February 2022 bulletin

We are currently preparing for the annual tax year-end updates in PeopleXD. Each year this requires software to be tested and applied to the system to ensure that the University can fulfil its statutory payroll reporting obligations.

To achieve this, we need to schedule a period of system downtime as follows: 

All areas of the system will be impacted except e-Recruitment (the applicant interface), therefore applicants will be unaffected by this work.

Implications for users:

• HR Self-Service will also be unavailable during the full system downtime, which will be noted on the Staff Gateway page.  
• It is likely that the payroll costing reports will be distributed slightly later than usual. However, we expect to be able to meet our commitment to providing these within three days of completion of the payroll run.

As always, we will aim to keep the duration of any downtime to an absolute minimum. A reminder will be included in next month’s bulletin and full details sent to users before the downtime takes place.

We would like to remind all Recruitment Administrators to follow the revised guidance on preparing and authorising vacancies for advertising. 

As previously communicated, following a system enhancement on 2 February, the format of the salary and grade details have changed. You should no longer enter the grade details into the ‘Salary (£)’ field in the ‘Vacancy Details – 2’ screen. For standard grades, the standard salary range will automatically pull through once the grade is selected. You should then only amend the salary details if exceptions or special circumstances apply (eg advertising with a discretionary range). 

Please also see the email sent to all Recruitment Administrators on 2 February. By following the correct guidance and formatting you will help the University achieve a uniformed and consistent display of our jobs across the board.

There have been a number of instances where the 'Standard hours' field has not been completed when creating or updating an appointment in PeopleXD, despite it being marked as mandatory in the guidance. To help reduce the number of data quality issues, and to align the system with our guidance, this field has now been set to mandatory. 

For system guidance, please follow the Complete the Appointing Wizard guide.

Save the date for our next briefing session, which will take place on Thursday 24 March from 10:05 - 10:55. As usual, this has been scheduled to coincide with the no user input period, which we hope will maximise your opportunity to attend. Look out for a calendar invitation which will be sent to all system users soon.

HR Systems Support 

HR Systems Support will be closed from 17:00 on Wednesday 13 April until 08:30 on Tuesday 19 April 2022. PeopleXD will be available to users and applicants during this time.

April Payroll deadline

The main payroll deadline has been scheduled for 7 April, to account for the Easter break. Details of upcoming Main and Casual payroll deadlines can be found on the Payroll website. 

Support for applicants

A message will be placed on the University’s Job webpages advising applicants of the office closure over the Easter period with the dates as above. Please be aware that behind the scenes, the support team will be monitoring the availability of the online recruitment system.

Staff requests

Please note that University HR will also be closed during this period. Staff requests will not be processed from 12:00 noon on Wednesday 13 April until Tuesday 19 April.

Please run the HRINFO01 employees data quality report and clear all Target End Date errors as soon as possible, and by Wednesday 23 March.

As at 8 February there were 327 employee appointment records with a Target End Date error message across the University. Clearing these errors will enable accurate central reporting of those on fixed-term contracts.

When to use the Target End Date field

Target End Date should only be used to record the end of a fixed-term contract. Planned return from any form of leave should be recorded off system. Please ensure that no permanent or open-ended contracts have Target End Dates. Guidance on the specific error messages in the HRINFO01 report are in the Target End Date section of the Data Quality HRINFO01 Error Clearing web page. Any queries on running this report should be sent to hris.dataquality@admin.ox.ac.uk.

Each month it is recommended that you run the following reports within the PERDEP02 FTC End Dates folder:

• Lapsed FTC End Dates
• List of FTCs Due To End
• Missing FTC End Dates
• Target End Date Misuse

Queries on running these reports should be sent to HR Systems Support. 

The ‘Continuous Service dates’ work stream of the Data Quality project is working to address incorrect service dates in PeopleXD.

The HR Analytics team are looking for volunteers to:

• go over a list of records that are highlighted as potentially having incorrect continuous service in PeopleXD;
• check whether or not the system value is correct; and
• provide any feedback on the data provided to help improve the workflow.

The aims and the benefits of the pilot are set out in the January edition of the HR Analytics newsletter.

If you would like to find out more about what is involved and the timescales, please email us.

The HRINFO20 casuals data quality report as at 8 February gave the following error counts across the University:

Please end any inactive casual appointment records, following the guidance below by Thursday 10 March. The end date input should be the last day of the previous month.

For guidance, please use the following links:

• Track changes and correct records (guide)
• Run reports in HR Reporting (guide)
• HRINFO20 Casual worker data quality validation report
• End appointments (guide)
• Recording start and end dates (guide)

The HR Analytics team would like to thank all those who have recently run the data quality reports and/or amended appointment records in PeopleXD to clear the staff classification errors, following our request in January.

As can be seen from the table below there has been a reduction in staff classification error counts in total across the University, as of 8 February compared with those recorded on 19 January 2022: