Modern Workforce Index — Paylocity
Transforming organizational health from intuition to insight. At Paylocity, I co-led UX and product design contributions for the Modern Workforce Index (MWI)—an organizational-health dashboard that blends platform utilization, employee voice, and structural indicators into an explainable score with recommended actions. (Paylocity publicly positions MWI as AI-powered.)
TL;DR
- Challenge: HR leaders had activity metrics but lacked a single, trusted organizational-health signal teams could understand and act on.
- What we built: Modern Workforce Index—an explainable, role-aware dashboard that surfaces utilization, sentiment, and organizational-health indicators with recommended next steps. Cross-functional with data science and research.
- Impact (org-level): Adopted as a platform-level credibility pillar. Public Paylocity case studies report retention and engagement improvements at some clients (e.g., Revere Plastics’ >70% turnover reduction). These outcomes reflect the broader Paylocity solution set—not individual attribution.
User Research Insights
- Explainability over sophistication: Leaders needed to see why scores changed, not just what changed.
- Actionability over analysis: From “here’s your score” to “here’s what to do next.”
- Trust over complexity: Transparent, comprehensible calculations beat black-box impressions.
Methodology & Explainability
I focused on making the score transparent and actionable: contribution visuals show drivers, trend context, and comparisons; managers receive recommended moves tied to drivers. The work emphasized clarity over black-box complexity and aligned with enterprise accessibility standards.
- Contribution visualization: driver impact, trend deltas, and peer benchmarks with drill-downs.
- Decision design: recommended actions connected to specific drivers and departments.
- Suite coherence: partnered with the Citrus design system team to apply and evolve patterns across the suite so org-health UI remained consistent.
Organization-Level Outcomes (examples)
Outcomes include reduced turnover and higher engagement in customer environments; these reflect the broader platform and client programs. For example:
- Revere Plastics: public case studies cite more than 70% turnover reduction through initiatives using Paylocity tools (engagement, communications, learning, etc.).
- Platform context: Paylocity materials describe MWI as an AI-driven capability that pairs scoring with recommended actions and benchmarking—used as a credibility and adoption pillar within the suite.
Outcomes are organization-level; I do not claim individual causality.
Team & Collaboration
As Senior UX Manager, I partnered with product, engineering, data science, and research to align feasibility, viability, and desirability. My remit centered on explainability, decision design, and suite-level coherence. I contributed to planning artifacts and adoption enablement in coordination with go-to-market teams.
Selected Artifacts
- Score contribution visual designs and micro-copy guidelines (explainability).
- Role-aware dashboard layouts and drill-down patterns (actionability).
- Cross-suite pattern applications with Citrus tokens and components (coherence).