Key Takeaways: SS NP for OD for series

Executive Summary

The webinar demonstrates how Banner’s Human Resources module streamlines higher ed employment management by delivering institution-wide visibility, employee self-service, error reduction, and end-to-end digital workflows. Leaders can forecast retirements, assess departmental impact, and validate compensation with configurable dashboards, enabling proactive succession and recruitment planning without manual data hunts. Managers track progress on goals, tasks, and cross-training to ensure execution. Employees access a mobile-friendly dashboard for leave, pay stubs, personal data (including preferred name and pronouns), and role-based activities, reducing inquiries and turnaround times. The My Team view supports workforce oversight and balance, while electronic personnel action forms, Salary Planner, and unique Faculty Load and Compensation (FLAC) automate faculty assignments, contract creation, compensation calculations, and job application into Banner, eliminating rekeying and improving accuracy and accountability across HR and payroll processes.

Speakers

Tessa Grefenstette, Associate Director, Search & Evolution

Key Takeaways

1. Centralized HR Insights: Centralized HR dashboards provide real-time, department-level insights—such as retirement eligibility forecasts and compensation ranges—to inform succession planning and budget decisions.

2. Empowered Employee Self-Service: Employee self-service reduces inquiry volume and processing time by enabling access and updates to pay stubs, leave balances, personal profiles (including preferred names and pronouns), and W-2s across devices.

3. Streamlined Manager Workflows: Role-based views like My Team and My Activities streamline managerial tasks with quick access to employment history, leave data, contact info, timesheet approvals, and activity initiation, improving oversight and responsiveness.

4. Digitized Workflow Governance: Electronic personnel action forms (ePAFs), Salary Planner, and task/goal tracking digitize workflows, eliminate duplicate data entry, reduce errors, and provide auditability for approvals and performance progress.

5. Automated Faculty Compensation: Faculty Load and Compensation (FLAC) automates faculty contract creation, overload assessment, and pay calculations using institution-defined rules, with end-to-end verification and job application into the system to prevent rekeying.

Key Quote

With the introduction of Banner, we'll see what the future will look like and how these challenges, which are all connected, can be overcome.

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Webinar

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FAQs: SS NP for OD for series

Frequently Asked Questions

SS NP for OD for series

Overview and Key Challenges Addressed

What core institutional challenges does the solution address?

It addresses four connected challenges: 1) providing a holistic, data-driven view across the institution and by department/employee type; 2) enabling employee self-service to reduce inquiries and wait times; 3) minimizing errors to ensure accurate decisions and correct pay; and 4) eliminating paper-based, duplicative processes through electronic workflows and tracking.

How does the platform help leaders make confident, data-driven decisions?

Dashboards summarize workforce data (e.g., retirement eligibility, compensation ranges) by department and time horizon, letting administrators filter, forecast, and quickly identify areas needing action. Leaders can immediately see which departments will be impacted by retirements in 1–5 years, assess compensation by range position, and plan with HR, Budget, and department heads.

Workforce Planning and Succession

How can HR forecast retirements and plan recruitment or succession?

Retirement dashboards use institution-defined rules (minimum years of service and age) to show current and future eligibility. Leaders can filter by department (e.g., Chemistry, International Programs) to see upcoming impacts, validate succession plans with chairs, and assess whether compensation adjustments are needed before engaging Budget.

Can compensation insights inform budgeting decisions during workforce planning?

Yes. Compensation views show where employees sit within pay ranges. For example, filtering on a department revealed all staff at or above 90% of range, indicating no immediate need for additional salary funding—streamlining coordination with Budget during recruitment planning.

How are succession and cross-training activities tracked?

Department heads can assign and monitor goals, tasks, and targets related to critical functions (e.g., faculty load and compensation cross-training). Progress indicators and due dates provide at-a-glance status, and weighted subtasks roll up to overall goal completion for transparent follow-up in meetings.

Employee Self-Service and Manager Tools

What information can employees access and update on the Employee Dashboard?

Employees can view leave balances and accrual history, current and prior-year pay stubs (printable and branded), and tax forms when available. In My Profile, they can see hire date, addresses, phone numbers, emergency contacts, and update items like preferred first name and pronouns—reducing HR data entry and speeding resolution.

Is the Employee Dashboard configurable and mobile-friendly?

Yes. It has a responsive design for desktop and mobile (e.g., iPad). Institutions can configure which tiles or sections are emphasized seasonally—for example, automatically surfacing tax documents (like W-2s) when released.

What tools are available for managers to support their teams?

The My Team view presents an organizational hierarchy with each team member’s employment snapshot, leave balances, hire/birth dates, and contact information (including emergency contacts). Managers can monitor leave usage and succession considerations and, where applicable, drill into indirect reports.

Which common activities can employees and managers perform directly?

From My Activities, users can initiate and approve timesheets, leave reports, and leave requests. Role-based access lets designated staff act as Pay Stub or Benefits Administrators to see the same view as employees, ensuring a single source of truth when resolving questions.

Process Efficiency and Error Reduction

How does the system eliminate paper-based HR processes?

It replaces paper with electronic personnel action forms (ePAFs) that use institution-defined templates and approval workflows. Transactions are initiated by the people closest to the information, routed for approvals, and fully tracked—removing re-keying, reducing delays, and lowering risk of errors.

Can departments model pay and budget changes online?

Yes. Salary Planner supports online analysis and modeling of projected salaries for direct reports and department-level fiscal year position budgeting, enabling faster, more accurate planning aligned with HR and Finance.

Faculty Load and Compensation (FLAC)

What is FLAC and why is it valuable for higher education?

FLAC (Faculty Load and Compensation) is a higher-ed–specific tool for managing faculty contracts, calculating compensation (including overloads) using institution-defined rules, and ensuring consistency and accuracy across assignments. It connects academic assignments to payroll without duplicate data entry.

Which roles are involved in the FLAC process and what do they do?

• Faculty Administrator: Builds the faculty profile, assigns instructional and non-instructional workload, verifies contract types and rates, and locks final compensation. • HR Administrator: Confirms employment/position details and creates the contract based on configured compensation rules. • Faculty Member: Reviews and acknowledges the contract and any attached documents.

How does FLAC improve accuracy and reduce manual work?

Compensation is calculated from centrally defined rules, and changes to course assignments are flagged for review. Once verified and locked, the job is applied directly into the system, eliminating re-keying into HR/Payroll and reducing the chance of errors while maintaining an auditable trail.

What visibility does FLAC provide during assignment changes?

Both faculty and administrators can view contract types, course assignments, and compensation details. If an assignment changes, the system highlights the impact so administrators can validate and update before finalizing payment.

Practical Outcomes and Action Items

What tangible benefits can institutions expect?

Faster response times to employee inquiries, reduced HR/Payroll workload from self-service updates, fewer data-entry errors, improved compliance and auditability, and better alignment of workforce and budget planning through integrated analytics and workflows.

What are recommended next steps to realize these benefits?

• Configure retirement eligibility rules and departmental dashboards for forecasting. • Define approval templates for ePAFs and train initiators/approvers. • Enable and promote employee self-service (profiles, pay stubs, leave). • Roll out My Team for managers to support leave oversight and succession. • Implement Salary Planner for upcoming budget cycles. • Define and test FLAC rules before an academic term to streamline faculty contracting.

Blog: From Insight to Execution: Turning Institutional Workforce Data into Measurable Action

Higher education HR and payroll teams face a mandate to move faster, cut errors, and elevate the employee experience—without adding headcount. Meeting that mandate requires a single source of truth that connects workforce planning, compensation, benefits, and performance, giving leaders confidence in today’s decisions and tomorrow’s plans. The urgency is real: retiring employees take institutional knowledge with them, paper-based workflows slow responsiveness and create risk, and fragmented systems force teams to rekey data and chase answers.

The solution is end-to-end visibility paired with true self-service and automation. A unified platform that centralizes employment data, workflows, and role-based tasks enables HR to shift from clerical work to strategy. An employee-centric dashboard that brings together leave, pay, personal profile, and task management reduces administrative overhead and empowers staff to self-serve. With manager views and configurable activities for payroll, HR, and academic operations, institutions establish a reliable system of record that accelerates decisions, shortens cycle times, and strengthens data integrity across the organization.

From Institution-Wide Insight to Actionable Workforce Execution

Start with an institution-wide view of the workforce and the ability to segment by college, department, role type, and employment class. When leaders can slice data on headcount, retirement eligibility, compensation bands, and vacancy forecasts, they can prioritize succession and recruitment with evidence. Modeling retirement eligibility by age and years of service today versus five years out shows which departments will be affected and when, enabling timely recruitment, targeted knowledge transfer, and budget alignment. Configurable dashboards equip leaders for meetings with board members, presidents, and department chairs by surfacing the metrics that matter—department impacts, compensation positions relative to ranges, and projected gaps—so decisions are fast and defensible.

Precision then shifts to the department level. Leaders convert workforce risks into specific actions, owners, and timelines through structured goal and task management tied to performance. Department chairs can assign high-priority tasks—documenting critical processes or cross-training on faculty load and compensation—set due dates, and track progress in real time from any device. Goals break into measurable tasks and targets that roll up to clear completion percentages, creating transparency without extra status meetings. Succession planning and process resilience become a managed, visible workflow. As updates come in, HR and department leaders see what’s on track, what’s slipping, and where to intervene, ensuring institutional knowledge is captured and workloads are sustainable.

Empowering employees to self-serve is equally important. When staff can access benefits details, pay information, and transaction status at any time, HR response times shrink and case volumes drop. Self-service reduces tickets and improves data quality by eliminating rekeying and cutting handoffs that introduce errors. That accuracy feeds payroll, compensation, and analytics, where small mistakes are expensive. Automated routing, digital approvals, and auditable histories replace paper shuffles with streamlined, compliant processes. The result is fewer delays, fewer corrections, and faster turnaround for high-impact transactions—new hires, pay changes, leave adjustments, and position updates.

A strong employee dashboard delivers immediate visibility into the most-used information: leave balances, pay history, and personal profile data. Employees can drill into current and prior-year balances, see accrual breakdowns, and resolve questions without contacting central offices. Branded pay stub access across multiple years eliminates repeat requests and supports audits and self-service printing. Profile controls let staff confirm hire dates, addresses, phone numbers, and emergency contacts, then make updates through intuitive actions. Options like preferred first name and personal pronouns promote inclusive experiences and reduce HR data entry by shifting simple changes to the individual, with updates reflected immediately downstream.

Manager productivity scales when the same platform offers a consolidated My Team view. A vertical org snapshot gives leaders quick access to direct and indirect reports, including employment history, leave balances, and key dates such as hire anniversaries and birthdays. This visibility supports succession planning, workload balancing, and recognition without system hopping or ad hoc reports. Contact and emergency information are available for urgent needs, and aggregated leave summaries help managers monitor time-off trends even when they aren’t the approver. Because the data comes from the same model employees use, discussions and decisions happen faster with fewer discrepancies.

Role-based activities centralize operational tasks in one place, aligned to governance. Employees initiate timesheets, leave reports, and requests; approvers act on them from the same screen. Administrators can view pay and benefits exactly as employees see them, accelerating troubleshooting with a shared frame of reference. Electronic personnel action forms let knowledge holders initiate transactions using predefined templates and approval chains, creating fully auditable workflows with clear ownership. Salary planning tools enable online analysis and modeling of projected salaries and position budgets, improving fiscal discipline and scenario planning without offline spreadsheets or duplicate entry.

Faculty Load and Compensation (FLAC) shows how specialized processes benefit from embedded rules and end-to-end automation. Faculty administrators set profiles and assign instructional and non-instructional duties; HR ensures employment and position data are payment-ready; contracts generate from configurable compensation rules that enforce policy. Course changes are flagged automatically, compensation recalculates based on defined logic, and final records are locked before faculty acknowledge contracts in self-service. Supporting documents attach for record-keeping, and once confirmed, job data flows directly into the core system—no rekeying, no version control issues, and a complete audit trail. Cycle times shorten, pay outcomes stay consistent, and academic schedules, HR, and payroll stay aligned.

Bringing institutional visibility, department-level execution, and employee self-service into a single, configurable hub creates a durable operating model for HR and payroll in higher education. Leaders get real-time insight to plan retirements and recruitment; departments turn plans into measurable actions; employees find answers without office hours; and payroll runs on clean, timely data. The result is fewer inquiries, faster turnaround, higher data accuracy, stronger compliance, and credible decision support—freeing teams to focus on governance and optimization instead of manual processing. For institutions with complex roles and academic pay structures, rule-driven tools like FLAC replace high-risk, spreadsheet-heavy tasks with repeatable, transparent workflows. Institutions that make this shift build workforce resilience, protect against knowledge loss, and scale seamlessly with the academic calendar, fiscal cycles, and evolving expectations—elevating HR from transactional support to strategic partner.