Overview
Background
The University has ceased HTBN (Hours To Be Notified) contracts under the Enhancing Employment programme of work. HTBN employees have been moved, predominantly, onto Guaranteed Hours contracts. Other atypical alternative employment arrangements are used in the University, eg Annualised Hours, although are not widely used potentially because administrative processes and systems are not in place to support.
There is a large administrative overhead for the management and reporting on the GH contracts in the devolved HR teams and business areas created in part by the manual nature of the process. The UHRS Systems team is also impacted by the inability of devolved areas to access the information they require and by the challenges of current reporting capacity.
The key points about Guaranteed Hours are:
1. The University enters into a contract with the employee, guaranteeing that the University will offer the employee at least, e.g. 100 hours for a specified period of time.
2. The employee is then offered work during the specified period of time that adds up to 100 hours or exceeds 100 hours.
3. The employee does not have to accept any of the offers of work.
4. The employee will get paid as the work is completed in arrears.
5. If the employee is not offered all of the guaranteed hours e.g. the employee is only offered 80 hours but had been guaranteed 100 during the specified period, the employee is entitled to payment for the outstanding balance of 20 hours at the expiry of the specified period..
6. It is worth noting that the contract length can be open-ended or fixed-term (with a known end date).
The ‘guaranteed hours period’ can be defined to suit the business requirements:
a) An employee can be guaranteed to be offered a number of hours on a recurring basis e.g. 100 hours per annum subject to revision if the need arises.
b) An employee can be offered a number of hours for a specified period and at the end of the period the number of hours to be offered is ‘refreshed’ for a further specified period e.g. 100 hours for the specified period from Sept 14 to Aug 15 followed by 120 hours for the period Sept 15 to Aug 16 and so forth. At the end of each specified period the employee is advised of their next allocation of guaranteed hours and the new period is specified.
c) An employee can be offered a number of hours for the duration of a fixed-term contract e.g. 100 hours over the duration of a 2-year fixed-term contract.
d) An employee can be offered a differing number of hours for a series of concurrent specified periods in advance e.g. over a 3-year fixed-term contract the employee is guaranteed to be offered 100 hours for the first specified period of 1 year, 50 hours for the second specified period of 1 year and then 100 hours for the final specified period and final year.
This analysis will feed into the design and technical implementation project in 15/16, which will deliver a method for recording guaranteed hours that have been offered for the specified period, and a method for managers to report on Guaranteed Hours employees e.g. to identify the imminent end of the specified period. Currently, Guaranteed Hours are being managed locally in a variety of different ways all resulting in significant and manual transfer of data to spreadsheets for final reconciliation and production of documentation in local HR teams.
Reasons for taking this project forward
The Principal has made a strong and public commitment to the removal of HTBN contacts. These contracts are no longer used but the terminology remains in Oracle. Work to remove the systems reference to the HTBN contract type from centrally managed systems and replace with Guaranteed Hours terminology will be completed in 2014/15 under project HRS083 (https://www.projects.ed.ac.uk/project/hrs083). However, there is also a need to ensure that appropriate business processes, supported by technical solutions, are in place to manage Guaranteed Hours contracts.
· The systems will comply with the University’s change to GH contracts and will help the management of Guaranteed Hours contracts.
· Ensure that employees on Guaranteed Hours contract types continue to be paid and contribute to pensions correctly.
· Provide MI on use and management of the contract types. This will include information to support the Business in estimating the level of hours which should be guaranteed in each contract.
· If systems are not brought in line with policy and processes then the manual overheads to the University are estimated as large impact.
· Provide a robust system to manage hours to ensure that there is visibility on how many hours have been guaranteed and for what specified period, and the difference between hours guaranteed and hours worked for individual employees. For particular business areas, including ultimately across the University, the requirement to have the capacity to track hours guaranteed, offered and worked (including when the hours were worked) is important.
Scope
The scope of the Enhancing Employment systems projects will be to implement a management and reporting solution for Guaranteed Hours only. In 14/15, the Enhancing Employment Analysis project will determine the specific requirements for this project: identify all GH employment arrangements, and articulate the business processes for managing them. This will be achieved by consulting key stakeholders.
Objectives
The aim of this project is to articulate the business requirements needed to support the management and reporting on the Guaranteed Hours contracts. The analysis will concentrate on:
No. | Description | How Measured? |
1 | Improve efficiency of the current method of · Recording hours guaranteed/offered/worked/paid to employees on GH contracts, · Reviewing status of hours offered/worked · Contract refresh forward planning | Each offer of work is correctly stored, can be reviewed and planned accordingly. Ability to differentiate between multiple contracts held by the same employee. |
2 | Ability to record and report at each management level | Line, department, division, university level reporting easily accessible |
3 | Ability to reconcile contract hours, hours offered, hours worked and future hours to be worked at each management level. | Reporting easily accessible, accurate and timely |
Deliverables
No. | Deliverable | Priorities |
1 | Suite of clearly defined business requirements documented in a Business Requirement Document (BRD) detailing the current business processes and addressing the following questions: · How are Guaranteed Hours being used and managed by the different stakeholders? · What are the recording and reporting requirements (including exception reports)? · What are the current data sources; the data required, required feed and compatibility of data? · Are there legal requirements? · Are there financial regulations, eg Working Time Directive?
| mandatory |
2 | Authorisation rules for who can - Manage an employee’s contract - Make and record offers against contracts. These would then be incorporated in the system build in the technical project scheduled for 15/16 | mandatory |
3 | Authorisation for who can see an employee’s contracts and view/report on work against contracts. These would then be incorporated in the system build in the technical project scheduled for 15/16 | mandatory |
4 | Ability to view/report on GH contracts within the university at an individual and wider level. Line managers, department, division, university level reporting to be easily accessible. | mandatory |
5 | Ability to communicate to employees the details of the GH: the numbers of hours he/she is getting paid for, the hourly rate and annual leave payments. The BRD will identify the information required to extract the GH data to be communicated to employees for processes including the automated generation of contracts to employees. | mandatory
|
6 | Ability for employee to view information on their own GH contracts. Display hours guaranteed/offered/hours worked/hours paid and balance of GH hours for the specified period. | Highly desirable |
7 | Ability to differentiate between a greater number of activities e.g. preparation, marking, staff development, than currently able to (with E-Time at least) to improve communication and monitoring. | Highly desirable |
Out of scope/Assumptions
· Any non-Guaranteed Hours employment arrangement is out of scope of this project (e.g annualised hours).
· This project will not articulate the design and technical implementation of the systems work relating to Guaranteed Hours. There will be a separate project in 15/16.
· It is anticipated that the solution will be in-house and that procurement is not required, as there is already a planned 15/16 implementation project.
· It is assumed that the analysis project will complete in 14/15 as scheduled.
Benefits
The benefits will be met once a solution has been implemented. For reference the benefits identified for the full implementation are:
Tangible Benefits | |||
Description | Value (£) | Calculation Method and Assumptions | Benefits Realisation – Required Actions and Timing |
Time taken in schools, Support Groups and devolved HR teams in monitoring hours offered | £61,119 Per year | Estimate of 1 day per month per 100 contracts for 2,700 contracts = 324 days per year = approx 2.0 FTE | within 1 year |
UHRS time in running report and carrying out comparison of contracted hours and payroll output | £4,278 | 125 hours p/year preparing, sharing and responding to queries = approx. 0.14 FTE
NB: this process does not currently take place but a mechanism should be in place to ensure in-year monitoring of utilisation of contracts. |
|
Potential cost of contractual hours not offered | £60,000 | · Guaranteed Hours contracts account for about £6million of costs per year. · If an employee has hours contractually guaranteed that we do not offer to them they should be paid for them. · We do not have data on how often this we are guaranteeing more hours than we actually offer but if we assume a 2% error rate in estimation and that better monitoring would half this then the estimated cost saving would be £60,000. | within 1 year |
Intangible Benefits | ||
Description | Assumptions | Benefits Realisation – Required Actions and Timing |
Improvement in employee experience – greater clarity of hours offered and balance of hours remaining.
NB: Significant proportions of employees with GH contracts are students. We believe this change will have a significant impact on strategic theme of ‘Outstanding student experience’. | Employees currently have insufficient access to guaranteed hours information outside of their offer letter. | Benefits are expected to be realised within 6 months of implementation. Use of a further enhancing employment survey to assess this should be considered. |
Success Criteria
This project will be a success when the content of the business requirements is signed off primarily by HR and devolved stakeholders by end July 2015.