July 2023 bulletin

August Main Payroll deadline – Wednesday 9th

Visit the Payroll deadlines and cycles page for information about the monthly payroll cycle, including the monthly key payroll dates for People Management users.

Details of upcoming Main, Supplementary and Casual payroll deadlines can be found on the Payroll website. 
 

 

News and updates

From October 2023, paper payslips will be discontinued for casual workers (including teachers and examiners). This change aligns with our plan to withdraw paper payslips after introducing HR Self-Service, aiming to save trees and reduce printing costs. Now that casual staff are routinely set up with an HR Self-Service account, paper payslips can be discontinued.

Additional details and specific instructions for HR teams will be shared next month, along with direct communications to casual staff regarding this change. 

With input from the Equality and Diversity Unit, we have updated the personal characteristics (diversity) data available to applicants and staff in PeopleXD, to align with HESA’s changes for this year’s staff return.

This includes: 

  • Minor changes to ethnic background descriptions and a new “Not known” option.
  • Combining “Gay Man” and “Lesbian” into “Gay and Lesbian” (removes gender signifiers).
  • Changes to category descriptions: “Legal Sex” to “Sex” and “Ethnic Origin” to “Ethnic Background”. 
  • Minor changes to disability descriptions and introduction of “Prefer not to say” for a specific disability.
  • Updates to guidance for applicants.

We are updating the reports in HR Reporting, the Guide to your HR data pages, and the equality data form. Please encourage staff to review and update their diversity data in HR Self-Service. 
 

As you are aware we have been piloting an onboarding feature within PeopleXD, that enables new starters to complete their new starter details within HR Self-Service upon commencing their new appointment. At this stage all we are doing is replacing the word version of the new starter data collection form with an online version.

We are pleased to inform you that the pilot is going relatively well and that we are aiming for a wider rollout October/November 2023. We will communicate soon what this means for departments and holding support session to help departments transition to the new process.
 

Please note that the Information Security and Data Awareness and Individual User Agreement courses must be completed before submitting access requests to pay and costing reports. Access will not be granted without this. Find out more at: Pay and costing reports.

Important and regular reminders

Automatic increments are due to be paid for Support staff from 1 August (providing they have been in their current role since 1 May 2023). Please read the following to ensure that the correct rate of pay is taken forward.

The day before the increment is due a new salary record is created automatically. This salary change does not need to be authorised - it will take effect the next day unless it is overridden. 

Action required:

  1. Ensure that the increment date is populated where required:

The ‘Increment Due Date’ report will help  to identify any staff with no increment due date, records where the ‘increment on hold’ flag has been ticked which will prevent the increment from happening, or those without a future increment date. You will need to check if any of these records are incorrect and amend/update them if required. 

  1. Ensure the correct salary is approved prior to the increment date:

The system will add one increment (where applicable) to the current approved salary. You must ensure that employees due an increment on 1 August have the correct salary approved as at 23:59 on 30 July. Ensure that any future dated salary lines with an effective date after 1 August 2023 have been set at the scale point the employee would be on following the automatic increment. You can use the ‘Staff in Post’ report  to check current salary data, and the ‘Monthly Personnel Changes’ report to check for any future dated salary changes, and to check the approval status for salary request.

 

 

Please look out for our emails in August and September regarding this year’s HESA staff return data verification. Your quick response to any queries is appreciated.

31 July 2023:

1.    Clear staff classification errors
The final deadline to clear staff classification errors in the HRINFO01 Data Validation report has been extended to Monday 31 July 2023. Please refer to last month’s bulletin for details.

2.    Run HRINFO02 the Athena SWAN data readiness report
If you haven’t done so yet please run the HRINFO02 Athena SWAN data readiness report to review the data and make any corrections needed. Refer to the May 2023 bulletin for details.

3.    Record/correct Academic Titles
Record/update Titular Professor titles awarded via the Senior Appointments Panel or the Recognition of Distinction exercises, in the Academic Title UDF. To identify updates required, run the PERDEP22 Employees with Academic Titles report. This title is crucial for mapping contracts to the correct Professorial grouping used for Athena SWAN and management reporting. Refer to the Set up and manage academic titles guide, which includes a matrix (in the Appendix) of who’s responsible for this data entry, as this may vary.

4.    Record Apprenticeship Type 
Each apprentice on an apprentice grade during the HESA year, 1 August 2022 to 31 July 2023, must have a completed ‘Apprenticeship Details UDF’. Follow the guidance at: Apprenticeships.

22 August 2023:

1.    Clear NHS Contract Details UDF and Sub-Specialty UDF errors 
There are currently 612 NHS Contract Details UDF and Sub Specialty UDF errors across the University.

This data is required for the Medical Schools Council Survey and HESA. Please clear any errors before the deadline by following Data Quality HRINFO01 Error Clearing. The HR Analytics team will be following up with departments to ensure these errors are cleared.

31 August 2023:

1.    Clear errors from HRINFO21 Vacancy and applicant data quality reports 
Please clear red and amber errors from the Step 1 and Step 2 HRINFO21 Vacancy and applicant data quality reports by the deadline. Only closed and filled vacancies with complete applicant status history (ie Applied; Shortlisted; Offer Made - Personnel; Offer Accepted - Personnel) are included. Vacancies set to 'appointment made' without the full applicant status history are excluded. Refer to section 4 of Manage recruitment statuses and events for the mandatory applicant statuses, by recruitment stage. For help with any data errors or queries, email hris.dataquality@admin.ox.ac.uk.

2.    Record all Reward and Recognition Scheme nominations
Before payments are made, departments must complete the relevant UDF for all nominations, including those without awards, following the Reward and Recognition Scheme guide.

To check if data has been entered or to verify it, run the PERDEP47 R and R Scheme Monitoring report. This report relies on the data recorded in two UDFs: Appt: R&R Recognition Scheme and Appt: R&R Awards for Excellence.

For details on the monitoring of the scheme refer to the HR Support webpages. For questions about the scheme contact the Reward team.
 

Staff data dashboards are available through Tableau. If you haven’t got access to Tableau already, submit a request here. If you no longer require access, please remember to notify us via email at hr.systems@admin.ox.ac.uk.

Updated guidance

We are pleased to tell you that an updated and improved set of guidance for appointing new and existing staff is coming soon. Please look out for the new guidance that will be made available on the New appointments webpage in the next couple of weeks.