July 12, 2023
Chris Todd, CEO of UKG
Rebooting Merger of Equals Into a Multinational Market Maker, Chris Todd – UKG
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UKG is a global provider of HR, payroll, and workforce management solutions and one of the largest private software companies in the world. Famous for its workplace culture, this award-winning company is consistently ranked as one of the best places to work by its 15,000 employees, who serve over 75,000 organizations with 120 currencies in 160 countries.
Following a massive merger of two equals, UKG’s new CEO, Chris Todd, has rebooted the company into a $3B (headed to $4B) global leader, developing the next generation of HCM (Human Capital Management) cloud solutions. Chris joined me for an episode of The Reboot Chronicles, to give us some powerful insights and lessons, from a first time CEO, on how he brought two companies together to drive this multinational company and industry forward.
A Company is Born – One Plus One Equals $3 Billion
UKG was formed by merging two well established software companies, Kronos and Ultimate Software. The merger was official on April 1st, 2020 and two companies of around 6,000 people each had to come together virtually. One might think the Covid-19 pandemic made things impossible, but Chris does not look at it that way. “Ironically, I think Covid helped us, right?”
Amongst bringing the two companies together virtually, company culture remained at the forefront of Chris and other company leaders’ minds. “It very difficult, very challenging, lot of extra work, lot of time. But we’re really proud of, of what we’ve done and how we were able to do it. And…both Kronos and Ultimate were companies that were very serious about their culture. Both companies historically been all over great place to work lists… but we knew that the new culture for UKG would be different”
The Power of Culture – People Platform Passion
Post merger, the UKG team worked on building a new company culture first and foremost, knowing it would be the backbone of their company.
“We worked behind the scenes; we worked more on culture and branding and employee messaging than anything else. Because we knew that we needed to land that in the beginning and we landed on our purpose as people, as our tagline.” These early efforts were successful and crucial to comforting and then empowering employees during a time of so much uncertainty. The employees were coming from amazing companies that they loved without knowing how the new company, UKG, would fair in comparison. Of course, the geopolitical state of the globe at the time was not comforting either.
“[UKG is] gonna be different than what they had before, but similarly amazing, and worth continuing to invest in, in terms of their time and careers and energy and enthusiasm and everything that goes with that.”
Walking The Talk – Employee Value
Chris Todd further brought to light why employees are so happy at UKG when he explained how he, as the CEO values them. “We’re a software company and our intellectual property and the brains of the outfit actually walks out the door every single night. We wanted to make sure we sent a signal to all the employees that they were important and they were valued and a big part of the UKG story.”
While other industry leaders may question the merit of valuing employee satisfaction so highly, Chris explains it perfectly. “It’s deeply strategic for us to focus on culture, right? It makes us a better place to work. It makes us an employer choice. It encourages people to want to spend their careers with us. At the same time, we fundamentally believe that in a strategic sense, it gives us better insight into the products and services that we’re delivering to our customers all over the world. And that’s part of our promise is that the energy that we put into culture will manifest itself in the products and, and solutions that they purchase from us, and it’ll enable them to be more successful too.”
