Progress in New Employee Onboarding

Colleagues,

In previous years, the start of the fall semester has presented challenges with onboarding new employees, particularly for our graduate students. Through your help and the process improvements implemented by Human Resource Management, our academic units, the Shared Service Centers and others, we saw dramatic improvements last year in getting our new employees and reappointed employees registered in the system, and we are seeing even fewer issues this year.

Thank you for your attention to submitting information about those new employees in a timely fashion and for encouraging those employees to address the system prompts as quickly as possible. If you have more new hires or reappointments that need to be initiated, please submit their information as soon as possible so those individuals can complete the onboarding process and be paid on time. This is particularly important for graduate student employees, whose tuition bills become due at the start of the semester. Once a student employee’s onboarding is complete their tuition waiver is in place, however the timing of the bill and posting of the waiver can create confusion and temporary hardship for the individual. We are doing what we can to keep this from happening to students, but if it does happen please help us ensure graduate students complete the onboarding process as quickly as possible and encourage them to monitor Enroll & Pay for updates to their accounts.

Together, with your help, we can ensure the impact on all our new and returning employees is minimal. For any issues or delays, please consider the following:

• The onboarding system allows staff to see exactly where delays in processing are occurring. If you receive a notification from your Shared Service Center about an onboarding delay with an employee, please address it as promptly as possible.
• If you have concerns about the progress of a specific individual for any reason, please reach out to Associate Director of Human Resources for Recruiting and Compensation Angie Loving, who will work with HRM, Payroll and the SSCs to expedite the onboarding process as much as possible for that individual.
• New employees affected by late onboarding, especially those who have responded quickly to prompts from the onboarding process, can sometimes get financial help in the form of a loan advance on their pay.

Progress on this year’s onboarding activities reflects an almost incredible turnaround from two years ago. Thank you for the work you and your team have undertaken to make this happen. Every year our staff bring forward new ideas to help us improve our processes. I appreciate your willingness to partner with our campus offices. It’s important that we continue to work hard to ensure all new employees are promptly welcomed into the KU community.

Carl

Carl Lejuez
Interim Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor