Learning in Small Bites

General
Extra
Technical

General

People working in HR information roles will know that there are a variety of reports that are required throughout the year. Many of those can be variations on themes about the organisation's staff profile.

An approach to dealing with the volume of reporting is to identify a set of questions that are regularly asked and publish those profiles periodically throughout the year. These can be described as profiles of the organisation at a point in time.

There can be a few benefits to publishing point in time profiles online:

There is one official source of numbers that everyone references and quotes.
Some legislative requirements to publish data can be met.
Colleagues can lift the information from the profiles and include them in documents.
In this age of hand held technology the information can be accessed 24 hours a day seven days per week.

Extra

Profiling is much more complex than just putting together a few reports like the ones below. Setting up a template of what is required and then programming your computer to draw the charts at a particular point in time involves initial effort then thereafter it can be a maintenance task to run the reports each period. When determining what to put into point in time reports it is a decent idea to first look at legislation and best practice guidance to see what information there is a duty to produce.

An example of some requirements in Europe can be found in the European Commission Legislation and Equality Plans guidance.

With a basic HR system it is reasonably straightforward to categorise staff by one or more staff groups.

With an intergrated HR/payroll system it is possible to create accurate profiles based on pay.

Once the legislative requirements have been addressed, it is a good idea to see what information departmental colleagues need for business planning, external reporting and bid preparation. It is likely that the same type of information is needed across departments and as such it should be relatively straightforward to produce a set of profiles for departments to use.

In the UK a benefit from the above approach can arise when dealing with some Freedom of Information Act requests.

Technical

The best advice we can think of is create a table of data on the point in time date that holds all of the information that will feed the profile charts.

We suggest this simply because in large organisations live data will continue to change for a variety of legitimate reasons:

contractual changes
new starters brought on to the system - sometimes late
leavers closed on the system - sometimes after their leave date but before the payroll deadline

A report writer must therefore have a freeze point and report users will need to accept that a point in time profile is just that. It is the organisation's data frozen at a particular point in time.

Key Legislation Underpinning Employment Contracts

The Employment Rights Act 1996 underpins contracts of employment in the United Kingdom.

The terminolgy to use is a written statement of particulars of employment. This summarises the main particulars of the employment relationship and must according to the legislation be given within two months of the person's first day of service.

Whilst the law states two months it would actually be poor form to encourage a person to give up an existing job or prior state of affairs without actually presenting them with the contractual terms of their new role until two months after it has started. The law is quite flexible but if we are truly focused on the quality of the engagement with the prospective member of staff the written statement of particulars really should be issued as soon as possible after the decision to appoint has been made.

Issuing the written statement of particulars at the earliest point means the person is aware of what they being contracted to and can clarify any uncertainties before accepting. Starting a relationship in this manner where possible helps ensure a more harmonious contract.

The key aspects of a written statement of particulars are as follows:

The names of the employer and employee.
The title of the job which the employee is employed to do or a brief description of the work for which they are employed.
Where the employment is not intended to be permanent, the period for which it is expected to continue.
Either the place of work or, where the employee is required or permitted to work at various places, an indication of that and of the address of the employer.
The date when the employment began.
The date on which the employee’s period of continuous employment began (taking into account any employment with a previous employer which counts towards that period). The continuous employment date is often the same as the start date. Where it is earlier this may give the new starter certain employment rights that come with longer service.
The scale or rate of remuneration/pay or the method of calculating this.
The intervals at which remuneration is paid (that is, weekly, monthly or other specified intervals).
Any terms and conditions relating to hours of work.
Entitlement to holidays, including public holidays, and holiday pay.
How incapacity for work due to sickness or injury will be handled, including any provision for sick pay.
Pensions and pension schemes.
The length of notice which the employee is obliged to give and entitled to receive to terminate his contract of employment.
Any collective agreements which directly affect the terms and conditions of the employment. In large organisations trade unions negotiate with the employer on behalf of staff, the agreements they reach with the employer are called collective agreements.

Key to the Organisation Chart

An explanation of the symbols used

	This icon represents a unit that has child units. Click it to see the child units.
	This icon means that a unit has its child units visible. Click to close the child units.
Unit name	Click on a unit to get more information on it. If the unit has child units it will open a page showing them too.
	Clicking this icon takes you to some basic theory on organisation charts and structure.
	This button is Collapse All and when clicked closes all units that have been opened up.
	This button is Expand All and when clicked opens all units so you will see every aspect of the tree.

Point in Time Profiles

What we have below is a rather simplistic example of how some basic information can be displayed on our fictional organisation the University of Small Bites. You will notice we have only shown some information on average pay and age bands profiled by sex. The data in relational databases is such that the information which can be aggregated is quite vast. This can then be sliced into all manner of more granular detail.

An ideal is to try to deliver information in a manner that can be accessed using hand held devices whenever users need it.

In HR information offices a huge amount of time can be saved if we determine what the organisation needs on a regular basis. This information can then be placed online at specific points in the year for colleagues to use. We call these Point in Time reports. It is also a good idea to ensure that charts can be easily saved by users for use in documents of their own.

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