Hagel and Company Human Resources Blog - California, Idaho, Washington State HR News

It’s easy to calculate the correct payroll taxes with Sage Abra SQL HRMS Payroll — thanks to quarterly tax updates available for download right from SupportPlus Online. To help you, we’ve provided instructions, download links, and other important information below.

Download your quarterly tax update
in these easy steps

1. Visit the SupportPlus logon page
2. Enter your User Name and Password (or register for a new member login).
3. Select the link labeled as Product & Documentation.
4. Select the link labeled Sage Abra HRMS SQL Payroll
5. Using the dropdown option for Get Product Update, select the appropriate version.
6. Using Site 1 or Site 2, download and save the update to the appropriate location.
7. Follow the instructions in the Release Notes.

Tips for a successful tax update

Downloading and installing your quarterly tax update is quick and easy. Here are a few suggestions to help you with the process:

	Check your software version. The Q3 2011 tax update is version-specific and is available for Sage Abra SQL HRMS versions 10.0, and 10.1
	Tax Update v8.5. Q2 2011 quarterly update was the last one for Sage Abra HRMS version 8.5. If any SQL payroll customer is currently on version 8.5, please call support for assistance to migrate to a currently supported version.
	Tax Update v10.0 and 10.1. To install the Q3 2011 update on Sage Abra HRMS Version 10.0 or 10.1, the installer will require Administrator rights. This is also true when updating the Client Workstations. This is due to the update relying on several legacy technologies, such as COM and C++, which require Administrator rights to install.
	Set aside enough time for the download. Downloading usually takes just a few minutes. Customers with a dial-up Internet connection may need to set aside about 30 minutes for the file transfer process.
	Let us know if you need help. Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you need technical help with downloading the Q3 tax update.

Questions?

Email: abratechsupport@sage.com

Phone: 800-829-0170
Live Chat is available from SupportPlus Online. While not intended for the complex issues or balancing questions, Live Chat is great when you need help from a customer support representative on locating and applying the tax updates, locating pertinent documentation and locating our helpful videos!

To view the original email from Sage, visit the following web address: http://app.sbs.sagespecialized.com/e/es.aspx?s=2022&e=1803&elq=11e90cba3f314c9ba9858ac88102329c

Do you ever wonder why it is that with all the advances in technology, many businesses still have difficulty controlling time and attendance issues? There are many causes for overtime overruns including such issues as employee absence, family medical leave absences, staffing limitations, and turnover. But the real cost of overtime can be less obvious. Long hours of work for prolonged periods can be a significant factor in overtime costs.

When employees are put on scheduled overtime there can be a resulting reduction in worker productivity. A study of the construction industry as far back as 1981 demonstrated that regularly scheduled overtime could result in a delay in the construction completion date beyond what could have been realized with the same crew working a 40 hour week (Construction Dimensions, July 1981). This can be a real money loser in a cost plus contract. And it’s not just work slow-downs that affect deadlines.

Employees working long hours for protracted periods of time are at much greater risk for injury and illness. Being on the job in a fatigued state can result in unnecessary on-the-job accidents. The longer the overtime continues, the more likely the rate of incidents will increase. This has an immediate negative impact on your labor and insurance costs. Replacement staffing or utilizing temporary labor makes a direct hit to the bottom line. If employees are moved from one department to another to fill in the gaps, the secondary impact on the “loaning” department may also impact labor costs.

A time and attendance program could help. Every company has different needs, so businesses want a product that is flexible enough to meet their organizations’ particular needs. Whatever the payroll requirements, a system capable of flexibility for meeting rules related to breaks, meals, rounding, time-off, managing holidays, and work week designation provides the best solution. Businesses will want a centralized management system that is accessible by line managers, payroll, HR and finance. Tracking individual employee hours can allow managers to identify potential hazardous or risky situations. Being able to track exceptions, review employee hours in real time, and calculate costs, all at individual workstations, can be an added cost-savings advantage.

Empower Software has a powerful, scalable calculation engine capable of handling complex pay policies, union contract arrangements, exceptions, and benefits management. Empower offers employee self-service for timely input of hours, review of PTO balances, and leave requests. Managers can access data from their desktop, sorting employee information to include important data on overtime and calculating associated costs. The revolutionary calculation engine allows for unlimited work rules. So no matter the size or complexity of your pay rules, Empower can handle your needs.

Are you afraid most of the employees at your workplace spend more time reading status updates on Facebook than they do actually working? Slacking off at work can cost your company a lot of money – and, as a human resources representative, it’s your job to come up with policies that will keep the business running smoothly.

Here are a few ideas for jump-starting worker productivity:

1. Implement a system that assigns workers milestones with specific deadlines. By creating a company-wide calendar system, workers will remain focused on the task at hand—and, by making the milestone calendar accessible to all employees, you can use peer pressure as a good incentive to keep workers from falling behind.
2. Introduce an employee reward initiative. Each week or month, provide a small gift and public recognition to a worker who goes above and beyond her assigned duties. The gift doesn’t need to be large – consider something like a $10 Starbucks gift card. The combination of the gift and public acclaim will encourage employees to try their best so that they’ll be selected for the award.
3. Let workers take breaks. Many workplaces strictly monitor how employees spend their time on the job, and ban them from playing games or sending non-work related emails. However, when employees are unhappy, their productivity is bound to suffer. Your best tactic is to allow workers to take breaks and participate in activities that they enjoy several times throughout the day. As long as they’re completing tasks by their assigned deadlines, there’s no need to take away privileges.

Confucius says, “The essence of knowledge is, having it, to use it.”

Writing an effective performance evaluation is about taking the knowledge you have developed about an employee over the last review period and putting into effective words. Words designed to help, to encourage, and to motivate the employee to produce valuable results.

The best performance evaluations are easy to write because the manager is an effective record keeper. With every opportunity the manager records achievements, successes, performance to goals, and work that went above and beyond. When the time comes to record the information in total, it’s readily available in a comprehensive file.

What about mishaps, screw-ups, or disciplinary actions? Performance evaluations should never be used as a disciplinary tool. Your company should have a disciplinary policy and procedure for use when an employee needs to improve performance. The performance evaluation is not that venue. Deal with problems as they occur, keep records per company policy, and unless it’s a major violation or the behavior continues, these incidents should not be brought up again during an annual evaluation. Giving positive feedback about performance improvements is definitely appropriate, however.

Performance evaluations should be straight forward, responsive, easily understood, specific, and encouraging.  Let’s look at each of these words or phrases individually:

Straight forward – the performance evaluation should look to the future with an eye on how past performance predicts future behavior. For example, if you have a major project coming up, discuss how the employee’s performance on a recent project or newly acquired specialized skills will be considered as you assemble the next project team. Let employees know that “best” performance is recognized and rewarded with new and interesting opportunities.

Responsive – the performance evaluation should reflect what the employee has done right and how you feel about it. Mark Twain is quoted as saying, “I can go for 2 months on 1 compliment.” Employees need to be validated and appreciated; telling an employee how you feel about their performance will have a positive impact on their performance.

Easily understood – performance evaluations should be clear and concise while avoiding flowery phrases or jargon that sound great but say nothing. The number of words is meaningless, but the quality of the content is priceless.

Specific – performance evaluations should address specific events, behaviors, accomplishments, and recognitions. Describe how these impacted the workplace and how you, as a manager, view the employee’s contributions.

Encouraging – without purpose and a sense of contributing, employees lack motivation and easily become disgruntled. Use positive words when you evaluate an employee. Finally, be sure to tell each employee how his or her contributions relate to the success of the team, department or company.

Evaluations should be fair, legally defensible and accurately record the employee’s performance. One trick to avoiding problems with documenting on the performance evaluation is to write in the third person, for example ‘Leo completed this project, on time’ instead of ‘you completed this project on time’. Avoid using the first person when writing. Writing what Leo does is more accurate that writing what “I” think about what Leo does.

Finally, you may want to consider software that helps you automate the performance evaluation process. Software can help ensure that:

• Evaluations are completed on time and not forgotten
• Managers across the company use similar methods to evaluate employees
• Your organization keeps good documentation from a legal perspective

Halogen software can help you meet your performance evaluation needs by providing tools for helping managers create a meaningful, effective evaluation in any format. Automated reminders prompt all the involved parties to action during the evaluation process. Evaluations can be accessed by multiple sources simultaneously, so multi-raters and peer reviews can be processed with ease. Content and authoring aides are available to assist the evaluator with language for writing an objective specific evaluation. Halogen offers a faster simpler way to deliver professional, effective performance evaluations!

The better your employees get along with one another, the better they’ll work together and the more efficient your company will be. With so many people of different ages and backgrounds working in the same environment, it may be difficult to get them all to see eye to eye. To create a more cohesive unit, focus on building a culture of teamwork. Here are a few ways to make that happen:

• Create intra-office teams to solve workplace issues. Build committees to discuss and solve problems relating to issues like absenteeism or how to communicate with telecommuting employees.
• Organize after-work events. You might consider offering a company-sponsored happy hour once a month, or holding a weekend potluck lunch every quarter.
• Take part in team fundraising events, like a charity walkathon or bowling match.
• Try out teambuilding games and exercises. Employees may feel a bit silly participating in these games, but they’ll create common bonds and help them learn to solve problems together. Find some great teambuilding activity ideas here.

Those should get you started! Tell us in the comments what types of teambuilding activities and events you do with your employees!

Thank you to all who left a comment on our “What Perks Should You Provide to Increase Worker Retention” post.  Congratulations to Elvia, the 3rd poster!  We will contact you shortly so we can send you the $25 Starbucks Gift Card.  Stay tuned for more giveaways, but until then please feel free to leave comments on our postings. 

Empowerment is one of the critical buzzwords in HR circles these days. With a time and attendance software package, employees, managers, payroll and HR are all empowered. Employees can track their hours worked, view timecards, check past, current, and future schedules, view time off balances and make and track leave requests. Managers can use the program to identify time and attendance exceptions that may require action. In addition, they can communicate valuable information to their employees in an automatically recorded format on overtime and project costs. Payroll and HR can provide valuable tracking data not only to line management but to the C-suite as well. Accurate tracking and trending of wage information provides invaluable information on people expenditures by product line. In addition, no matter how complex your pay and policy structures may be, e-solutions restore integrity and validity to critical business data.

Time and attendance software can enable your organization to have one central location for data management available to line management, payroll, accounting and finance as well as Human Resources for accessing data for reporting and fiscal management. A good solution is designed to handle the simplest to most complex pay policies related to leave, union and work rules, breaks, overtime, shift pay, holiday pay and PTO time, all while reducing data entry and the potential for typographical errors. Besides the benefits of improving data integrity, and controlling organizational cost through effective and efficient time and attendance management, there are other, more subtle benefits to an automated system.

Worries about preferential application of policies keep HR professionals up at night. Payroll worries about compliance, rounding rules and accurate calculations of hours based on various pay codes and work schedules. Employees have their own concerns. They worry if their management is applying policies and procedures consistently to all employees. In some businesses, workers may have no knowledge of what happens to their paper timesheet once it’s submitted, until they see their paycheck. With an e-system, costly employee relations issues and potential legal actions can be monitored and avoided. Although never 100% avoidable, these issues can be substantially mitigated with a centralized, comprehensive, flexible, time and attendance tool.

With every new piece of legislation, businesses find themselves scrambling to update and revise their internal systems to meet the latest in regulatory statutes. Costly and precious man hours can be spent updating systems and spreadsheets, training management on new processes and keeping an ever-vigilant eye on data as the new processes are implemented into your manual systems and procedures. A robust, highly flexible time and attendance system can be your answer. But do your due diligence!

Tips for evaluating time and attendance solutions

1. Choose a system that:
   • Provides federal and state updates in a timely manner
   • Enables you to make minor rule changes based on local requirements
   • Has enough options and settings for future business needs is a good start
2. Evaluate the implementation costs and return on investment for the first three years. Software license costs are usually front-loaded but longer term maintenance and update costs also need to be evaluated when determining the investment return.
3. Contrast and compare at least three different systems. There are a myriad of packages on the market and it’s easy to fall in love with the first package you see if you’re using manual systems. Evaluating the pluses and minuses will improve your knowledge, provide valuable insight into key components, and help make the proposal for the system you finally choose.
4. No one system is perfect, so focus on flexibility and integration with your current financial and HR systems.

Let us know if we can help you find the products that might work for your company!

Keeping your employees happy is an essential role in the world of human resources management. Recruiting and training new employees is costly for your company, so it’s well worth a little effort to ensure that your current employees are willing to stick around for the long haul.

A survey from Accountemps asked CFOs from more than 1,400 companies with 20 or more employees about what perks that planned to offer in 2011 to attract and retain employees. Here are a few ideas based on their responses, which you may want to consider offering your own employees:

• Subsidized training
• Telecommuting or flextime
• Matching gifts
• A mentorship program
• Onsite perks, such as childcare, cafeteria, coffee shop, or gym
• Subsidized parking or bus fare
• Housing or relocation assistance
• Subsidized gym memberships

Particularly if your company is still struggling from the recession, creating a more comfortable workplace will help build employee loyalty when big raises are out of reach.

What perks have been popular in your workplace? Share your strategies in the comments.  All valid comments will be entered to win a $25 Starbucks card on June 1st!  Check back to find out if you’re a winner!

For more ways to retain employees, talk with Terri Gresham about  Halogen Employee Performance and Talent Management Software.

What value can an interactive performance evaluation add for your employees, your management team and your company?

In today’s business climate, value is a critical performance measurement. Businesses and particularly HR functions are measuring all kinds of data to determine the value of a function, or an activity and how it relates to the overall business strategies. Employee performance is an accepted leading indicator in predicting how well the company will perform. However, the traditional annual individual performance evaluation is often considered ineffective and a waste of time for both employees and managers.

Providing feedback on accomplishments that are a year old is hardly motivating. And more importantly, it does nothing to keep employees engaged in their performance as it relates to current, ongoing projects. Workers perform best when they know what they are supposed to be doing and how they are expected to do it, or at least have a vision of the end product and tools to accomplish the goal.  Yesterday’s annual performance evaluation misses the mark in all these areas. The solution can be found in a living, electronic employee journal.

When utilized to its fullest extent, an e-journal provides the opportunity for 360 degree feedback when it will be of most value to the recipient. Those observing, participating in or sharing work assignments can provide timely feedback. Giving updates and significant objective data about the management of a project as well as the employee’s performance as it relates to the project creates the opportunity for successful outcomes for both the employee and the company. E-journals can make the difference between an employee knowing or not knowing what they need to know in order to succeed.

Companies who value employees as assets rather than costs understand the value in sharing information as a key factor to accomplishing organizational strategies. Gone are the days of using performance evaluations as a once-a-year requirement to talk about performance, goals and aspirations. Today, management, employees and even HR have access to a more sophisticated, effective communication tool for creating organizational and individual employee successes. A virtual, dynamic e-file provides managers the opportunity to review and report on goals and milestones, awards employees the opportunity to log accomplishments and provides HR with information to update training and developmental targets.

The virtual employee performance record eliminates the drudgery and mistrust often associated with the performance evaluation process. With this evolution in the evaluation system, the e-journal facilitates a more meaningful dialogue between managers and employees on relevant work issues. Employees know they have an opportunity to weigh-in on their performance in a meaningful way.  Creating value in the evaluation process has a domino effect by creating value for both the employee and the manager; the outcomes can positively affect productivity, the quality of the work product, value for the customer and ultimately business revenue—a value win/win.

For a software system that can support this practice, learn about

Halogen e-Appraisal Year-Round Performance Journal.

Are your employees building up enough of a nest egg for retirement? According to a recent survey by consultancy firm Aon Hewitt, most mid-to-large businesses have doubts about their staff’s savings skills. The survey found that only 38 percent of employers believe their staff members are taking accountability for their retirement funds, while just 30 percent feel that their employees are financially prepared to face retirement.

That means the burden falls on the workplace to help employees gain a better understanding of how they can effectively save for their futures. Here are a few ways you can help your workers:

• Instead of making workers sign up for 401(k)s or other investment plans, provide automatic enrollment. Employees may opt out at their own discretion, but participation rates will be much higher than in an opt-in system.
• Provide employee education in investment strategies. Bring in a financial coach to help them learn how to diversify their investment portfolios.
• Provide a 401(k) matching plan to incentivize employees to save.
• Offer online services that will allow employees to check on and manage their investments.

You can help your employees retirement readiness by giving them information and tools to help them plan.