Douglas County School District Gains Accuracy and Accountability with Kronos Workforce Central
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. Until recently, 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.
Today, Workforce Timekeeper™, the time and labor application of the Workforce Central® suite, tracks the work activities of more than 2,000 employees at 70 sites. The Kronos system interacts with the district’s Oracle human resources system, facilitating information-sharing. With research under way to fully quantify the savings, Douglas County can already enumerate benefits, including employee enthusiasm for a system that improves payroll accuracy and standardizes the awarding of comp time and overtime, ensuring fair compensation throughout the district.
"The Kronos system tightens everything up, because every employee swipes," said Payroll Manager Julie Woirhaye. "It's that easy."
Automating to manage growth
The expectation of continued growth in the district drove Woirhaye and Raylean Washburn, programmer/analyst, to exchange Douglas County’s cumbersome, 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 on-site 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.
Meanwhile, the human resources department was processing a constant 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. "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 labor data, based on its functional capabilities, its ability to integrate with the Oracle system used by the human resources 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 ensures 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 hang on a display board once drivers arrive with their vehicles. Besides helping to control buddy punching, 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, which 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. It was only after the Kronos implementation that Douglas County saw the level of non-compliance that the school district has 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, with the managers and school principals who signed timesheets 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 the automated, integrated Kronos solution would facilitate accurate, timely, and FLSA-compliant pay.
From acceptance to 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, while the knowledge of who worked which hours at what sites often resided only with the individual employee. Time-tracking now 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 ensures that they get paid accurately.
For Woirhaye, an attraction of the Kronos solution had been the minimal training hourly workers needed in order to use it because the system is so 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.
Valerie Locke, ITS support for the school district, created a training lab to provide a basic course prior to the system’s launch. Woirhaye and the payroll staff matched each secretary 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, 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."
|