Large Public School District Minimizes FLSA Compliance Risk, Controls Labor Costs with Kronos^®

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The third-largest public school district in Colorado, Douglas County has grown steadily in the past two decades and now serves nearly 50,000 students. The district has opened at least one brand new school each year since 1990.

Every month the district processes paychecks for 2,100 full-time, hourly employees — as well as for teachers, administrators, and others. In the past four payroll employees spent several days each pay period collecting, reviewing, inputting, double-checking, and often correcting the information jotted on timesheets by the district’s hourly workers.

But not anymore. Today Workforce Timekeeper^™, the time and attendance application of the Workforce Central^® suite, tracks the work activities of more than 2,000 employees at 70 sites. From the beginning Douglas County could enumerate the benefits it saw: payroll accuracy. Standardized awarding of comp time and overtime. Fair compensation throughout the district. And employee enthusiasm for the new system.

“The Kronos system tightens everything up because every employee swipes,” said Payroll Manager Julie Woirhaye. “It’s that easy.”

Automation helps save money, manage growth

The expectation of continued growth in the district drove Woirhaye and Raylean Washburn, programmer/analyst, to exchange Douglas County’s manual, timesheet-based batch pay system for a Kronos automated workforce management solution.

“We were buried under mountains of paper,” said Washburn. Employees logged their hours, signed their timesheets, and passed the timesheets to their onsite managers for signature and submission to payroll. Errors such as a missing timesheet or signature or illegible hours required a payroll staff member to contact the school site. These productivity-killing, manual processes weighed everyone down.

And the HR department was no better off. It was constantly processing a stream of employee terminations and re-hires, individual pay rate changes, and other data necessary to generate timely, correct timesheets and paychecks. Invariably, this process led to payroll errors and inflated labor costs. But now Douglas County’s Kronos solution maintains accurate, high-quality information. And this has helped the district slash costs. “We believe that Kronos has helped eliminate errors and save over $138,000 last year,” said Washburn.

Douglas County chose Workforce Timekeeper to automate time and attendance data based on its functional capabilities, its ability to integrate with the Oracle system used by the HR department, and “the friendliness of the Kronos system,” said Woirhaye.

Washburn worked with a Kronos services professional to set up the implementation. “Any reporting or adjustments we need to do now, we do ourselves,” she said. “We use Kronos as a starting point and try to be as self-sufficient as possible.”

Employee accountability helps ensure compliance

Douglas County has used the Kronos system’s flexibility to tailor data collection to the way different departments work. School sites have Kronos data collection terminals. District bus drivers use Kronos’ 4500 Touch ID^™ biometric terminals in combination with ID cards that drivers hang on a display board once they arrive with their vehicles. Besides helping to control buddy punching and labor costs, the system helps a dispatcher track the fleet. Douglas County also plans to expand its data collection options by adding employee self-service. This will allow many employees to use the Internet to enter and view their information.

“Because employees track their own time, we have an accurate picture of the hours they worked. And this helps us stay in compliance with FLSA and other regulations,” said Washburn.

While compliance had been a back-burner issue for Douglas County, Washburn and Woirhaye knew that automation would improve compliance by consistently enforcing pay policies. It was only after the Kronos implementation that Douglas County saw the level of noncompliance that the school district had experienced.

Besides being time-consuming and error-prone, the old system lacked a way for employees to provide a verifiable and useful accounting of their time and activities. The pay system was rife with long-standing compliance concerns. Case in point: Managers and school principals who signed timesheets were often not fully aware of employees’ actual work activities, the district’s time and pay policies, or FLSA regulations.

By coincidence, a news-making FLSA compliance audit in a nearby school district accelerated Douglas County’s switch to the Kronos system. The district’s administration was comforted to know that its Kronos solution would facilitate consistent, FLSA-compliant pay through the centralized administration of pay policies.

Easy-to-own system leads to employee enthusiasm

The district’s improved payroll accuracy and compliance reflect more than the efficiency of automation. The improvements also reflect a new culture of accountability that the Kronos solution has brought to Douglas County. Previously, policies and procedures knowledge resided in the payroll office. And the knowledge of who worked which hours at what sites often resided only with the individual employee. Now time-tracking rests directly in employees’ hands — and employees appreciate it.

“At first people were resistant,” said Woirhaye. “But now people like it.” Employees know that Kronos helps ensure that they get paid accurately and that accurate records are kept.

For Woirhaye, an attraction of the Kronos solution was that it was easy to own. Hourly workers needed minimal training since the system is user-friendly. Still, the challenge remained to train dozens of school secretaries for a critical new role: Each week, a site-based secretary uses a computer to review and, if necessary, correct the employee swipes at her site.

The district created a training lab to provide a basic course prior to the system’s launch. Each secretary was matched with a member of the payroll staff for ongoing, one-on-one support. Payroll staff attended training sessions so that the secretaries could meet their payroll contacts face-to-face.

“I think it’s all about accountability. For one thing, employee swipes provide accurate data,” Woirhaye said. “And because the secretaries at the sites are authorized to edit employees’ time and the principal will sign off on it, we no longer have people working unapproved hours.

“Someone has to track your time,” she concludes. “And I think it should be you. The terminals are placed by the doors where most people come in. I’m not required to swipe, but I do, to keep track of my time.”