This week, Carol Ladd sat down and spoke to Brant Steen, about his role in the project as well as what Time-Tracking items look like in Workday. Here’s what he had to say.

Carol: Could you tell us a bit about yourself, your position at the college, and your role in our Workday transition?

Brant: I'm the VP for technology at Bucks. I'm also the project lead. In addition, we had a couple people who had needed to duck out of the project here and there over the course of the last year, and one of those people was heading up the Time-Tracking portion of the system. So rather than delay the project, I said I'd step in and try to get Time-Tracking up and running, which was something that I knew very little about going into the whole process. That's how I got involved in the Time-Tracking portion of things for this project.

Carol: Who will have to enter time in Workday once we launch?

Brant: Currently, there are a number of different time-tracking solutions that we use. Some people are using Time Clock Plus, some are using Web Time Entry (an old WebAdvisor component), some are just putting time on paper, and then having that signed off by their area, and others have an admin who puts time on sheets for the whole area and then that gets signed by the supervisor.

One answer to this question is that now we will just have two ways of tracking time. People who use a punch clock with their thumbprints, in most cases, will continue to do that. Everybody else will use Workday. That includes the people who are approving and managing the time for the people using punch clocks. They will also now use Workday to submit that time and edit that time, if they need to. There will just be those two solutions and most of the campus will be using Workday.

Right now, exempt salaried employees don't enter time into any systems. They will continue to be exception-based and not enter time. Therefore, if they're taking a day off, they’ll enter that into Workday, but they don't need to go and put their hours in that they worked each week, that's assumed and they just get their regular salary.

Carol: Could you tell us more about what time tracking features are in Workday and how we'll be able to access them?

Brant: There are really two types of time. There's an audience of people who do what's called in and out time, which means that you would punch in at a particular point of time, like 8am. Then you would punch out, in this example, at 4pm. So, you actually put those times into the system. The majority of that type of time entry will happen from Time Clock Plus. Again, people who are going to punch in the clocks are Security Guards and Physical Plant. They're not really going to see their workflows change and would continue to use the clock. All that time will go into Workday.

The other type of time is called hours only, and this is largely Classified staff who will enter just how many hours they worked on a given day. They will go in the system and say, “I worked seven and a half hours in a day” or, “I worked four hours in a day” or whatever it is. This group are the ones who are going to be more hands on putting their time into the system, but it’s very simple. For most, the easiest way to access this in Workday is they'll have what is called a worklet (icon) called Time and they'll click on it. Then, they'll pick whatever week they are entering their time for, and they’ll be presented with a calendar week view of a Sunday to a Saturday. They can click on a day, and it'll bring up a dialog box and, for most people, they’d say, “I worked seven and a half hours.” That's all they really do and they hit OK. After they put in all their hours for the week, they have to hit the Save button and then it goes to the manager for approval. It's really straightforward. If they wanted to, they can enter their time for the entire week, all at once, as opposed to going one day at a time.

There's also a quick add feature, which I imagine will become very popular, where someone just can go through each day and say how many hours they worked that day. They hit OK, and that just put seven and a half hours on each day. Then at the end of the week, or the end the two weeks for the pay period, they just hit submit. Once they click submit, it gives a summary view. The next step is to be approved by the manager and it goes into the manager’s inbox. They would then see the summary view. That's how most people entering time are going to interact with this.

Carol: Now, entering time is going to be new for a good deal of our employees, can you tell us why that would be beneficial for us to start doing?

Brant: So it is going to be new for some folks and not new for others. Right now on campus, areas are doing things a bit differently, so depending on your area, you might fill out a timesheet, you might not, or your area admin might do it for you. There's a variety of ways that time entry is happening right now. If you don't know the next piece of the process, it ends up going to Payroll in some fashion, where it then has to be entered into other systems. Right now, there's a lot of duplication of effort there.

Therefore, from here out, everyone who needs to report time will need to enter time into Workday in order to be paid. One of the big benefits to this is that the hours go straight from what you're doing right to your manager for approval digitally, and then right to Payroll. There's no extra entry in the middle, no one's having to submit paper copies and then enter that into systems and do a lot of manual work there. It’s going to be very streamlined and you know that what you're putting in directly results in what you get in your paycheck.

Some regulatory items come into play. From what I understand, things like the ACA, and maybe some other regulations as well, require what's called Positive Time Entry for staff who need to enter time. What this means is that person is responsible for going in and saying, I worked, x-number of hours. It's like a kind of a contract, you're saying that I did this and you sign off on that, saying that it's true and honest. As I understand it, that's part of these regulatory guidelines, so this will get us up to speed with that. There are a few benefits here, and it will be a change for some staff, especially in areas that are used to having, for example, the area admin taking care of all their hours for them, but as you can see, it's very straightforward. It's not a difficult thing to do and it also completes all those links in the chain like I talked about.

Carol: If we have any questions on Time-Tracking, where can we turn to?

Brant: Initially, when we go live with Workday, there's going to be a kind of HelpDesk, although I don't mean our HelpDesk with IT. Essentially, we're going to have an open Zoom line, most likely, with some staff sitting in triaging questions that come in. It's going to be a way for people to reach out, initially, with questions or concerns they have. With any major launch like this, we expect there to be some issues/questions/concerns. What we're going to be doing those first few weeks is just working around the clock to try to reconcile and fix all those problems that come in and make sure that everything's running smoothly. Therefore, those first few weeks we will have some points of contact that everyone is going to know about.

Once that initial launch time is over, and we just go into sort of normal support/maintenance mode, there's going to be what's called a Time-Tracking Administrator. They will become the main point of contact for questions like this, both for people who are entering time and for people who are having trouble approving time or editing time. Most likely, that person is going to be Vickie Ashton, who was working on many of the time systems for us before Workday. I'm working on handing off this knowledge to her that we've developed over time. She'll be then up to speed to move forward and go into our normal maintenance mode for the system.

We're also drawing up a number of job aids, especially for people who have the more complicated time entry and time management. So, there'll be some documentation on hand that they can refer to, if needed. If we run into situations where we didn't cover something or something wasn't covered properly in those job aids, we'll add them and get a new one circulated so we have kind of a multi-tiered plan to support, depending on exactly what it is you need.