Quinnipiac University: Educators Become Better Managers

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Quinnipiac University: Educators Become Better Managers

6/27/2003

Over its 73-year existence, Quinnipiac University (Q.U.) in Hamden, Conn., has seen its workforce grow and evolve in its composition. Today, the school's employee roster is made up of full- and part-time faculty, administrative staff, two groups of unionized workers (clerical and facilities), 900 work-study students, employees in a university affiliated polling institute, along with workers in security and its on-campus health center.

As part of its strategic plan to keep all aspects of its campus and administration up to the most recent standards in automation and Web-based technology, Quinnipiac began investigating ways to improve the labor management process for all of its 1,400 employees in the fall of 2000.

"We had really reached the limit of what we were able to accomplish in a paper-based environment," says Anna Spragg, Quinnipiac's director of HR. "Our hourly employees were looking for services like direct deposit, and we just could not turn around that many manual timesheets in time to meet the banks' deadlines."

Students who spent the morning in classes learning to create the technology of the future began questioning why they reverted to pencil and paper when it came time to report their work-study hours. "They really disliked the paper timesheets," Spragg says. "Q.U. students are so up on all of the new technology and what's possible, it was hard to argue with them."

Moving Forward
With the administration's encouragement, Spragg, along with a multi-disciplined committee from Quinnipiac's HR, payroll, and IT departments began looking for ways to modernize their labor management processes. One of their first stops was the university's Facilities Department, whose employees used another vendor's timeclock for capturing time and attendance data.

After talking to supervisors in the Facilities Department, they requested a demonstration of this vendor's other capabilities, along with a due-diligence review of competing vendors. After several presentations, the committee selected Kronos' Workforce Timekeeper application—the integral component within Kronos' Workforce Central suite—though it meant sacrificing the investment the university made in the other system.

"We came to the conclusion that [the system used by facilities] wouldn't do everything we wanted," explains Spragg. "We had a very solid infrastructure in place—Sun Microsystems servers running the Datatel platform—so we wanted something that would integrate easily and would have the flexibility to grow and evolve as our employee base d'es."

Helping cement the committee's decision was an extensive list of references in the academic world. "Kronos came highly recommended," Spragg says. "They had a good reputation and demonstrated that they had an excellent product that could handle the level of information we had in mind."

Phased-In Implementation
Quinnipiac realized that employees are often resistant to change—even when that change promises more convenience and better equity in the implementation of university policies. For this reason, the administration adopted a phased-in approach to rolling out the Kronos application.