April 2022 bulletin

 

Important - for action/attention this month

Academic teaching and/or research subjects – enter missing staff data by 23 May
Staffing figures released for 2020/21

News and reminders

Expand All

Please remember that once an appointment has been used to appoint an applicant, it cannot be used again.  

If you attempt to reuse a past appointment (eg by removing it from the vacancy), this reverses the successful applicants’ appointment status in PeopleXD from ‘commenced’ back to ‘authorised’. This causes a number of errors including: 

  • The employee missing from payroll costing reports; and 
  • An incorrect appointment start date and status

To avoid errors, please always refer to the Manage unplanned recruitment events guide in instances where you are either: 

  1. appointing individuals from unsuccessful recruitment drives; or  
  2. where a role is being advertised again 

We would like to take this opportunity to remind you about the Manage unplanned recruitment events guide, which is designed to be used where recruitment and appointments have not gone to plan and outlines the steps you need to take.

As some of you may be aware, we have a long-standing issue where Continuous Service dates may appear incorrectly for some employees. The Continuous Service calculation is driven by set system rules, which look for eligible appointments when calculating the service duration.

If you are unsure and would like a Continuous Service date to be assessed to see if a fix can be applied, please contact HR Systems Support.

A form is no longer required to join the HR newsletter and mailing list. Instead, HR staff can now email HRIS Data Services with their name, email address and department. If the joiner is replacing someone who is already on the list, please let the team know who to remove. It usually takes around a month for updates to be actioned.

The HR Newsletter is published once every academic term as well as a special edition in the summer. The newsletter includes updates from across the University HR teams including policy changes, project updates, event listings, and staff changes within University HR. For more information visit the HR communications web page.

Payroll corner

P60s for the tax year 2021-2022 are now available for employees to view in HR Self-Service.

Please note that the Payroll team can no longer see the latest P60 in the system until they are released (via HR Self-Service) to employees. This has impacted our ability to respond to recent queries relating to P60s. If you are waiting on a response, please bear with us whilst we catch up on the backlog. 

The leaver UDF must be updated with where to send the P45, any outstanding holiday pay etc. at the same time as you enter the leaving date. If you enter these UDF details at a later date, they may not be picked up by Payroll and any extra payments will not then be made.

If you only find out about the extras after you have entered the leaving date, you must email your Payroll Officer with the details.

The Payroll Office has seen an increase in the number of people inputting pay-related changes in PeopleXD after the main payroll deadline which is causing pay-related issues for staff.  

The most common problem is appointing an existing employee to a new post (this includes using the ‘Replace contract’ button). Even if you have not commenced or approved the new post, setting up the new appointment immediately closes the previous post and your employee will not be paid. It is essential that employees are paid correctly for work they have completed in their current roles, and this must take precedence over preparations to establish them in their new roles.  

The deadlines are always clearly published in each Bulletin via a link to the This month's Payroll deadlines webpage (the guidance on understanding payroll cycles is also found here). If in doubt, please check with HR Systems Support or your Payroll Officer, but otherwise wait until after the 'No User Input' days at the end of the month. 

Update from the HR Analytics team

The HR Analytics team are preparing a new Person UDF to collect Academic teaching and/or research subjects in PeopleXD. This information is collected for the annual HESA staff return, and is currently collected under ‘Learning and Development’ in People Management. 

As part of the preparatory work, we will be transferring existing information in the system to the new Person UDF on your behalf and this will include a new set of subject/discipline categories. To enable this, we need the subjects to have been recorded in PeopleXD. 

Currently there are 908 staff records which require Academic teaching and/or research subjects to be recorded against their record, but which are currently missing.

To check for records with missing information please run: HRINFO01 Data Validation_Qualifications and Subjects 2021-22 and clear your data errors by Monday 23 May at the latest.

For each employee listed with an error in the HRINFO01 report you must:

  • add the Qualification = ‘Aca.Disc taught/researched’; and 
  • select at least one ‘Aca.Disc taught/researched’ value in field named ‘Academic Disc. 1’

The information is requested of new starters in the current New Starter Data Collection form and a guide on how to input the information can be found on page 9 of the Add and manage personal details guide.

Additional information can also be found at: Academic subjects taught and/or researched.

The latest staffing figures for the 2020/21 reporting year have been published on the staffing figures web page.

The HR Analytics team would like to thank all those departments that have amended appointment records in PeopleXD to clear the FTE errors from the HRINFO01 Data Validation 2021-22 report. There has been a marked improvement as can be seen in the table below:

 

Number of appointment records with an FTE error message Percentage Change  
8 March 2022  11 April 2022    
176 123 30.1% reduction  

 

The remaining FTE errors will be queried with departments by HR Analytics as correct data is required for the annual mandatory gender pay gap analysis.
 

As can be seen from the table below the error counts from the HRINFO01 Data Validation 2021-22 report across the University remain at a high level for Employee Status or Employee Sub Status and have increased for Target End Date.

 

Error type

 Number of appointment records with an error message

Percentage Change

 

8 March 2022

 11 April 2022

Employee Status / Employee Sub Status

111

 108

2.7% reduction

Target End Date

285

 301

5.6% increase

 

If you need help after referring to the Employee Status errors section and the Target End Date errors section of the HRINFO01 error clearing web page please email hris.dataquality@admin.ox.ac.uk.
Please give Person Reference & Appointment ID and a description of the issue.

Reward updates

Many departments submit staff requests stating that a generic job description has been used. Please note that the term ‘generic job description’ refers only to the roles listed on the Reward website. These are official generic job descriptions and can be used by any department.

If you have a role that has previously been evaluated using HERA that you wish to function as a generic job description for your department, please reference the staff request number of the initial evaluation on the current staff request. Providing the job descriptions match, the Reward team can quickly authorise the new post.

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 – New starter UDF’s  Updated guidance for the NHS UDFs.
Scenario factsheet – Academic recruitment Updated terminology.
Changed reference to advert text limit, now expressed in words (as opposed to characters).

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.