May 2022 bulletin

News and reminders

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Would you like to help shape the development of our HR system? By being a POG (Product Ownership Group) member you can influence decisions on the release of new system features and enhancements.

We are currently looking to expand membership of the existing POGs. PeopleXD users from all divisions are welcome to get in touch, and we’d particularly love to hear from those based in GLAM and Social Sciences. If you are interested and would like to hear more, please contact Michelle Williams.

In the March Bulletin, we shared plans to reintroduce the ‘Legal Sex’ and ‘Previous Surname’ fields in PeopleXD.  These have now been reinstated on the main Key Information screen within People Management.

The guidance in Complete the Appointing Wizard and Add and manage personal details has been updated to reflect the changes.

We recently undertook an exercise to review and align the ‘on’ and ‘off’ system versions of the academic-related contracts. As a result, minor tweaks have been made to both versions. Please be assured that any contracts previously issued were correct, and do not need to be reissued.

Update from the HR Analytics team

Following our request last month, there has only been a slight decrease in the number of staff records with Academic teaching and/or research subjects missing:

30 March 2022

9 May 2022

Percentage change

908

883

2.8% reduction

 

Please run: HRINFO01 Data Validation_Qualifications and Subjects 2021-22 and clear your data errors by Monday 23 May at the latest. For details, see our request in the April 2022 bulletin.

The ‘HRINFO02_AthenaSWAN Potential Staff Data’ readiness report will be available from the end of May until 31 July. The report allows departments to review their Athena SWAN data before the extract is taken for the 2022 Tableau data refresh.

To prepare:

  1. Run and clear all anomalies from your ‘HRINFO01 Data Quality Validation’ report before reviewing the ‘HRINFO02 AthenaSWAN Potential Staff Data’ report; and
  2. Ensure that all parental leave action and reason codes have been entered for all relevant employees, including recording return from parental leave.

 

The Athena SWAN Tableau Manual is an important resource for anyone working on their departmental renewal and has now been updated. The manual describes the methodology, background and what is included in Tableau for Athena_StaffData and Athena_RecruitmentData; how to use the Tableau interface to view and export data is also covered.

The Athena recruitment data > Data inclusion and data quality section has been expanded to state that where vacancies resulted in an appointment being made, only closed vacancies with complete applicant status history (i.e. Applied; Shortlisted; Offer Made – Personnel; Offer Accepted – Personnel) are included.

For anyone who requires access to these Tableau workbooks follow the process set out on the web page Accessing Tableau. Further information is available on our Athena SWAN web pages.

University wide there are currently 228 ‘staff classification errors’ in the HRINFO01 report. The majority of these are mismatches between Category and Sub Category.

It is essential to clear these errors ahead of tackling other data errors highlighted in the report, using these three steps: 

  1. Clear all Category and Sub Category errors; 
  2. Re-run the report; 
  3. Clear other data errors

Several error types reference the Category and/or Sub Category fields, so if these fields are incorrect, this may result in other errors returning (or not returning) falsely in the report. For guidance, please visit our staff classification and data quality clearing errors webpages.

Please continue to run the data quality reports HRINFO01 and HRINFO20 regularly and clear errors promptly.

The titles of Statutory Professor and Titular Professor in the ‘Academic title’ User Defined Data are used to place employees into the Academic Professor group for Athena SWAN and correct recording of ‘Titular Professor’ assists in the annual HESA staff returns. It is therefore important to check that all academic titles are recorded correctly.

We advise that you:

  1. run the PERDEP22_Academic Title report to identify missing/incorrect information;
  2. familiarise yourself with the titles, their conferral process and the team responsible for data entry;
  3. add/correct the information where you have responsibility to add or update the Academic Title User Defined Data;
  4. instruct and follow-up with Data Services hrisdata@admin.ox.ac.uk  where amendments are to be made by this team; and
  5. add the end date in the ‘To Date’ field in the Academic Title User Defined Data when the academic title no longer applies

For guidance, please refer to the Scenario Factsheet: Set up and manage academic titles.

By following the above you will avoid emails from the HR Analytics team regarding Academic Title data.

The fourth HR Analytics newsletter was published earlier this month, aimed at keeping you informed about important HR data quality news and actions. If you missed it, click here to read. This includes details about the following actions required by departments:

  • Ensure that postcodes are entered correctly
  • Help with Immediately Previous Employment and Previous HEI Employment
  • Adding ‘leaver’ information to PeopleXD

Reward updates

The apprentice contract states that apprentices should progress through the apprentice grade with each milestone reached.

In 2020 when the Oxford Living Wage was introduced, points 1, 2 and 3 of the apprentice grade were all moved to the Oxford Living Wage point.

The University has reintroduced progression for apprentices by revising their grade with four distinct points to which existing apprentices will be transferred. The revised grade will be introduced in June 2022 with back pay for any apprentices who have reached milestones from 1 August 2021.

The revised apprentice grade will be published on the HR Support and Finance websites and departments should make new appointments to the revised grade.

New/updated documents and reports

We are continually making updates and improvements to our guidance materials. Please always access guidance directly from our website, to ensure you have the most up to date version. If you spot an error or would like to request an update, please email hr.systems@admin.ox.ac.uk with the relevant details.

The following guides have recently been updated:

Guidance What’s changed
Scenario factsheet – Personal Services Companies  This guide has been updated and re-released following the last major system upgrade.

The TRNDEP01 Current Open Courses report has been updated to fix a bug which caused errors on the report relating to the number of bookings made and courses to be missed from reports where no places had been booked. 

This month's deadlines

Monthly payroll dates are now available from the This month's Payroll deadlines webpage.

Please bookmark this page, which is updated monthly.