District Administration - July/August 2012 - (Page 3)

sponsored web seminar digest From payroll to pensions, manual and honor-based attendance processes have high cost and morale impact Kathy adams Payroll technician Washington County School District, Utah Our problems before we had a workforce management solution included: • We had an all-manual process. • We are overrun with paper time cards. • Anyone working over 20 hours didn’t turn in anything unless they had extra hours or time off. • Very little history was maintained and what existed was not accurate. • Two and a half employees were needed to manage time tracking. • Lack of compliance with FLSA and FMLA. Because of the distance between our locations, we knew that we needed something web based. And because of the legal actions we were facing, it was critical that we have a good audit trail function. How we overcame problems and objections • We got administration buy-in first. • We kept employees notified of all the changes along the way, including a regular newsletter from HR. • We made sure that all employees’ individual accounting of their own time was entered into the system– whether it was on an email or a sticky note. • We identified the processes that needed to be changed –such as clocking in. Long-term employees thought they would hate this, but we found that those who were working their hours loved the clock because they could document their time; while other employees were now having to use their leave time to cover absences. • We identified the processes we couldn’t change - such as paying non-salaried employees on a 12-month basis. We use Flexitime to track hours for non-instructional salaried employees and we integrate with Kelly to track teacher absences. So we have that cross check so a teacher cannot be gone without us knowing. The benefits we have seen are how much more accurate leave is and how much easier to track and manage. Now we can tell what an employee’s leave is for. Over the three years we’ve had the system, we have seen leave increases of 11 percent, 62 percent and 32 percent, respectively. In addition to managing the process and increasing accuracy, we also eliminated 90 percent of our paper costs, saving about $9,000 per year, and reduced payroll processing from two weeks to two days per period, eliminating a half-time position. report or document manually. This presents some major challenges. • 45 percent say self reporting is the norm in their districts. • 15 percent track manually within a spreadsheet. • 6 percent track via email There was no real standardized approach to how K12 is handling absences. A study by Forrester showed that 12 percent of employees overstate their time worked by two hours each month. So even if you have an accurate way to count time, you can’t validate that the information you have is accurate. One of our respondents said that they take the issue of tracking absences very seriously because it can impact morale of other employees who see people cheating the system and not getting caught. In fact, it was stated in our study that the best system in place to track employee time reporting abuses was other employees. Interestingly, we saw much more robust functionality when it came to integrating leave balances with payroll (82 percent) and with absences being integrated into payroll (74 percent). What is the management cost of these issues? Seventy-nine percent of respondents said that the responsibility for tracking and enforcing attendance policy fell on the direct supervisor and 62 percent reported that up to 2 hours per week were spent by supervisors handling attendance tracking. This is higher than what we found in the government or higher education sectors To view this web seminar in its entirety, please go to bit.ly/DA0524. http://www.bit.ly/DA0524 http://www.bit.ly/DA0524

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of District Administration - July/August 2012

District Administration - July/August 2012
Contents
From the Editor
Letters
News Update
District Profile
Administrator Profile
Research Center
Professional Opinion
Supervisor's Opinion
Crisis Response
Going Mobile
Gaming Gains Respect
A Running Start for ELLs
Paul Vallas for Sale
Unsung Heroes
CIO News
Avoiding the Pitfalls of Virtual Schooling
Noteworthy Books
New Products
Product Focus
Problem Solution

District Administration - July/August 2012