Slide 1 (Introduction)
Kevin Fitzgerald: Welcome to the presentation on Time, Attendance and Leave. My name is Kevin Fitzgerald and with me is Lyndi Zavy. We are going to be going over some details of the Time, Attendance and Leave project. About how we are going to implement a system that hourly people will use to log hours and that everyone will use to check their leave balances and track all of those balances. We also understand that this project is a big impact on everyone because we are changing from a monthly to a biweekly pay cycle. So Lyndi Zavy, her job is to make sure she understands all the impacts that are going to be occurring during the course of this project, and to research ways to help employees get through that. So, let’s get on with the presentation
Slide 2 (Agenda)
Lyndi Zavy:
We have three goals for today: We are going to review the Time, Attendance and Leave project and tell you a little bit about the project itself; we are going to discuss the impacts of the project- how it impacts your pay, how you log hours, leave, and request time; and also help you understand the resources and support available to assist employees through this transition from monthly to biweekly pay.
Slide 3 (Major Impacts)
Kevin Fitzgerald:
On May 31, 2015, all OUHSC and OUHSC-based Tulsa employees will transition from a monthly pay cycle to a biweekly pay cycle. We will also begin using the TAL system, it stands for Time, Attendance and Leave, but we just call it TAL. Everyone will use this to track hours if they are hourly, everyone will use it to track leave taken and balances. Employees can use it to request leave instead of doing the paper form or whatever process you do now, you’ll be able to request leave electronically through the system, and the entire process of routing timesheets for approval will happen electronically through the system.
Slide 4 (Reasons for TAL Implementation)
There are three primary reasons for implementing a Time, Attendance and Leave system and biweekly pay. The first reason is that monthly payroll is challenging for administration and for recruitment. To run a monthly payroll cycle is very challenging. In essence, we tell the system that employees will be here the entire month, until we tell it otherwise using the time sheet from the prior month. It is also very difficult to recruit individuals to come work for us when we only pay them once a month, because most of the rest of the world pays us more than once a month. The second reason we are moving to a Time, Attendance and Leave system is that the Affordable Care Act dictates that we offer our part-time employees insurance benefits at a rate that’s in line with how much they work for us. So if we hire an employee working 20 hours a week, but they actually work 32 hours per week, we have to be able to track and report back to the Federal Government that they actually worked for us 32 hours a week, and that we offered them insurance benefits at a cost at that 32 hours per week rate. If we don’t get this right, if we don’t track and report this information appropriately, we can be fined. And that’s not a fine per employee that we get it wrong, it is per employee at the University of Oklahoma. And that fine comes out to $24 million. So that’s reason number two, and 24 million. Reason number three is that the State of Oklahoma moved to biweekly pay in January of 2013. As higher education, we got a temporary exception, but they didn’t tell us exactly how temporary, and when it would expire, and how much time we would have to prepare. So in order to get ahead of the game and be ready for that change, we are going ahead and moving on May 31st of 2015.
Slide 5 (Transition to Biweekly Pay)
The last monthly paycheck will be May 29th of 2015, and the first biweekly paycheck will be June 26th of 2015. If you look at the calendar, and you look at the first two weeks listed there in June, they’re in yellow. Everyone will get paid for the two weeks in yellow down on June 26th, which has a yellow box around it. The next two weeks are in light blue, and you can see that the pay day for that is July 10th, which is in light blue, and then you can follow the colors all the way through. Everyone is going to get paid for all of the time they work, but since we are not going to run the payroll in advance anymore (we are going to wait for the end of the pay period to run it), there’s a two week delay. Now, that means that pay day will be every other Friday two weeks later. The PPP payroll remains mid-month and is unchanged.
And, if you are trying to get a basic feel for what your biweekly check is going to be, you could take your monthly take home and multiply that by 12 and then divide it by 26. That’s going to be an average of how much each check is going to look like. Now because two checks per year are a little different, it’s an average. Twenty four times per year it’s going to be a little less than that, and twice a year it is going to be more than that.
Slide 6 (Transition to Biweekly Pay)
We recognize that getting a monthly pay check on May the 29th and getting a biweekly pay check on June the 26th causes a difference in what you are used to bringing home at the end of the month. In order to help you through this gap, or this difference, you are allowed to convert up to 80 hours of leave and of that 80 hours up to 40 can be from your Extended Sick Leave account. If you are an hourly employee who accrues comp time, that comp time can be converted into funds. But that check will be deposited on June the 12th so that you can make it through that difference. Now one thing on this check is that you will not have any University-sponsored benefits come out of it. Regular taxes will apply but your medical, your dental, your vision, retirement, those kinds of things will not come out of this check.
Slide 7 (Leave Conversion Details)
As Lyndi mentioned, if you decide to convert leave to get through this gap, it will be paid out June 12, 2015. It is going to have taxes and any garnishments taken out of it, but the University deductions for paying for things like insurance won’t be taken out of that payment. Now, if you are a half-time employee, or .50 FTE, you can convert up to 40 hours of leave and only up to 20 of it can be from Extended Sick Leave. Nine over twelve and ten over twelve faculty can only convert up to 40 hours of ESL, because they don’t have PTO.
The good news is that the University provided three days of Administrative Leave at the holidays. Normally, you have to use three days of your own PTO to get through those three days during the holiday break, but the University gave everyone three extra days of Administrative Leave so that you wouldn’t have to use three days of yours. Save this PTO for the conversion.
Slide 8 (Leave Conversion Details)
Now, on that leave conversion, all benefits- eligible employees will need to complete a form to select that leave conversion. You’ll have to tell us, do you want to convert leave, yes or no? That form was sent on February 2nd it came from the Provost’s office. That form is due no later than May the 4th. The reason for that big gap from when it was sent out to when you have to turn it in is to allow you if you are ready to make that selection, go ahead and turn that in. You’ll turn it into your Payroll Coordinator. But if you want to wait and see what your leave balance is at the end of April to decide, then you can do that as long as you turn it in by May the 4th. That form will ask you who your supervisor is, please put the name of your supervisor. If you’re not sure who to put, put who you would turn in your regular time sheets to or who you might ask off for leave when you need to take it. That way we know in the system who to route your time sheet and your leave request to.
If you are an employee who is funded by a grant, you are eligible to convert leave, it can be funded from the grant unless it specifically prohibits it, but the funding may have to come from a different source so that you can convert that leave.
If you are a Resident, you should contact the Graduate Medical Education office with any questions on how to get through this transition, and also graduate students can contact the Graduate College with questions.
One thing that’s really important to note is that anybody that was hired after January of 2015 will not be able to accrue that full 80 hours of leave to cover the conversion, so we encourage new hires to save as much leave as possible. Remember that you do not have to convert the full 80, it can be whatever you want to within those parameters of no more than 80 hours of leave and no more of which can be 40 from Extended Sick Leave.
Slide 9 (PTO Accrual)
Everyone is going to get the same amount of PTO, or leave, every year that they have been getting so far. It is just that you’re going to get it every two weeks instead of every month. So for instance: if you get 18 hours a month now, that comes out to 216 hours per year. You’re going to be earning it every two weeks and since it is not an even number, the system is going to multiply it and keep up with all the decimal points, so somebody who gets 18 hours a month now is going to get 8.307692 hours every two weeks. When you look in the TAL system to check your balances, it is only going to go out two decimal places so in one month it would be 8.31. You can see that someone who earns 20 hours a month gets 9.230769 hours every two weeks, and see that someone who gets 22 hours a month gets 10.153846 hours every two weeks.
The rules that you can only have up to 336 hours before it begins rolling over to ESL is exactly the same. And right now, when you get to the end of the month the way it works is… the leave you would’ve earned in that month will show up on your pay stub at the end of that month, and the next month they go back and they try to adjust everything for what you might have taken during the last half of that month. Now, all the leave accrual is going to be accurate: Any leave that you took in that two week period will show up at the end of that two weeks on that paycheck, any leave that you earned is going to show up, but it is all going to be delayed two weeks. So the leave you accrue and the leave you take is going to show up on that paycheck two weeks later, but it’s always accurate for that time period.
Slide 10 (PTO Accrual Details)
A few more details about PTO accrual: PTO will be accrued in proportion to hours paid. So let’s look at this first example. If someone had leave without pay, say they accrue 8.31 hours of PTO normally (that’s equivalent to 18 hours a month now), but they had 20 hours of leave without pay in that 80 hour pay cycle. Because they only worked 75% of that time, they would only accrue 75% of that time since they didn’t have leave to take for that other 25% so that comes out to 6.23 hours instead of that full 8.31 hours. In our second example, if we have someone who is a .80 FTE, they would accrue 80% of their PTO. In the example of the 8.31 hours, that comes out to 6.65 hours because it is 80%. Just a reminder, our Staff Handbook states that PTO does not accrue while on Leave Without Pay or on Extended Sick Leave, so essentially the system will just run that calculation for us and do that PTO accrual in proportion to hours paid.
Slide 11 (Biweekly Deduction)
Right now, or at least before we make the transition, all of the deductions to pay for premiums for retirement programs, for parking, for health club- it all comes out once per month. When we transition over to the biweekly pay cycle, some of these are going to come out 24 times per year and some of them are going to come out 26 times per year. The ones on the right side of the screen are 26 times per year: all of your retirement deductions, FSA health, FSA dependent care, long-term care, payroll deductions for contributions like United Way, Campus Campaign, any garnishments or tax levies, any child support or spousal support and any student loan deductions will come out of every check, 26 times per year. The ones on the left side only come out 24 times per year: Medical, dental, vision, employee and spouse long term care, life, supplemental life, dependent life, employee and dependent AD&D, and the parking and the Health Club deductions all come out 24 times per year. Which means twice a year, roughly every six months or so, you will get a check that doesn’t have the deductions from the left side, and that check will end up being a little larger.
Slide 12 (Biweekly Deduction)
So every month has two pay days in a month, but there are two months a year with three pay days in a month. Typically, when we hit a month that has three pay days in a month, you will not have those deductions that Kevin talked about under the 24 deductions per year. However, back when we talked about that leave conversion on June the 12th, remember that we said our University benefits will not come out of that. In order to pay for those premiums that you’ve been getting in terms of benefits all year, we have to take those deductions out of that third check that hits October of 2015. So the first time that we have three pay days in a month, you’ll see that that check will have those deductions taken out. So that means that our first true benefits premium holiday, that check we don’t have those deductions come out, that will happen in April of 2016 and every time after that when we have three pay days in a month, you will not see those deductions come out. A really easy way to remember this is that from June 26th when we go live on biweekly until April of 2016, your checks will be roughly the same amount, provided that you don’t have any leave without pay, overtime, those kinds of things, and then when we hit April 2016, you’ll have a third check that month that is just a little bit larger. Now just remember that any time you have any garnishments, levies, child support, those kinds of things, those will come out of every payment you receive, including that payment on June 12th.
Slide 13 (Biweekly Deduction)
On some people’s W4, they have selected to have extra withholdings. Usually people do this to have a little bit of extra money held out of every check from either the federal or the state so that they don’t end up owing taxes at the end of the year. But those settings are based on the actual pay cycle. So for example, let’s say that you had $100 extra withheld for taxes every month. When we transition over to the biweekly pay cycle, that would become $100 every two weeks. I worked with the project team to try and make sure that everything that had to be changed could be changed automatically for all the employees but that’s actually not legal for us to change your W4. So, if you have extra withholdings specified on your W4, you’re going to need to make that change right after the May 2015 payroll is run so that you can adjust it from how much you want withheld every month to how much you want withheld every two weeks. You can go to self-service and look at your paystub and you can see how much is being withheld extra every month to find out what that is, and we are also going to be sending out some messages to everyone who has extra withholdings to remind them to do this. You don’t necessarily want to do this before the May payroll is run, because then you would be withholding less every month, you want to do it right between the transition from a monthly payroll cycle to a biweekly payroll cycle. And again, we are going to remind everyone about this and send an email out to everyone who has extra withholdings to remind them.
Slide 14 (Resources and Support)
Alright, now I get to talk about my favorite part. We know that this move from a monthly pay to a biweekly pay changes a lot about how you budget, how you plan, and how your money comes in. So we want to make sure that we have all of the resources and support available to you to help you through this transition. Let’s talk about a few of those options. Our first is our Employee Assistance Program. We work with Magellan to provide our employees with support 24 hours a day, seven days a week through the 800-number listed on the slide. Most people don’t know that we actually have a package with them that provides legal and financial support through a group called CLC. So what that means is as a benefits-eligible employee, you can call 24 hours a day, seven days a week, call Magellan and say, ‘my employer is changing my pay periods and I don’t know how to budget for it, can you help?’ They will spend about 10 minutes on the phone with you setting up an appointment, they’ll find a time that works for you and they will send you an email with that person’s name and phone number for you to call at the time that you agree works for you. When you call them you’ll need to have some basic information like your income, your monthly bills, and any support that you think you might need—come with those questions ready for that 30-minute phone call. When you get on the phone with the individual from the Employee Assistance Program, they’ll help walk you through ways to prepare for the biweekly transition, and ways that you can budget and plan accordingly for when you get paid every other week instead of once a month. They are tremendously helpful and great to work with, I really can’t encourage you enough to give them a call. And, just for being benefits-eligible, you can call up to three times per year.
Slide 15 (Resources and Support)
Something else that you can do to help you get through the transition of going from a monthly to biweekly pay cycle is talking to your credit union or your bank about your loans. Quite a few of these institutions will defer a payment for say a car loan to the end of the loan so that you don’t have to make that payment in July, making it a little easier to get through that transition. Utility companies, other organizations like that will help you by moving the due date, so that if you spread the due dates for all your bills across the month instead of having them all at the beginning of the month, that also can make it a lot easier. At ouhsc.edu/taltalk, we have a document called “Letter to the Creditors” and what it is, is a document that says ‘To Whom It May Concern: this employee’s pay cycles are being changed, please work with them to change their due dates or do something about their loan to help get them through this transition.’ It doesn’t work all the time, in fact we got this letter from the State of Oklahoma, it is based on their version that they used when they converted from a monthly to a biweekly pay cycle, and they said it is very helpful for employees working with creditors to get their due dates changed. You probably have to show an ID card or a pay stub to show that you really are an employee, but we encourage you to go and print off that letter, or multiple copies of it, and talk with your creditors about changing your due dates. If you have any other questions about this, you can send email to TAL-Questions@ouhsc.edu and we will answer all of the questions for you.
Slide 16 (Leave)
Let’s talk a little bit about how your leave will work in the new system. So in the new system, so as of June 1st, when you work a holiday you will earn straight time for working on that holiday and you will bank the holiday. What that means is when you work on the holiday, it moves that time into a bank. And if you see the graphic below you’ll see how that cascades through when you ask for leave. So when you go into the TAL system and you request to take leave, you’ll just select ‘leave taken’ on your leave request. What it will do is it will look and say has this employee ever worked on a holiday? If so, it will burn that banked holiday first. Then it will look and see, is this employee hourly, and do they accrue comp time instead of overtime and do they have a balance? If so, it will cascade through that comp time next. Then it will point to PTO. If you are salaried employee who has never worked a holiday, chances are it is just going to start at PTO. But the system is going to run through this for us, and make it a lot easier to use that banked holiday and that comp time. It will not allow negative leave. What it will do is it will cascade through all of these available leaves. If you have a personal illness of five days or more, it will let you use Extended Sick Leave if you have a balance, and then it will roll into what’s called Leave Without Pay. So again, it will cascade through all of these different types of leave, and then move to Leave without Pay once you have exhausted all eligible types of leave.
Slide 17 (Overtime)
Alright, let’s talk a little bit about overtime. Hourly employees will be paid overtime for working over 40 hours between Sunday and Saturday. The official work week in the TAL system is Sunday-Saturday. So everyone will get overtime if they are an hourly employee and they work more than 40 hours, unless they have elected comp time. Employees can request, and if their supervisor approves, they can earn comp time instead of overtime, but overtime is the default. And, as of January 1, 2015, only hours worked count for the purposes of overtime. So, leave and holiday hours don’t count. If you were to have a holiday on Monday that was 8 hours, and then worked the rest of that week but worked two extra hours on Friday, that’s not overtime. If you worked more than 40 hours in the last four days of that week, then all those hours over 40 would be overtime, but the 8 hours on Monday don’t count towards figuring out if you’ve got overtime.
Slide 18 (TAL System)
Let’s talk a little bit about our Time, Attendance and Leave system. We’ll have a landing page at tal.ouhsc.edu where you will go to access the Time, Attendance and Leave system. If you are an hourly employee, it will give you the option to clock in using the web clock. Remember, as Kevin said, the system will track hours worked for all hourly employees, so when you go on if you’re an hourly employee you’ll see a web clock where you can clock in in the morning, clock out for lunch, clock back in after lunch and out at the end of the day. We will show you how that looks here in a minute, but basically if you are hourly that’s your first stop in the morning. You’ll clock in there and use that to log your hours unless you use a wall clock and we will talk about that in a minute as well.
Now, everyone can use TAL to access leave requests, their leave balances, and route time sheets for approval to your supervisor and to your payroll coordinator. All of those functions, the leave requests, the balances, and the timesheets are available to you off campus so you can do that from home if you need to put in a leave request or review your timesheet you can do that, and supervisors and payroll coordinators can access those time sheets and leave requests from home. But that web clock, the ability to clock in and clock out for the day, that’s locked down to our network meaning you can’t access that from off campus. On that website, tal.ouhsc.edu, you’ll also be able to access frequently asked questions and training and resource materials to help you navigate through the system.
Slide 19 (TAL System)
Let’s look at some screen captures from the system. Now, these pictures actually came from a test system, when we go live the colors will change to crimson and cream and we will have an OUHSC logo in there but just to give you an example of how it looks and feels, the top box shows where someone’s going to log in. You’ll use your normal OUHSC log-in, the same one you used today to log into your computer to log into the TAL system. The bottom screen shows an example of what the web clock looks like. If you were to log in to the web clock you would punch the in button, that will start the clock rolling. Twenty seconds later it is going to automatically log you out because if you log back in to it again, it is going to show you the out button. Within that 20 seconds if you were pick one of the other options like the Time Off Request so that you could fill out a leave slip, it would leave you in the system.
Slide 20 (TAL System)
This next slide is what your balance information will look like, so you’ll see in the accrual balances you can see that Lyndi Zavy has earned 8.31 hours of PTO. I haven’t taken any leave year to date, so my current balance is 8.31. If I had a leave request in the float, it would show that I had an approved leave balance of however many hours I had requested, and then you will see that I have the potential to earn another 227.69 hours for the rest of the year. Then if we look below, I am actually going to start you at the bottom where it says submit time off request. If you look at the from and to dates, that’s where I would select the time I wanted to take off, so say I wanted to take off from September the 8th through September the 12th. I would say leave taken, and then submit. On the next screen where I would submit that leave request, it would give me the functionality to put in notes to my manger and anything like that, and then I would hit submit and it would route it to my supervisor. My supervisor will get an email and a notification in the Time, Attendance and Leave system that they have a leave request pending approval. Then if you go back up to Time Off Requests, you will see that I submitted a regular leave request from September 8th through the 12th for total of 5 days or 40 hours and that that was for vacation, I put a note in there that said test and my manager messaged back and said that I needed a better reason to take off but they went ahead and approved it. You can see that in the green where it says review status approved. The process status says pending because it hasn’t gone into my timesheet yet, once that goes into my timesheet you would see that that would say processed.
Slide 21 (Time Clocks)
Hourly people that don’t use a computer as a normal part of their job or don’t have access to a computer will be able to use a physical time clock, or what we call a wall clock. This is what one looks like. To clock in and clock out, you will use a OneCard, that’s the ID card that you were issued, it’s got your picture on it and it’s got some numbers on it. You just swipe it across there just like you would a credit card transaction, it’s going to come up with an ‘in’ button and you press in, or if you are clocking out you press out. Something important to keep in mind: If you clock in on a wall clock, you have to clock out on a wall clock. If you clock in on the web clock, you have to clock out on the web clock. The out has to match the in, you can use the two different systems so long as the out matches the in. For instance, you could clock in in the morning on a wall clock and clock out for lunch on that wall clock, come back in the afternoon and clock in on the web clock and then clock out on the web clock. You can use each, as long as the in matches the out. Now, in the event that you can’t find your OneCard or you left it at home, you can actually call up a keypad and type in your HR number. If you don’t know your HR number, you can ask your Payroll Coordinator to get it for you and it is printed on your OneCard. There are typically two numbers on the OneCard and the top one says HR, so as you can see in this screen capture there’s a button in the top right that says Keypad if you pressed that a keypad would appear, you’d key in your HR number and the in and out buttons would appear and you could clock in or out.
Slide 22 (Tracking Hours for ACA)
Now back when we were introducing the reasons why we are implementing a Time, Attendance and Leave System, you’ll remember that we talked about reason number two, the Affordable Care Act and the reporting that we have to do. Part of that is that if you are a salaried employee who works less than .75 FTE, we don’t exactly have to track your hours in terms of in and out with a timestamp like we do for hourly employees, however what we do need to know is how many hours you worked in that day. So any salaried employee who is less than .75 FTE will have what’s called a duration time sheet, and what that does is it will say Monday you worked 8 hours, Tuesday you worked 4 hours, Wednesday you worked 2 hours, and so forth but not with an exact in and out just a total number of hours. If you are a salaried employee who works less than .75 FTE or you supervise employees that are salaried and work less than .75 FTE, we encourage you to work with you Payroll Coordinator to ensure you know how to do this and to get all your questions answered.
Slide 23 (Training)
We will be conducting a lot of training before we go live. We want to make sure that everyone knows exactly what it is they are going to do once we transition into the TAL system. We will be holding hands-on training for Payroll Coordinators starting in April. They will enroll in those classes, come up to our training room and they will be guided through a series of training exercises so that they know exactly what it is to do the Payroll Coordinator functions. We will be conducting some instructor-led sessions for all the Supervisors starting in late April and through May. The employee sessions, showing people how to do a leave request, how they can approve their timesheet, put leave on their timesheet, clock in and out, those instructor-led sessions will start in May. We are also building manuals, job aids, and putting videos together just like this one that will be at the tal.ouhsc.edu website.
Slide 24 (Questions)
That’s actually all we have for today, so we would like to thank you for watching this and for learning more about the Time, Attendance and Leave system. If you still have questions that we haven’t answered in today’s presentation, please send those to TAL-Questions@ouhsc.edu and a member of the project team will answer that for you, and it also helps us build our frequently asked questions section on our website, ouhsc.edu/taltalk. So please let us know what questions you have, but otherwise thank you for your time today.