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Dear Colleagues,
While Berkeley successfully converted to UCPath this past Spring, as you know, and as expected, we continue to learn about the practical side of how to work with UCPath Center (UCPC) in Riverside and how the UCPath system affects our processes here at UC Berkeley.
What's going on?
With summer hiring and salary changes on top of regular HR activities, our transaction volume in June and July increased well into the thousands per month. For Berkeley campus this has meant longer transaction turnaround times, especially in these three specific areas:
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Hiring and rehiring
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New employee system access issues
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First paychecks
Due to additional hand-offs occurring between UC Berkeley and UCPC, it is taking about twice as long to complete certain transactions during these busy summer months and this will likely continue on into early Fall semester when UC Davis and ANR (Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources) go live with UCPath. We're working hard with UCPC to relieve this congestion (including hiring at UCPC to handle additional volume), but the length of time it takes to complete transactions will not be solved overnight. We’re still learning how to use the system for more complex actions and for mass upload actions, which should save time once we have them operationalized.
What are we doing about it?
We're doing a number of things to better understand exactly where issues are arising including:
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Reviewing transaction turnaround times with Berkeley Regional Services (BRS) and UCPC.
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Analyzing transaction cancellation reasons to better understand why transactions are being returned to campus for correction.
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Clarifying processes with UCPC to ensure consistency both here at UC Berkeley and among UCPC team members.
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Looking at the number of additional staff resources we need to support UCPath.
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Launching a ‘Process Improvement Initiative to Re-Envision the Onboarding Process’ to improve the transparency of our onboarding process and associated roles, set clear expectations to the campus, and re-envision a more efficient onboarding experience for the future.
Are there any long or short-term solutions in place?
Berkeley Regional Services (BRS), Central HR (CHR), Academic Personnel Office (APO) and UCPC are hard at work testing solutions to address these pain points. We are currently piloting a “template first” approach in the regions and with certain key employee groups (e.g., Academic Student Employees, Graduate Student Instructors) which means new hire information will get sent to UCPC earlier in the hiring process so employee IDs can be generated sooner. BRS is also looking at expanding the use of Smartsheets to allow for a more efficient process for managing groups of employees. We have also recently added alternative ways of getting people paid that can be used in limited/emergency circumstances.
How to help?
As a campus, Berkeley no longer has complete control over high impact, high priority transactions. However, we have a culture that established itself over many years of using our previous human capital management and payroll systems, where people got something done "last minute,” or "after the fact," or "as an exception." With UCPath this has changed and we must align to UCPC standards, policies and processing time. First and foremost, we’d like to ask that we try to be patient and go easy on our fellow colleagues at UCPC and within BRS, APO and CHR - all of whom are working extremely hard to get people hired, paid, signed up for benefits, etc. In the near-term, please take time to adjust your/client’s expectations by being clear that certain transactions are currently taking longer to complete, but that this will not be our long-term state. You can also help by getting new staff into onboarding sessions earlier and by referring clients to the deadlines set in your Region for each pay processing period. You can refer to the BRS Communication about key fall hiring deadlinesand the client-facing payroll deadline calendar.
Finally, please reach out to us through this Feedback Form and tell us what’s going wrong, where your pain points are, etc. The more transparent we are with each other, the more we can support and move faster together to solutions for all.
We truly appreciate your patience and support during this period of transition learning a new system/way of approaching HR transactions.
Sincerely,
Marc & Jo
Marc Fisher
Vice Chancellor, Administration
Jo Mackness
Interim Assistant Vice Chancellor, Human Resources
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