their employees, whether employees should have access to funds they have already earned and whether these arrangements are better than payday loans or if they perpetuate a similar vicious cycle.
One of the really interesting insights was a customer story. They implemented strict guidelines around what was possible to draw from and saw major success without the vicious cycle drawbacks. Rather than allow draw down from the full pay cheque, employees could only access their pay for any extra shifts they picked up. That meant that employees couldn’t get themselves into a debt situation, but that they did have ways of managing unexpected costs. It also increased the number of employees picking up extra shifts, mitigating the costs of hiring additional workforce.
While that solution may not work for everyone, it does go to show that a creative application of these new tools can really have a positive impact on a team.
Read more: Everything you need to know about Earned Wage Access
State of the industry insights – all about skills
In another session, a rep from PWC shared the findings from their Hopes & Fears survey. There were 56 000 respondents, 2000 of whom were from the UK. This session was a conversation based on the findings in the survey where the attendees could all input.
To start, we talked about becoming a skill-based organisation and the benefits and drawback of doing so. Many of the organisations in the room suggested that it was a direction they are interested in, but aren’t sure how best to balance that with other types of aptitude. As one person put it, “You can’t necessarily upskill behaviours and attitudes.”
There was also a general consensus that monitoring skills is a critical part of switching to a skills-based structure. Different attendees shared the importance of using monitoring to identify and fill both existing skills gaps and potential future gaps. Monitoring, paired with a skill-building technology like an LMS (Learning Management System), can also create greater internal proficiency and develop learning pathways to nurture talent. Most agreed that this requires greater thought than simply bringing in a new piece of tech.
The conversation then moved, inevitably, to AI. Compared to the 2023 survey, positivity toward AI has risen with 57% of respondents expecting AI to improve efficiency and 46% anticipating it lessening their workload. But with the advancing of AI comes lots of questions about how it will be used in the workplace, especially in businesses with the widest range of generations. These questions included:
- What is the best way to introduce generative AI into the business?
- As more people use it, could that stunt skills growth?
- Will there be an influx of people who can only perform the role with the help of AI?
- How can you improve recruitment to counter any negative impacts of AI usage?
- Does this further support the need for skills monitoring and the balance with soft skills and attitude?
While we didn’t come to any firm answers about these questions, it seemed that simply asking them really got the cogs whirring for most. That part was wrapped up by the agreement that, regardless of how much your team and business use AI, strong governance is the key to it being both effective and secure.
Overall, this quarter’s Dayforce Community Connect was a really interesting way to learn more about what’s happening at Dayforce, connect with Dayforce users (and those who want to be Dayforce users) and to spend the day learning. All of us who attended had a great time and are really looking forward to next quarter’s event!
Are you curious about Dayforce and how it can help make your work life better? Get in touch and talk to our Dayforce experts!
