Webinar Transcript
Jenna: [00:00:00] Hey everybody, thank you so much for joining us today. We're really excited to get this kicked off. I apologize for a little bit of that technical difficulty in the beginning there but hopefully, everybody is in here and ready to go. We're so excited to have you with it. my name is Jenna DeVries.
I'm the director of business development here at improvisations and I'm so excited to welcome everyone to the COVID-19 Kronos Questions Webinar. we're really excited to have some hopefully helpful conversations with you in the midst of kind of a trying time for everyone. we hope that everyone on this call is healthy and hopeful about the future, even in light of all this uncertainty.
There's no doubt it's a difficult time right now for businesses of every size. and for HR leaders in every industry. As Kronos consultants, we wanted to offer this webinar to our clients or to other people, dealing with a workforce right now and to equip you for all the compliance changes coming up.
And specifically, some of the unique Kronos issues, that we're all trying to [00:01:00] navigate right now with our clients. And we thought it would be helpful to talk about this information and. Create a community where people can ask questions and we can support each other. right now. So, before we get started, for those of you who don't know who improv is, I'm going to give you just a little overview about us.
We are a Kronos services partner. We have been in the workforce management space for about 30 years, and we have been a dedicated Kronos partner for 15. And we pride ourselves on creative solutions and on developing long-term relationships with our clients. And I am so excited today to introduce some of our senior-level consultants to you.
Let's see here. I'm going to pull them up.
Here we go. So today on the webinar, and we have three featured Kronos experts who are going to be talking with you about some of the questions we've been getting from our clients. And we have Kevin Wallenhorst, Ken Casey, and Nicole Clark, and they're going to be answering some of the questions we've received and having some real in-depth discussions [00:02:00] about how to handle Covin moving forward with your workforce.
and after they speak with us, we are going to have a live question and answer. Session at the end of the event where you guys can ask any questions you have. we're happy to answer. And I don't know, for those of you who haven't used teams before, there is a panel on the side there where you can leave your questions separate from the chat.
So, there's actually a question panel right there. So, if you have any questions, feel free to put them in that chat and we'll make sure they get answered. as long as time allows at the end.
So, let's get started. We've got a lot to talk about. Want to make sure we use all of our time to the fullest.
And so first of all, I'm going to add Nicole here. Hey Nicole, can you turn your camera on? I can't add you until your camera's on.
Nicole: [00:02:50] Awesome.
Jenna: [00:02:51] All right, so Nicole is going to answer our first question and the question that we received is what is the best way to track hours [00:03:00] worked to cover Covid 19 needs or allocation of staff whose departments are closed?
Specifically, look to track it? It fenders itself, quarantine expenses. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Nicole?
Nicole: [00:03:14] Yeah. So, we started working with, customers, quite a few customers last week, especially, within the healthcare industry. For tracking of nonproductive time, for any self-quarantine or S or isolation that employees were being set on.
so the important thing is, is to set up, a, accrual for it, which Kevin will be covering. but one of the big things that have happened is this. Is doing productive versus nonproductive time. so the nonproductive is, is what most companies are getting into right now. with doing [00:04:00] that quarantine time, we're starting this week to get more and more into companies that are looking at tracking productive time.
because of the new families first I Kronos virus response. Act. and right now that just covers, reimbursements for the, paid emergency sick leave. but I believe that especially with companies such as hospitals or any sort of first responders, they are more and more looking at legislative to cover expenses for other, other groups too.
Jenna: [00:04:39] Awesome. Thank you so much, Nicole. I really appreciate your answer there. all right. We got another question. Are you ready to move on? Anything else you wanted to add, Nicole?
Awesome. All right. We got another question. I'm going to turn it over to Kevin. Kevin, if you wouldn't mind turning your camera on there for us.
Here we go. So, [00:05:00] Kevin, the question that I have for you is, how can we change accruals to track and pay employees for any sick time they have acquired?
Additionally, how do we record an accrual balance without a penalty to the employee? That's another question that we've listened to a lot of our clients about. If you want to talk a little bit about that.
Kevin: [00:05:17] Sure. So we've had a couple of questions on this and there's been a couple of different possible solutions people have had for this.
one is just to track the time off and they want to do it separately so they're putting up a specific pandemic or quarantined code in case anybody has put out on ad. Again, this is mostly for health care is what they've asked for. I've had other ones that have gone ahead and we've added a cascading pay code in there, so they're going to use their same accrual bucket.
they want to go ahead and do the new cascading code, where they're going to put it in as a pandemic code is going to go through their PTO time and then go into a, another bucket of time that potentially is or isn't paid at one that's cascading all the way through. what they were originally starting out with 80 [00:06:00] hours.
now with the new, Assigned act and they have little more details on it. They may be expanding that, but they want it to make sure that they had a couple different buckets to go ahead and expand that into and collect the data, which, which ones are paying for which ones they're not. And then had other ones that are going to try and coordinate this into all three.
They want the, the paid time off. And then they want FMLA. And for some of those smaller companies, there's going to be two different areas that are going to collect, whether it's FMLA for the employee themselves because they're one of, they went ahead and are quarantined, or it's going to be FMLA due to the kids off of school or take care of a sick family member, and that may get paid differently eventually, or BB be reimbursed differently.
So they're going to have three different codes. But then even though they're creating other codes, they'll be able to report them into Kronos and pull reports out of Kronos for each one of those. But they still may be mapping all the FMLA codes together into their current payroll system and their current PTO or vacation time, even though they're calling it something different, they can report on [00:07:00] it in Kronos and it'll still get mapped over to their payroll system as their old vacation codes are actually going all the way through and creating new pay codes in their payroll system.
So. Depending on what you want to do, there's differences that you're going to have to change in your accrual profiles to whether you're letting negatives happen in them. you may have new pay codes that are gonna to from current accrual balances. You may be creating a new accrual bucket altogether, just because after they exhaust their own PTO time, they're still going to get.
Paid for two or three more weeks, whatever you decide. He may want another cruel bucket on there just so you can limit how many days are on that. And then any of these with the new pay codes and what you're going to call it, they all lead up to, you are going to also need to check your interface to make sure these codes are going to go over if you're creating new ones in the, In your payroll system, we need to make sure that the new ones are in there and the mappings correctly, or that the new pay codes and Kronos are mapped to your old ones there. And then we're going [00:08:00] to have to have access. So we've had a couple of different areas with access. One has been transferring of work time, which is potentially your job transfer sets, for just, putting all the hours into work time.
But then also what. Hey, coach, do you want for accrual? Some people are just letting the supervisor just put it in the PTO time and an, all the paperwork for the virus is actually going through payroll or HR. So they're the only ones that are going to have access to the new pay codes to change it over to the pandemic or quarantine pay codes, whatever you'd like.
So there's many different options. It depends on how you guys are gonna want to track it to what level you want to track it too, and if you want it to go all the way through into your payroll system or not. So again, that's a, that's what I have. So I spend the three different things that we've had from three different hospitals and also have tracked it that way.
Talking to one manufacturing client as well. Right now, they're mainly worried about. just the time off if the people are quarantined or home because of, kids at school or somebody else's [00:09:00] family member, they're taken care of. So that's been the big push is to make sure you can track time off. And then the second one has been starting to think about what are you going to do if you have to track time work?
So you call in people to cover for other people that are quarantined off, or if a lot of people end up. Being in the hospital or he ended up shutting down a particular line because he had people off. So those are the kinds of questions that we've been getting so far. If you have any questions on that, I'll go ahead and forward them through Jenna.
Jenna: [00:09:30] Awesome. Thanks so much, Kevin and Ken, we had you. I'm on the tail end of this question. Was there anything you wanted to add to what Kevin just said did great job, Kevin. Thank you.
Ken: [00:09:40] No, I think Kevin covered it pretty well. I think one of the big things is how are you tracking it in the timecards? And that'll kind of give you some better hints about what you want to do with accruals.
If you're setting up a brand new pay code or pay codes for tracking the virus, you may want to set up a separate [00:10:00] accrual for that just so you can easily see kind of year to year to date numbers of people that are off quarantined off, sick off taking care of kids. Whatever the different codes might be.
Jenna: [00:10:14] Awesome. Thank you. That's great. All right, we got another question here for you guys. Now that we've talked about a cruise a little bit, the next question is going back to Nicole. Nicole, if you want to throw your camera back on. So the question for Nicole is, what are some feasible options. Using the biometric fingerprint time clocks that people are considering and cleaning, et cetera.
We've had a lot of discussion going on about how to properly clean farm clocks. I know there have been some issues with climb time clocks being damaged. and just so everybody knows before Nicole addresses this issue, we are going to be sending out a recording of this webinar to everyone afterwards as long as some additional materials and for you guys to review.
So, but go ahead, Nicole.
Nicole: [00:10:56] Okay. I'm going to start with cleaning cause that's the most important [00:11:00] thing. And people are causing lots of damage to their time clocks. so first thing is never spray anything directly on your time clock. to clean the actual time clock, mixer, you use a cell phone. Lint free cloth, and only use glass cleaner.
Nothing with alcohol in it, nothing, no antibacterial wipes or sanitizing gels or that type of stuff. so spray glass cleaner on the soft cloth and then wipe down your time clock with that. first they biofeedback scanners. I met them. Scanners make certain that you only use. Diane diluted a dish soap and do that again on a soft cloth first and then wiped down your scanner.
But, again, you're not using, any hand wipes or anything like that directly on the clock or, on the biometric path.
So, one of the things, a lot of companies are [00:12:00] interested in right now is being able to disable, your biometrics. so you can be able to do this on, through the system on, workforce central workforce dimensions and the I series, any of the clocks attached to those. Now, if you're on workforce ready, you actually have to disable the biometric scanner, w within the time clock itself.
I think Reed's at Kronos is working on it on a secondary solution for workforce ready, that are using the InTouch 10 clocks. But for right now, you have to do it within the time clock for workforce ready, everybody else, then, you can be able to do that right in your device set up. And, but the main thing is to make certain that you collect.
Any punches or any, new biometric scans that were happened, before you go and turn it off. [00:13:00] there we will be, we do have instructions that we can email out to you. and also they have it in the, At covert 19 discussion group too. but it is a fairly simple, there's only, four instructions that you have to go through, to, after you've done the collecting of the punches is turning off the events.
So that if you have your events scheduled frequently, it doesn't happen while you're resetting this. then going through and I'm checking the boxes to download the employee biometric options, in the biometric identification. And then, in your general device settings, I turn off the enable. but biometric.
Then winter, once you're done with that, then you can reinitialize your timeclocks to make certain you are not sending down biometric data. and then, when you. [00:14:00] Well, hopefully this is all over with. you can be able to reenable your biometric data and, the employees will not have to reenroll because the, biometric information is kept in the database.
So that is great news on that item. other ops. Okay. The other options are, we have, companies that are. If you have a lot of employees that are switching to working remotely is to turn on timestamp, for them. that's a relatively easy switch, because you just need to change the time method to timestamp and hourly.
If they're not already set to that, in your function, access profiles. Enable them to have access to the timestamp features. And then also, in their navigator at the, my camp, [00:15:00] my timestamp widget to there, my information workspace.
And then that last option, and it does take a little bit more set up, and interaction depending on if you are on that cloud, Kronos cloud network versus, being on premise is you could. Set up mobile. but you would have to then, purchase licenses and stuff like that to get set up. But, you could have employees punch or fill out time off requests, review their schedule and their time card and everything through, through the mobile option.
Jenna: [00:15:42] Awesome. Nicole, while you're here, we did get one question in about the time clocks and from Lisa here, and she says, how do you make sure that the virus is not spread person to person if you can't use a sanitizing solution?
Nicole: [00:15:55] So one of the main things is I always. [00:16:00] I don't even want to tell you how far back it goes.
But from the first I instill, I did a biometric scanner, at a customer. I always recommended putting a, think of the, of the, wipes hand wipes, at the scanner. they work and dry a lot faster than, I sanitizing gel, does, because then, sometimes the face scanners have a hard time reading.
If somebody has like a lot of lotion on their hands or best or grease or anything like that. So though, so you could still use the wipes. it's just important to make certain, on people's individual hands. and then they just need to make certain it drives before they, before they do their biometric scan.
Jenna: [00:16:49] Awesome. Thanks Nicole. That's great. And thank you Lisa for that question. Make sure you guys are popping your questions up in the chat so we can make sure and we get to them either now or later. alright, we are all going to move on to our [00:17:00] next question. Thanks so much, Nicole. You're great. And we're going to turn it over to Ken again here.
So, Ken, here's your question. What is the best way to temporarily disable our attendance policy in Kronos? We want to make sure exiting points track as normal, but we want to temporarily suspend employees from accruing new points.
Ken: [00:17:21] Yeah, so probably the biggest concern here is we don't want to be generating points or occurrences and penalizing employees if they're off sick or if they're staying home with their kids.
So, depending on how you're tracking it in the time card, really will tell us what the answer is. And attendance. if you're, if you're not doing anything special, no special pay codes are set up for the virus and you're using, I'm sick. During your normal sick pay codes, there's probably a really good chance that those sick pay codes are going to generate points or occurrences.
They're probably going to disqualify people from perfect attendance. So if you're not setting up any new pay [00:18:00] codes, we probably want to change your policies so that while this virus is going on, those sick occurrences or absence occurrences aren't going to generate any points. If you're setting up new pay codes, we would obviously go in and set up some new events around those pay codes so we could track all of the use of those pay codes and see everybody's absences in attendance.
But not be generating points off of it. So there's a number of things to look at. besides sick pay codes, if you're not doing anything special in a timecard, you have people scheduled, but there's no punches in the system. We could be generating absence exceptions, which might be generating points, or if you've got a lost time policy setup and you've got schedules but no punches, it's gonna show missing time.
And that could be generating, Points or occurrences as well. So it really comes down to what, what kind of events are you currently tracking? What are you going to [00:19:00] do moving forward? Are we going to set up some new pay codes, some new comments, some way of tracking in the timecard that attendance then needs to be able to recognize.
And, once we sort that out, probably the thing to do is to duplicate your discipline policy, make a new version of it. turn certain things off, set their points to zero, put in any new events that you want to track and then add that to your policies with a date effective saying, you know, we decided on starting on March 15th, this is what we're going to do.
And then we can recalculate attendance points from that point forward and it will temporarily use our, our virus policy until. The time is that we're back to normal and then we can put your normal policy back into place, effective on that date and every single return back to normal. So it really comes down to how are you going to track in the [00:20:00] timecard going forward and what current events do you have set up that we really need to disable turn off set points to zero, that kind of thing.
The only other thing is it sounds like a lot of this is rolling into FMLA, virus absenteeism, even for taking care of kids that aren't in school or if, daycares are closed down. It sounds like all of that is now falling into FMLA. So, it's definitely needs to be tracked. And, it's also sounding like with this family's first.
Response act that there's possibilities of being reimbursed for expenses. so it sounds like tracking is going to be very, very vital, on a number of regards. So I would imagine a lot of people will end up having pay codes just so they're able to track this accurately.
Jenna: [00:20:52] Awesome. That was great.
Thank you so much, Ken. All right, we've going to move on to our next question. I see some of you are posting questions up [00:21:00] in the chat link. Thank you. I promise we will get to those at the end here. so this question coming up is for Kevin. Kevin, what is the best way to code closures with a specific pay code and not the usual holiday or scheduled time off pay code.
Kevin: [00:21:17] So again, it depends on what you pay code you're going to be using. But if you do create a new pay code, it would be easiest for that. Whether you have one that's paid and not paid, and by having the pay code in there, you'll be able to track it through your reporting. But you can also create schedules, whether temporary or longterm.
If you have a manufacturing area that's closing down, have a. You know, the certain medical areas there, for elective surgeries, and I've had a whole dental office closed for the whole week. She could actually schedule and he could schedule by pay code and put in the eight hours for people. And you could have a start and end date on that, so you don't know.
Jenna: [00:21:56] okay. Awesome. Did everybody hear all that? Because I think I lost Kevin. Kevin, I'm [00:22:00] sorry. I lost the end of your question. Can you, Can you try that one more time for us?
I think we're going to have to turn off the camera for right now. yeah. Kevin said, why don't you just talk, we'll keep the camera off cause I think we're having some bandwidth issues. Everybody's working from home. So like have a, can you, can you repeat that last part
Kevin: [00:22:26] can you hear me now?
Jenna: [00:22:28] I can hear you now. Yes.
Kevin: [00:22:30] All right. So yes, there's four. I'm in regards to, once you have your pay code set up for tracking this, if you're going to have to close down a and the, like in a case of a manufacturing plant or like Ford and GM are going to be shutting down whole plants, medical, we've had a dentist practice have to close down all their practices for at least a week, why they reevaluate everything.
So it'd be nice to be able to track that easiest. You can create your pay codes and then after you have the pay codes, you can generate. New schedules. [00:23:00] So when you have a schedule creator, you can go ahead and do that by those pay codes. So you can set it up to have a start date and end date. You can add people into those schedules there and you won't have to go into individual time cards and add in those pay codes for every single day.
So that's probably the easiest way to do it if you're looking at shutting down a whole office or a whole production line, or even an a, a plant or a specific area. So if I'm have any other questions on that, go ahead and. Feel free to send them on through.
Jenna: [00:23:30] Awesome. Thank you so much, Kevin. I appreciate it.
All right, here we go. Thank you guys so much. So that was the last question that we had planned for today. I have gotten a couple questions here in the chat. so let's see here. From anonymous, we have a question and, and consultants feel free to decide who wants to answer this, but they said we are tracking costs using cost center transfer.
Is there an easy way for the employee to quick stamp to a different cost center or an easy way for a salaried [00:24:00] employee to transfer? And they are on version eight right now.
So, and I'll jump up at once. Anybody want to answer that one?
Kevin: [00:24:11] I've had one customer already create a new cost center specifically for the virus. So they added that into the employees to be able to transfer to at a manager level. And then they can, obviously they could assign it to people too, if they wanted everything to default to that.
But they're going ahead and just doing transfers. And again, if you have a cost center, you can set up your transfers in your schedules for a certain amount of time. So you wouldn't have to do that on a daily basis. And. Track all your work time and potentially could also set it up for your, pay, your time off as well.
Ken: [00:24:46] Yeah, probably one of the, probably one other option with that is you can use, percent allocation rules to, automatically transfer to a certain cost center based on a pay code. So if you're setting up new [00:25:00] virus pay codes or COBIT pay codes, you could have that automatically go to a specific cost center as well if you want it.
Jenna: [00:25:08] Awesome. Okay. Thanks for chiming in there, Ken. All right. I'm looking here. It looks like we're getting a couple more questions. I go. All right. If there's anything else you guys want to cover or talk about NASA time to put it in the chat. Like I mentioned earlier, we are going to be taking a recording of this webinar.
We're going to send it out to you, and we're also going to be sending out a resource for you guys that has all of these answers from the consultants and documented in a PowerPoint so you guys can pass that around to your organization and have all of these answers in a concise document. We are going to continue these webinars for the rest of the month on Friday.
We want to continue to kind of build a community where people can continue to talk and have questions, as we continue to handle this event together as a community. so thank you guys so much for tuning in with us today. We really, really appreciate you being here. [00:26:00] and if you have any questions at all, feel free to shoot me an email.
You should have my contact information in the invite and we thank you guys so much for your time and thank you consultants for answering all of those questions and we'll be reaching out to you with the recording and the resources shortly. Thanks everybody. Stay healthy and stay safe.