How End-to-End Is Your Municipality’s HRIS?

March 15, 2019 Kyla Mackie

How End-to-End Is Your Municipality’s HRIS?

You manage the day-to-day and workforce operations of a Canadian municipality. But you also have an impact on the lives of the people who live, work, and play every day in your hometown.

Your impact is driven by a passion for strategic planning with a clear vision of long-term and short-term goals. That includes finding the right candidates, developing your workforce, and empowering your people to make it all happen.

A lot of this work is accomplished through a municipality HRIS system, but is your municipality’s HRIS the right candidate for the job?


Are You Building a Better Payroll & HR Experience for Your Employees?

You strive to create sustainable change within your community through the creation of policies and programs, working with other levels of government, and developing strategic work. To do so, you work with hundreds of employees that share your vision for building a better community, as well as building a better workplace.

As you manage multiple departments across your municipality, it is no easy task to track employee hours and compile reports. It can become challenging to schedule each department in a different system, in turn making it hard for employees to access their information.

With 60% of the public sector feeling like their HR Tech is being underutilized, you are not alone!

Every full-time employee must be entered manually in multiple systems. Tracking pension plan contributions and multiple pay rates become a cumbersome task.

As a result, 80% of business leaders like yourself agree that problems arise when there are different internal systems that don’t talk to each other, causing a lack of communication, bottlenecks, redundancy, or complacency.

But can you overcome these challenges?


Municipality HRIS Challenge #1: Lack of scheduling visibility between departments

Scheduling Across Multiple DepartmentsScheduling employees for each department of a municipality takes a significant amount of time.

Manual Time Collection & Tracking
Are you tracking each employee on multiple spreadsheets with an ever building a paper trail? Let’s say you need to different costs centres based on the type of work performed.

How do you manage that efficiently and accurately when working across various spreadsheets.

Here Comes the Seasonal Workforce

Summertime nears and everything is in bloom, and now it’s hiring season for all those seasonal workers. The burden of manual time collection is intensified with a casual workforce.

Now you have an influx of seasonal employees, volunteers, part-time and full-time, who may be working multiple positions in one day.

Are you hiring staff just to keep track of all that data? Simply because your current processes or systems aren’t accommodating for this scale of work?

Tracking Across Multiple GLs or Cost Centres

Keeping track of their hours throughout various cost centre spreadsheets can become a daunting task. Many organizations we speak with even find themselves hiring someone just to manage all that data entry which adds even more costs to your Payroll, and what happens if something isn’t tracked or costed correctly?! It doesn’t have to be this way.

Gain Better Visibility Across All Your Administrative Operations

With the right municipal HRIS system in place, you can integrate your time entry methods, municipal scheduling software, and Payroll for all departments.

Automate schedules, and you determine who has access to each group’s schedule. Not to mention you can assign specific job codes or positions to the appropriate GLs automatically! So that means less chance for error, more time spent doing meaningful work, and one less data entry clerk to hire.


Municipality HRIS Challenge #2: Manually applying changes to pension plan contributions each year

Managing Multiple Pension Plan Contributions for MunicipalitiesManaging pension plan contributions for every eligible employee requires extensive tracking. Considering each employee becomes eligible at different times throughout the year. How do you constantly monitor when to manually change the contribution rate?

Digitally Transform Your Compensation and Benefits

With the right technology driving your municipality’s compensation and benefits strategy, you can automate this function.

That means the contribution rate would automatically increase based on the rules and times you set up.

Managing all this in your municipality’s HRIS empowers your team so that you can compile pension contribution reports with ease.

Now you have greater visibility to confirm the total amounts your employees contribute align with the insurance or plan provider.


Municipality HRIS Challenge #3: HCM reporting spread across too many sources

Too Many Data Sources for your HRISToo Many Data Silos
Using fragmented systems for reporting tools, leads departments to become siloed. This lack of communication between municipal departments increases inconsistency and inefficiency. Each department has their own tools or software so neither system talks to each other.

What you end up with is a vicious cycle of manually entering data, creating countless spreadsheets, and the pain of trying to make this information accessible between departments.

It takes a significant amount of time to track each department’s spreadsheet, exporting them, and then compiling the reports manually.

The Single Source of Truth for Your Municipality’s HCM Reporting

By implementing strategic reporting for the entire workforce, manually compiling reports for all departments will no longer be a daunting task with one integrated system that talks to each other.


More Municipality HRIS Resources from Avanti

Over a dozen Canadian Municipalities use Avanti to pay, develop, and manage their employees.With Avanti as your all-in-one solution for Municipality HRIS, Payroll, and time tracking, every employee is part of your municipality’s people management success.


Municipality HRIS Challenge #4: Employees can’t easily access their Payroll & HR information

Municipal HRIS Employee ExperienceWith multiple systems, it is difficult for employees to access their information such as:

  • Pay statements
  • T4s and tax slips
  • Vacation time, entitlements, and time off requests;

On top of that, your department managers can’t produce or access the reports they need to see how their employees are doing and how well the department is operating.

As a result, this increases the administrative burden on those managers and your HR team.

All the Municipal Employee Information, All in One Place

What if employees and managers could access everything through a mobile app, with the data pulling in real-time. It provides ease of access for employees, who can track their information on demand and gain immediate fulfillment.


Municipality HRIS Challenge #5: Managing multiple pay rates

Municipal HRIS Management of Multiple Pay Rates for EmployeesMany municipalities have employees who work on rate grids that increase periodically or, after a certain number of hours. When an employee has two positions with different rates of pay and rate grids, this becomes increasingly difficult to track.

How is your Payroll team keeping track? Is this all maintained in one big spreadsheet? Manually tracking this information is a big challenge; it’s prone to errors and, worse yet, what happens if that file goes missing or gets deleted?!

Payroll can’t depend on working from a static spreadsheet that doesn’t move with the speed of your operations. So how do you ensure employees are moving to the next pay rate grid at the right time, without the need for constant monitoring?

Automated Step Increases for Your Municipal Employees

Automate those step increases with an HRIS that’s as dynamic as your municipality’s Payroll and HR operations. When you have the right tools in place, it is much easier to manage multiple positions with different pay rate grids. When your pay structure is complicated, you need a solution that makes managing pay easier and helps your Payroll team work smarter, not harder.


To Innovate Your HR Tech, Look Beyond the Municipality HRIS Niche

All-In-One HRIS system for HR and PayrollAs a Canadian municipality, you are faced with a lot of challenges when it comes to implementing new processes and managing change to improve the employee experience. However, that innovative spirit is sometimes bound by the limitations of your ‘end-to-end’ niche systems.

Having an integrated system that aligns with your operations will create an easier workflow for all employees across departments. That doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be labeled as public sector software.

Understand your needs. Identify what’s working, what isn’t, and what could be better. Here’s a checklist to get you started.

It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day tasks of managing a municipality, sometimes those tasks cause a detour in your strategic plan.

Take your municipality’s HR tech strategy from status quo to superhero.

Learn how the City of Brandon provides their 700+ employees with a better experience.

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