The "Kronos Guy" Blog

Providing better information to a Kronos Timecard 

Managing timecards for your employees requires a lot of review and understanding.  For example, when an employee forgets to punch, who will be adding that punch?  More often than not, you are assigned that responsibility.  Now, can you just add the punch with the time you thought the employee came to or left work?  No, you need to confirm this with your employee.  Once they confirm the time they arrived or left, you need to add that punch.  Here is the catch.  Once you add that punch, Workforce Timekeeper no longer considers that punch “missing”.  An easy way to ensure that this punch was missing originally is to assign a comment and note. 

I am always surprised when long time users of Kronos’ Workforce Timekeeper seem to have forgotten about the ability to perform group edits.

Payroll Close Genie vs. Pay Period Close Genie: 

I know you are familiar with the Pay Period Close Genie.  This is a detail Genie that lists all the employees (a manager can see) and shows if their timecard is approved, signed off, or if there is anything left for the manager to do (missed punches or Unexcused Absences), but what about the Payroll Close Genie – the one that summarizes all the facilities – the one that the payroll department can look at to see if they are ready to process payroll.

The Payroll Close Genie is a wonderful Genie, however it is missing from many of the implementations that we start working with.  Since it is not part of the “stock”, Genies that comes preinstalled on the disk, many times it never gets created.  It is not part of the stock Genies because it is based upon labor levels and labor levels are not part of the basic information that is supplied out of the box.  Labor Levels get defined once the implementation gets underway. This is one of the BIG value add Genies.

Let’s face it; nobody wants to “work”. Unless you find an occupation that you enjoy every working day; then it doesn’t seem like “work”, but more a part of your lifestyle and something you can take pride in. So what does that have to do with Improvizations or Kronos?

Anyone who has experience will tell you that the retail market (as opposed to manufacturing, health care or government/education) is very unique.  When planning a Workforce Timekeeper upgrade or implementation, a critical aspect of the overall success and adoption of the system is application/system training; a top consideration should be: How can Workforce Timekeeper training be adapted to the retail environment?  This is by no means an in-depth blog entry, but more of a quick review, the main ideas expressed here can be used to develop something more individualized for a retail organizations individual needs.  So let's start:

The Greek titan of time, “Kronos” (or Cronus) in addition to spawning the name of the company we all know and love, also had many children. Most of these he ate. Or at least swallowed until, Zeus, one of the survivors grew up and forced Kronos to disgorge his siblings.  Such abuse was apparently common during the so called Golden Age of Greek mythology.  Another famous Greek, Plato, is known for his own perspective on the abuse of things… namely poets and or poetry. Apparently much nerdier folks than I have spilled a lot of ink debating whether Plato disliked poetry or the poets themselves.  As far as I have read he never ate any of them.  Plato did, however, coin a very interesting (dare I say poetic) admonition: “Banish the abuse, not the thing”. 

In previous blogs, we have talked about nurses using Kronos 4500 terminals.  One of the common tasks nurses need to complete at the 4500 terminal is a transfer.  When this occurs, much like any other transaction at the terminal, the nurse should be responsible for ensuring that the transfer was recorded, and if not, responsible for reporting the error. 

There are many ways to record an employee’s PTO in Workforce Timekeeper. The four most common are:

One of the most important ‘Best Practices’ in the timekeeping arena is the separation of pay and attendance policies across the timecard.  Generally this means that what you do as far as paying the employee is isolated from what you wish to set as tardy or no-show attendance thresholds.  A simple example of this would be rounding an employee’s punch back to the hour if it is up to 7min after but still being able to track every time they are late as part of a stricter attendance policy – say 1 minute for tardiness. Legally speaking, companies have to pay people for the time they work (rounding is allowed if it averages out or favors the employee) but they need to counsel and be able to terminate employees in cases of chronic tardiness or absenteeism.   

I’m sure you have heard this before.  Your nurses are too busy to sit around the timeclock waiting to punch in and out.  They need to get to work, and worrying about department transfers will simply slow them down, or worse yet, take them away from what they are supposed to do, care for their patients.