Kronos Labor Levels vs. Org Maps - A Healthcare Perspective

Everyone is familiar with labor levels in Kronos. You have up to seven that you can assign and use to make up your employee's "home labor account." The general practice is align your labor levels with your financial systems - GL and Payroll - so that your employee's time worked is charged appropriately. Of course no one has seven levels that they actually use for charging and transferring time, so the rest of the labor levels are used for reporting or some reason that no one remembers...! The only really important labor levels that get transferred around are Company/Facility, Cost Center/Department, Position, and sometimes a project code (although this one is mostly for reporting). Does this sound familiar?

A few years back, Kronos introduced the "Org Map," which has a lot of potential purposes. But we're talking about healthcare here, and for healthcare, there is no mystery to the purpose of the org map: It is for scheduling. Org locations and jobs are the heartbeat for staffing employees and a good org structure is critical for an effective scheduling implementation. Hopefully I'm not telling you anything new here!

But is that all the org map is good for? Driving your scheduling processes?

Absolutely NOT!

If you plan it right, your org map can be the key structure around which you interact with WFC, instead of labor levels. Yes, you read that right. "INSTEAD OF LABOR LEVELS." Should I say it again?

INSTEAD OF LABOR LEVELS!

You still need labor levels, of course. The org map does not REPLACE them. But it does eliminate the need for most-if-not-all of your labor level transfers. So think about all the things you hate about labor levels:
--How they are not
 tied together (giving your managers the ability to accidentally transfer an employee's time into the "Labor & Delivery" cost center in your corporate office...).
--How they are awkward to pick and choose and search for the right ones when you are doing transfers.
--How your managers and employees are confused about the full labor account on reports and timecards because they only know what three of the entries mean.

And I'm sure you have others...

But then along comes the org map. It is structured like a tree, so leaves that are not appropriate for certain branches don't have to be attached. And users can browse to the location and job that they are looking for instead of doing multiple searches to find the right labor levels. And you are already using it for scheduling.

Here is the secret: You tie your org map to your labor levels for those levels that need transfers. Like the facility and the cost center. (But you don't tie it to the position.) So every time you do a schedule transfer to a new job in a different location, it automatically changes the labor levels too. Simple as that!

Of course there's a whole art form around how many levels deep to make your org structure and how to resolve positions and jobs and what to do with locations like "On Call," but that's a little more than the scope of this blog entry.

Suffice it to say, ORG MAPS CAN FREE YOU FROM LABOR LEVELS. And THAT is why the org map is beautiful thing.