Kronos Helps "the City that Works" Get the Job Done
The City of Stamford, dubbed "the city that works," is a coastal community 25 miles to the northeast of New York City. Home to approximately 117,000 citizens, Stamford is an economically sound community that continues to pursue economic development initiatives to attract and retain leading companies and corporations.
It's fitting that a city that once sought to improve its human resources systems turned to Kronos for help. Implementing the Workforce Timekeeper™ application — the core component within Kronos' leading Workforce Central® suite — helped the City of Stamford meet its strategic objectives and enabled it to realize some pretty impressive benefits too. For fostering rapid acceptance of new technology in a diverse employee population, Kronos presented the City of Stamford with a Best Practices Award. Each year Kronos presents these awards to organizations that achieve excellence in the application of Kronos technology.
Challenges faced
Peter Lucia, the City of Stamford's senior management analyst, describes the challenges his city once faced. "We used to process all employees' time and attendance information with a mostly manual approach," he says. "We collected labor data using paper timesheets, and then we processed this information with a number of partially automated systems."
Lucia explains the problems of such an approach. "It took a long time for our managers to collect, review, and process employee data," he says. "The paper timesheets sometimes led to errors, and as a result, we wasted time, effort, and money trying to maintain this data." Even worse, their old workforce management system didn't provide real-time insight into critical labor information, such as overtime, and this led to budget overruns and overspending. The City of Stamford decided it was time for a change.
Planning for success
Before it selected a solution, the City of Stamford put a lot of thought into how it should work. "We completed a five-year plan to implement a three-pronged HR, payroll, and workforce management system," Lucia remembers. "We knew Kronos would play a critical role because it provided the critical time and attendance information our HR and payroll systems needed."
Better still, implementing Workforce Timekeeper would get rid of the city's manual workforce management processes and all the problems that went along with them. "When we saw the full range of benefits Workforce Timekeeper could provide, we decided it was the solution for us," says Lucia.
Automating critical processes leads to positive results
Now, instead of submitting time and attendance data or other information on paper timecards, City of Stamford employees enter this same data using one of Kronos' data collection methods. "Most employees use a Kronos data collection terminal," says Lucia, explaining that they simply swipe a bar-coded ID badge through the terminal. "But we also use the Workforce TeleTime® application, which lets employees who travel use the phone to enter labor-related data or even access their schedules or other information."
Then, when it's time to process all of this data for payroll, Workforce Timekeeper's powerful pay rules engine calculates and applies the city's specific pay rules - for fast, easy, and accurate payroll results. "It's completely automatic," notes Lucia. "This helped us re-deploy HR and payroll employees for increased productivity. As a result, we saved time, effort, and money."
This claim is easily supported. "As a result of implementing Workforce Timekeeper, we reduced the amount of overpayment and other incidences related to payroll errors by 50 percent," Lucia says. "Eliminating unnecessary overpayment alone has created savings of more than $100,000."
That's not all. "We have eliminated paper timecards altogether," he says. This policy has been particularly effective with the City of Stamford's substitute teachers. "Before we had Workforce Timekeeper, we required substitutes to complete paper timesheets, which were then approved by the principal. Then they were submitted to payroll, batched, counted, and hand-entered into our payroll system for payment." Having substitutes use Kronos data collection terminals instead of paper forms helped the City of Stamford eliminate nearly 14,000 timecards each year.
Automating time and attendance processes for other employees helped the City of Stamford get rid of even more paper forms. "We estimate that 100,000 documents no longer need to be processed. When you factor in processing time and productivity savings, this saves us an additional $25,000 annually," says Lucia.
Rolling out a new system
But before it could realize these results, the City of Stamford first had to overcome some skepticism. "Getting buy-in from 2,750 employees was definitely one of the biggest hurdles we had to overcome," recalls Lucia. The City of Stamford promoted acceptance for the system by building support from the very top. "The mayor and his cabinet all began using the Kronos solution very early in the process, including swiping at the terminals," he says. "And they were all very verbal about their unwavering support for the system."
This effort paid off. "As we completed each implementation phase, we often found that the managers who were most opposed to the system prior to the implementation became our most outspoken proponents once they started using it," says Lucia.
A comprehensive solution
Lucia says that Workforce Timekeeper helped his city realize other powerful benefits too. "One of the most significant is that all labor and union contracts are now applied uniformly," he explains. "All of our contracts are programmed into Workforce Timekeeper. Automating the calculation of these policies helps us comply with state, federal, and union regulations." In fact, Workforce Timekeeper automated all of the City of Stamford's pay codes as well as other pay and leave policies. "Our employees are more comfortable because they know everyone is being treated fairly and equitably," Lucia comments.
In addition, the City of Stamford has fostered employee self-service programs, especially in regard to employee leave management. "We also implemented Kronos' Workforce Accruals® application," he says, referring to the powerful leave management application that is part of the Workforce Central suite.
Lucia goes on to describe the downsides of the way they used to track leave time. "Employees used to maintain their own leave or other benefit balances, and department managers frequently had to run reports to calculate balances," he says. Now with Workforce Accruals, City of Stamford employees can access their accrual balances 24/7. "This has been a major improvement because it has empowered our employees for improved morale and freed managers' time from having to respond to these time-consuming requests. Overall, feedback has been extremely positive."
The road ahead
As the City of Stamford continues use of its Kronos system, it is looking to create additional efficiencies and benefits. "We'd like our employees to expand their use of certain products like Workforce TeleTime," says Lucia. "We're also interested in upgrading to the Kronos 4500 Touch ID™ badge terminals, which would enable employees to perform additional functions right at the terminal. And we're looking to expand our accruals tracking process to our certified teaching staff, which will help us streamline processes further and realize even more improvements," he says.
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