Ceridian Looks to Transform Human Resources to Human Relations with RelatedMatters Acquisition

Creating and sustaining trust inside of the organization remains one of the greatest challenges to improving employee satisfaction and productivity if not delivering higher-value business outcomes. Building more trust-based relationships is also something that most HR functions are unable to impact with their current HR processes and technologies.

The announcement therefore that Ceridian is integrating the intellectual property and mobile-device app from RelatedMatters into its Dayforce HCM software is welcomed news that the HR software and service provider community is addressing the struggle of HR functions to truly impact organizational effectiveness. TeamRelate came to Ceridian through the February 2015 Ceridian acquisition of RelatedMatters.

Since launching RelatedMatters in 2014, more than 100 clients have adopted the TeamRelate mobility app to “develop thriving relationships amongst employees” and “build better cultures”. At a recent analyst briefing in San Francisco, I had the chance to take a 44 question assessment on the application and participate in a “circle” of peers and Ceridian executives to evaluate the app and assess how it helps build human relations through understanding personality characteristics, seeing peer comparisons, and receiving communication coaching that is part of the environment.

Even in this initial exposure it was also instructive to see the real-time status updates around an individual’s stress, emotion, energy, activity and commentary that can be input by the user around what he or she is doing or working on to help people better relate to each other in the workplace.

At the event Ceridian said that they are actively using TeamRelate internally to facilitate executive employee relationships, better build project teams, and even improve service delivery professional and customer pairings. What was even more exciting was that Ceridian plans to include the technology and capabilities in Dayforce, such as the recruiting module, starting with the next release this summer.

Building RelatedMatters into Dayforce SaaS is a great step forward as it allows HCM software to do more than administer human resources processes but actually allow HR functions to support greater effectiveness in human relations in the enterprise.

Ceridian’s existing compliance capabilities and commitments in regulatory areas such as data privacy and personally identifiable information (PII) coupled with its LifeWorks employee assistance program (EAP) service make it the only likely HCM SaaS player to be able to pull off this psychologically-driven organizational effectiveness approach. Its ability to restrict such potentially sensitive data as well as offer social workers to pick up the phone to help workers deal with issues like stress is an attractive proposition for enterprise clients. This commitment to the newest self-service technologies coupled with comprehensive and compelling service support should help it drive results with customers.