Workforce Management: Time and Attendance

Welcome to the Institute for Workforce Management! Thank you to everyone for your participation and support. Join us over the next two days for our exciting lineup of speakers with many informative sessions covering the hot topics and trends surrounding the Workforce Management community. Join Amy Niras Community Facilitator and Advisory Board member for Workforce Management at HR.com as she reviews the Institute's accomplishments thus far and highlights what’s in store for the new year. During this short, 15-minute session, Amy will provide an overview of the certification program (have you signed up yet?) and an update on hours accumulated to date. Find out what you have missed, and what is in store for 2013. Throughout this session we will:

• Introduce you to the Advisory Board
• Introduce you to the Institute and the Certification program
• Help you learn how to become an expert in Workforce Management.
• Offer an opportunity for YOU to host an educational session and educate your peers.
• Learn why this Institute is important to the Workforce Management Industry and how you can contribute to its success.

If you are new to the Institute for Workforce Management, this introduction will cover not only our past accomplishments but explain why you should continue to participate and be a part of this community. For those with questions regarding the Institute and its content, this is your chance to share your ideas. Don’t forget, this is a great opportunity to converse with our industry experts. Looking forward to your participation!

The Affordable Care Act (ACA), or ObamaCare for short, is going to change how individual stores are managed for Human Resource, Operations, and Information Technology managers.

Ensuring compliance with the ACA is creating new and challenging endeavors for every role in the organization with the need to track staffing and scheduled hours, ensure proper coverage for the business, determine the right mix of full time and part time staff members, and decide whether it's right to pay or play with shared responsibility.

HR staff will need to adapt to the new reporting requirements to maintain compliance with the act. This includes new reporting processes, maintaining minimal insurance programs, and deciding whether to provide overtime to staff members or to hire new staff.

Operations and store managers will need to ensure that the right staffing mix is available for work, while keeping turnover to a minimum. Improper scheduling or poor management of absences and time-off requests will quickly lead employers into an area where they need to provide health care for staff members that they otherwise would not need to provide.

IT managers will need to provide the toolset to allow HR and operations personnel to perform their jobs with real-time information. Data that lags until payroll is processed might be to late to be actionable. Ensuring effective accommodations for the ACA with require a pro-active approach to labor.

Compliance with ObamaCare is not just an “HR problem”, but the responsibility to notify everyone of their roles will likely fall into a “shared responsibility” with HR, operations, and IT, so it's important that you understand where everyone should fit in.

Make sure everyone in your organization knows their role in the new and changing landscape!

Want enterprise power — at a budget-friendly price?
Kronos® Workforce Ready® is the affordable all-in-one solution for managing HR, payroll, and time & attendance. Now small and medium sized businesses can boost revenues and increase profitability with accurate employee data. This cloud-based system provides real-time employee data to help you make critical business decisions based on facts, not guesswork. And it’s all in one platform, with one employee record and one simple user interface.

Because Workforce Ready is cloud-based, Kronos manages it for you — no more hardware or IT headaches. You can get it up and running in a flash to meet your needs. And you pay monthly only for what you use. And, you can mix-and-match solutions to meet your changing needs and add employees easily as your company grows.

Attend the Workforce Ready online demonstration to see how it can help you:

* Select and onboard the best-fit employees
* Manage employee records, open enrollment, training, and performance
* Maintain compliance and payroll accuracy with timecard management
* Reduce costs by avoiding expensive overtime
* Gain visibility through robust, easy-to-use reporting

And so much more… all in one simplified, cloud-based solution that delivers enterprise power at a budget-friendly price. Seeing is believing, see for yourself what Workforce Ready can do for your business in this live demo! Register for the demo now>>http://solutions.kronos.com/forms/FY-12-OTH-DEM-Workforce-Ready-Pre-SalesDemos-2

Dennis has over 28 years experience implementing, servicing, and consulting in the workforce management industry. With over 25 of those years directly representing solutions for Kronos. Dennis has deep domain knowledge and experience in all Kronos solutions and industries that Kronos serves.

Come join us, HR Executives, VPs, Directors, Managers and Generalists

This session will focus on absence management in the workforce today. Proper absence management is key to helping organizations maintain the highest levels of productivity, minimize the total cost of labor, and ensure compliance with constantly changing Federal and State leave management legislation. There are several absence management best practices that can, and should, be used to help organizations achieve these goals.

Effective absence management starts with the proper calculation and allotment of benefit accruals. Automating this process eliminates the risk of manual calculation errors and provides employees accurate information on available benefit days. To take this a step further, moving the leave request and approval process from manual to electronic makes the leave request process more efficient and provides transparency for employees and managers on available leave days. Managers and employees have the visibility into current account balances, future accruals, historical time taken off, and can receive notifications throughout the approval process.

With growing regulation of Federal and State leave compliance, it is imperative that organizations begin to centralize their case management processes and integrate them with leave management. Tracking FMLA and State Leave cases electronically brings leave management into a centralized location, allowing employees to take the appropriate time off, whether that is FMLA, Vacation, or Sick time. It allows for the tracking of case and period thresholds and makes sure leave time is allocated and used appropriately. Through the use of notifications, managers and administrators can monitor absences in real-time and regain control of the absence management process.

In this session, we will focus on absence management best practices and common tools to help you manage employee leave, increase transparency, and maintain compliance with common leave management policies.

Few industries face as much complexity in payroll administration and accounting as manufacturing.

All payroll administrators are tasked with managing employee information; tracking hours and calculating pay; withholding employee taxes and other statutory payments; ensuring accurate payments; complying with federal, state, and local reporting requirements; and preparing tax documents.

Manufacturing operations hold additional challenges.
• Most manufacturing companies have a geographically dispersed workforce that may alter in size, including multiple business units, locations, and products.
• Pay cycles may vary for different worker groups.
• Workers may spend variable hours working on different jobs at different pay rates, and rates vary (overtime pay, double-time pay, bonus pay, vacation pay, sick pay and commission pay).
• Different assignments over the course of the day may fall under a government contract or collective bargaining agreement, while other assignments do not.
• Managing absences and scheduling labor to meet dynamic production needs present additional challenges.
• Training and certifications must be maintained to ensure continued ISO and other plant certifications.
• Companies need to be able to break down labor costs against specific production tasks.

Ammu Warrier, a recognized expert in managing contingent workers for manufacturing companies, will provide practical advice for managing industrial worker time and expense. The session will cover:
• Work scheduling techniques that provide the workers needed for each production run
• Establishing and enforcing pay and work rules – consistently and accurately – across the organization.
• Curbing the rising rate of litigation over alleged violations of state and federal labor laws
• Building a link between time management and worker safety
• Generating workforce intelligence data that tracks individual worker activity and payroll across multiple lines and roles. These metrics uncover the true cost of product-specific manufacturing labor, payroll accuracy, the root cause of scrap generation, and the cost of reworking.

Everyone’s talking "cloud" these days but what exactly is it and how can it impact your payroll organization? Also, are all clouds created equal and, if not, what should you be looking for when evaluating a time tracking solution for your organization? Are all cloud solutions really safe?

In this webinar, we will demystify the promise of the cloud and arm you with what you need to make tracking employees' time in the cloud simple and safe. We’ll discuss why and how the cloud is impacting business – and your life - today and why it can be an optimal solution for your employee time tracking needs. We’ll share real-life examples of how the cloud is being used to automate time and attendance while transforming payroll organizations from administrative centers to business partners with a new focus on helping the organization drive greater workforce productivity. We’ll also share best practice tips on what to look for in a cloud provider and how to spot cloud “imposters” and get exactly what you need to quickly, easily and safely deploy a cloud-based time tracking system that streamlines your payroll process.

By attending this webinar, you will learn:

•       What the cloud is and how it impacts your organization
•       How an organization can benefit most from a cloud-based time and attendance solution
•       How to use cloud-based time tracking to streamline payroll, increase productivity and drive visibility across your organization
•       How to evaluate cloud-based providers and what key competencies you should look for in an ideal partner for your time tracking needs

The Workforce Management space continues to have tremendous operational and financial opportunities for companies.

The space has gone through numerous operational, iterative, and technical changes over the past decade. Always remaining a constant business requirement is that, every healthcare system, retail chain, manufacturer, casino, and school system with hourly employees uses a, or part of a Workforce Management suite of software and hardware solutions to empower employees, budget hours, schedule employee’s time, enforce pay practices and rules, manage leave and attendance, and track their highest controllable cost, their people. The balance they face is to improve customer service and control and reduce labor costs at the same time, while retaining and improving employee satisfaction and retention, not an easy task.

After many years of personally selling, consulting, and guiding hospitals and retailers as their trusted Workforce Management advisor, you realize that the Workforce Management space is both always changing and constantly growing. In healthcare you will find a different set of Scheduling, Time and Attendance, and Analytics solutions, than in retail, or casinos. Knowing which solution to go with for each vertical is the difference between a three to five year painful road trip with the wrong vendor, or performance and productively improvements across the organization with the right vendor and service partner.

Industry analysts who follow the Workforce Management space estimate that employee wage and benefits range from 25% of operating costs in retail to up to 75% of operating costs in healthcare., According to financial analysts, for every dollar a hospital spends, up to 66 cents goes towards paying for their people.