All-Important HRIS Planning Tool: Capability Checklist

Letke, who is the founder and CEO of the HR consulting and outsourcing company HR Integrity, Inc., offered her tips at a recent webinar sponsored by BLR® and HRHero®.

Deciding What’s Appropriate for Your HRIS

Here are some questions Letke uses to help employers define their HRIS needs:

• What information are people in your organization requesting? Employee demographics? Training/ Certification? Performance Evaluation? Wage data?
• How do you, line managers, the chief executive officer, and the chief financial officer obtain needed personnel information?
• How long does it take you to respond to a new request for information?
• What HR management needs are not being addressed and handled properly?
• How effective is your support to the budgeting and planning processes?
• What’s not being handled well today?
• Where do you stand in complying with COBRA, ERISA, FLSA, OSHA, and other statutes and regulations?
• What tasks are you being asked to do today? How well are you performing these tasks?
• What new programs, services, and management support must you provide to help your organization meet its goals?

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Finally, a simple but comprehensive guide to wage and hour. Correctly apply the FLSA, remain the go-to expert with BLR’s comprehensive guide. Save hours of research time.  Go here for information or to order Wage & Hour Compliance: Practical Solutions for HR

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Here are some things you might consider putting on your systems capability checklist. It could be part of your request for proposal or your secret wish list, says Letke.

• Integration modules—what does it offer (payroll, attendance, self service, benefits, recruiting, etc.)
• Level of integration with payroll
• E-mail alerts (auto-generated e-mail tells you when someone has completed a form, or 60 days before a certification is about to expire). Can you set it up yourself?
• Expense and headcount tracking
• Succession planning
• I-9 compliance
• New hire processing
• Employee skill inventory
• Requisitions for new hires
• Interviews of applicants
• Resume importing
• Keyword searching
• Employee self-service, online enrollment
• Manager approvals of changes
• Life events
• Personal records
• Handbook maintenance
• Labor relations, seniority
• EEO-1 and affirmative action reporting
• Pay equity analysis
• Compensation
• Salary change requests
• Salary history
• Reprint W2
• Payroll
• Bonus
• Pay grades
• Job descriptions
• Benefits
• Participation, how much paying
• Employee benefits statement
• 401k
• Flexible benefits
• Account balance reporting
• Training and development
• Enrollment
• Costs
• Library
• Notices and certificates
• OSHA and safety
• Preparing the OSHA 200
• Employee safety history
• Exposure
• Report-writing capabilities
• Import and export data
• Hardware required
• Ability to modify fields or add new columns in numeric data
• Security—unique security profile for each user
• Data breach control
• Utilities
• Records management—how long to store, delete

Put together a detailed checklist like this (your list should reflect your particular interests and needs) to help you evaluate potential vendors and their systems, says Letke.

Otherwise, you’re going to be saying, “I wish I had thought of that before I picked a system.”

Of course, the best system in the world won’t help if your policies and practices aren’t what they should be. Where do you start? How about the very beginning with the basics—wage/hour. Yes, it should be simple, but it’s just not. Complying with the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) is one of the most confusing and challenging things comp managers have to do.

Even the most savvy practitioners get tripped up, and the law’s complex requirements can easily land you and your company on the wrong side of a lawsuit or DOL investigation.

Fortunately, there’s help—Wage & Hour Compliance: Practical Solutions for HR provides you with detailed guidance on how to comply with the FLSA and takes you through the most complicated wage and hour issues that HR practitioners encounter.

When you’re faced with a supervisor’s travel time question, an employee’s request for comp time, another executive’s suggestion that more assistant managers be deemed exempt from overtime, you’ll find answers in seconds, from a reputable and reliable source.

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Wage and hour lawsuits are expensive—and easily prevented. Here’s how to protect against crippling judgments. Go here for information or to order Wage & Hour Compliance: Practical Solutions for HR

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Wage & Hour Compliance: Practical Solutions for HR features:

• Real-world examples of wage & hour challenges and how to solve them
• Multiple quizzes, so you can see where you need to review more carefully
• An overtime exemption audit checklist, so you never make the wrong call
• State-specific charts, for comparing your multistate obligations
• Sample policies, easily modified to fit your specific preferences
• A quarterly newsletter, Wage & Hour Compliance Bulletin, to keep you aware of the latest developments in the law, and why they matter to you.

BONUS! Not just a manual. You also get:

• Free CD containing over 20 forms, policies, checklists, state-by-state comparison charts and more, all so you can point, click, and go.

Why are aggressive attorneys so eager to file claims on behalf of employees? Because there’s so much money to be made:

• $4.75 million: Hospital in Thousand Oaks, California, settles wage and hour lawsuit over miscalculated overtime pay and failing to compensate workers for missed meal and rest periods.
• $1.15 million: Las Vegas construction company to pay in back wages to 1,060 current and former employees.
• $976,327: New Mexico aerospace company settles with 900 employees who were routinely required to work through lunch breaks without compensation.
• $340,400: New Jersey convenience store to pay back wages and damages for violations of overtime and recordkeeping.
• $84,541: New York physical therapist agrees to pay 22 employees for minimum wage violations.
• $30,000: Texas chain of four gas stations to pay their six hourly employees, again for recordkeeping and overtime violations.

Avoid steep fines. Go here for information or to order Wage & Hour Compliance: Practical Solutions for HR.

Buyers’ Benefit: To make sure your Wage & Hour Compliance: Practical Solutions for HR remains current with changing interpretations and court decisions, we monitor courts, Congress, and state legislatures. Each year, we’ll rush you an updated edition and bill on a 30-day review basis. You pay only if you decide to keep the updated edition.

Stay up to date with wage/hour changes. Go here for information or to order Wage & Hour Compliance: Practical Solutions for HR.