Dear Teal:
We hope you are enjoying this rain and glorious fall weather as much as we (and our backyards) are! We also hope your semester has been filled with exciting new connections and a smooth"ish" return to campus after the pandemic. We have a few important announcements and reminders to share with you as we head deeper into November.
Thanksgiving Week Reduced Services
Many of our SHARE staff will be taking vacation during Thanksgiving week, so please plan for reduced response times and delays in normal everyday processing. We will have enough staff to cover anything urgent or high priority.
In addition to ourselves, you may escalate urgent items to:
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Human Resources or Payroll - Ana Sanchez: akasanchez@berkeley.edu
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Research Administration - Henry Chan: hen_chan@berkeley.edu
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Purchasing & Reimbursements - Kathleen Tronnes: share_purchasing@berkeley.edu
Messages to share with your faculty:
The “No Air Travel” Box
UC Berkeley’s Business Air Travel Carbon Mitigation Program helps to mitigate the environmental impacts associated with our business air travel by supporting campus projects that reduce our carbon footprint. If an air travel trip is funded by unrestricted funds, a $10 (domestic) or $25 (offshore/ international) fee is assessed to the unrestricted chartstring used to book the air travel. Traveler receipts do not display this fee but the approver can view the transaction details, including the fee and associated chartstring used for the fee in the tracking report. Some departments (21 units) have additionally opted to participate in this program for trips booked with restricted funds outside of the travel report system. Learn more: https://sustainability.berkeley.edu/office-sustainability/air-travel-mitigation-program
Please approve CalTime, especially for your hourly (bi-weekly) employees!
We have had a few instances of employees receiving overtime in the hundreds of hours due to lack of Supervisor oversight on timecards. Please ensure that all Supervisors, (including any Faculty that supervise) in your department are actively checking CalTime for their employees, especially for the bi-weekly/hourly employees. All supervisors receive caltime emails from donotreplycaltime@lists.berkeley.edu asking them to approve their employee’s time cards every biweekly or monthly paycycle and they should not be ignored. There is not a mechanism to automatically clock them out, so they will be overpaid if this is not addressed. By law, overpayments must be paid back and all timecards corrected, which generates a lot of extra work for everyone involved. We would like your partnership to help prevent this.
Tip: If a supervisor will not be able to approve their employee’s time cards in CalTime, please remember that they can assign a delegate to approve their employee’s time cards on their behalf.Please add/confirm this bullet verbiage.
We hope you have a very Happy Thanksgiving week!
Warm Regards,
Teal and Max