Introduction
TIM: I want to welcome everyone and thank you for joining us today. We have a great presentation for you on Kronos Workforce productivity that was put together by our very own Cindie Terzo.
Cindie is a Senior Kronos Consultant with Surety Systems. She has over 20 years of payroll and HR experience. In addition, she has 13 years of working with Kronos specifically.
If you have any questions during the webinar please feel free to submit those via the chat feature; at the end, we’ll have Cindie answer a few of those for us. At this time I’ll turn it over to Cindie.
Presentation
CINDIE: Thank you Tim. Welcome everybody and thank you for taking time out today to join us for this webinar to discuss some of the items within Kronos to help you manage your workforce.
Company leaders would agree that their most valuable asset is their staff, however, it is also their greatest liability, which requires effective workforce management. By using Kronos effective you can control your liability.
Labor costs account for a substantial part of your company’s budget. By minimizing your payroll errors and overpayments you can help control unnecessary payments. These items can be controlled by using Kronos effectively with tools that can be built, for instance, Genies, HyperFinds, labor allocations…items to help you help your manager manage the employee’s timecards to minimize errors and to, again, reduce your labor costs.
By properly using Kronos with those right tools you’re also going to help improve your employees’ workforce productivity. The less time they have to look within Kronos to find errors or to find employees in different situations, they’ll have more time to be more productive in their Workforce for the items they were hired to do, instead of using all their time in Kronos looking for items. We can create Genies to help identify errors within Kronos.
By building Kronos effectively and creating new tools you’re reducing unnecessary transactions and you can automate some of the processes, again, optimizing your manager’s time, ensuring your compliance is in line with your company’s pay policies and practices, and that your managers’ access is correct. By doing so you’ll have a cost reduction by reducing the time spent in Kronos and achieving optimal utilization of your employees.
So how will we do those things and what are the items we’re talking about? Again, I said Genies, labor allocations, some of the items we can create for you to help use Kronos more effectively and again for your managers to use Kronos more efficiently. So, some of those things that we discussed… we’re going to look at how we create those things and some of the items that can be added to Kronos to help your managers.
So, first of, all let’s just look at and consider the amount of transactions that your managers are tasked with daily when reviewing timecards. There are punch edits that are possibly being managed or created, they may have to add work rule transfers, there could be a meal break that an employee needs cancelled, it could be an issue with pay codes and adding a pay code to an employee’s timesheet, an employee could simply have missed a punch for the day and a manager needs to go in and add a punch, schedules, maintaining schedules properly, so that employees time is charged accordingly, and also labor allocations—you may have an employee within your company that their labor is split across two or three different cost centers or departments. If this is a consistent thing you can create a labor allocation, add it to the employee’s people record, and those wages or hours would be split based off those labor allocations, therefore reducing the need to adjust their time daily or weekly or however often that transaction takes place.
In regards to labor allocations, as I stated, you would create the labor allocation within your setup area, you would create the numerous cost entries, so obviously if it’s two you could add just two lines of department transfers; again, once you save it, you would add it to the employee’s record, so that the allocation would simply just take place anytime they punch in, or if they’re salaried and schedule is built, it would automatically allocate those hours based off the labor allocation you’ve created. A labor allocation can be created and it can have a generic name; it can be applied to one employee or multiple employees—as many as needed. You could create numerous labor allocations and apply them to numerous employees. Again, there’s a lot of things that can be done with labor allocations, in my opinion, it’s not used often within Kronos and it’s a great feature.
With your pay rules and your work rules, your company obviously, as you grow, or as the time since you’ve had your Kronos installed, some of your company practices and policies may have changed, so of course you’ve added or removed some new pay rules or work rules. It’s very important that you make sure your manager’s access is kept current so that all your company’s practices are being met. If you don’t remove those pay rules from your manager’s profiles they can continue to use those on their timesheets or in their schedules, therefore creating pay that’s not necessary or even overpayment. So again, with the pay rules and the work rules, it’s very important that you are keeping them current in your users’ profiles.
Also, as we’ve discussed with your work rules and your pay rules, your pay codes… your pay codes have increased or maybe even decreased since your Kronos was installed. Once you add a pay code or you remove a pay code it’s very important that you go into the pay code profiles and update those pay code profiles to add or remove those codes so that the managers have correct information when they’re adding codes to an employee’s timecard, and they’re using the correct pay code. So again, you’re eliminating the chance that they’re using an incorrect pay code by keeping their profiles correct and current.
With Genies, and I know all of you know what a Genie is—some companies have numerous Genies, some companies just have a few. If you have old Genies you would again just want to remove those from any profiles so that it’s not a long list to choose from, if you add new Genies you would need to add those Genies to a manager’s profile so that they have the correct display when they’re logging into Kronos. You can create Genies for really anything that you would need—to identify maybe overpayments, or to identify an employee that’s receiving pay that they’re not eligible for, or vacation hours. Whatever really you want to do with Genies, for the most part you can, not only that you can also create HyperFinds to identify even a smaller population and assign those HyperFinds to the Genie so that when the manager logs in it immediate displays those employees that you’re looking for in that particular Genie. For instance, let’s just say that you have an employee who is not eligible for shift pay, but a manager has gone to their timesheet, done a work rule transfer and inadvertently added the wrong work rule and that work rule includes shift pay. So the employee is going to get shift pay whether they’re eligible or not. You could create a Genie to identify employees that are not eligible for shift but are receiving shift. You could quickly pull that up, you could see the error right there, go to the timesheet and make the adjustment as necessary. So Genies are very helpful if they’re built correctly and the managers know how to use them. And again, it has to be in their profile, so keep that in mind, that you would want to make sure their profiles were being managed also.
So again by creating Genies you’re being proactive and instead of passing incorrect times to your payroll department and overpaying your employees, which would require a paycheck to maybe be voided, or the next pay period you’re deducting wages from an employee, which nobody likes but you have to be compliant, so we do that by being proactive and making sure our managers are using the correct work rules and have the right tools to identify those errors.
When a new manager is hired within your company or if there’s new pay policies and practices throughout your company you definitely want to make sure you’re training your employees so that they’re equipped to be effective when managing your employee’s time cards and they’re aware of the new processes. So, for the most part, new managers are hired, they’re giving a login, and they’re basically just told, “Okay, here’s your time sheets, go in there and enter punches or go in there and deduct something or add those transfers. If they don’t know how to use Kronos or how to identify the correct transfers or the correct pay codes, they’re obviously going to make mistakes on their employees’ time sheets. Sometimes to the employee’s advantage—they’re getting more wages—or, they’re not being paid correctly. Either way, we definitely want to make sure we’re paying our employees correctly and minimizing the adjustments that your payroll department has to make. So by training your employees, you’re equipping them to effectively manage those timecards and make sure everybody’s paid correctly. And it also makes your pay period close process much smoother.
And to the point of creating Genies and training your employees—if they know what they’re doing and they have the right tools at hand they’re going to be much more productive, they’re going to be able to jump into Kronos, feel much more comfortable with what they’re doing, and know that they’re making the correct choices. Therefore they can jump in, they can get the pay period close done, they can make the adjustments on the timesheet as necessary and get out of Kronos, feel confident with what they’ve done, and also ensure that the employees are getting paid correctly. So they’re much more productive for what they were hired to do, instead of managing and playing with Kronos all day, and I hear that a lot—that I spend so much time in Kronos, I just wish it would do this, I just wish it would do that… well it will, we just have to build it to make it do that and make sure you’re trained to know how to find those things and identify those issues.
So that’s really the end of this presentation at this time, and hopefully, I’ve given you some valuable information, and at this time if there are any questions I would love to answer some of those.
Q&A
TIM: Thanks for that presentation Cindie; we’ve got a few good questions here for you, we’ve got just a little bit more time, so we’ll take a couple of these.
First one is in regards to labor allocation—is there a limit on the amount of accounts that can be used in a labor allocation?
CINDIE: No, there’s not and I’ve seen it numerous times where a manager is split across four different departments slash call centers, and again if a manager’s not trained correctly they’re going into a time sheet or a schedule and they’re making those changes daily or however often they happen, and the chance of human error is going to occur. So what you can do with labor allocation is absolutely, you could use as many as necessary; the main thing with labor allocation is that the wages have to equal 100%. You’ll receive an error if you try to save it without it being 100%. So again, to your point, absolutely, you can make it as many as you want, the main goal is that it equals 100% of the wages.
TIM: Okay, here’s one about Genies. Can they be customized for the users?
CINDIE: Yes, they can. You may have a manager who only has employees with shift pay, you can create a specific Genie for that manager and assign it only to her display profile, if you want custom data within a Genie as long as long as those skills are available within the Kronos set up, you could create a Genie based off a manager’s wishes, so yes. You can customize your Genies and as I stated earlier, customize even a HyperFind to assign to that Genie so that the population that is returned on those Genies is much smaller.
TIM: Alright, we’ve got time for one more. This one is about pay code profiles. In terms of pay code profiles, should both the pay code edit profile and the pay code view profile be updated to remove the old codes?
CINDIE: The only profile that would be updated would be the edit profile; if it is to remove a pay code, you would want to remove it from the edit profile. If you remove it from the view profile and an employee or a manager ran a report for a period outside of that new code, if they don’t have that old code in their view, the report would return without that pay code. So a manager may think, “Oh my, they didn’t get that pay six weeks ago when they should have.” But they probably in fact did, but if it’s been removed from their view they’re not going to see it. Also, to that point, if a new pay code is added you would want to update the edit profile so that the manager has access to it, and also on the view profile, you would need to add that to their view profile, so that when they’re running a report they now see that new pay code also.
TIM: Thanks for that; if you have a question that wasn’t answered, we’ll get Cindie to answer those after the presentation and we’ll respond back to you directly on those. If you’d like to access this presentation or any of the information on the slides at a later date, you can visit the Surety website and that will be available there.
I want to thank everyone again for joining us. Cindie, appreciate your time, and I hope everyone has a great day.
