This is a continuation of our Solutions for Summertime HR Challenges post. 

The summer season tends to be a busier time of year for HR Managers and Payroll Administrators due to vacations, new employees and seasonal volunteers.  Below are a couple of things to keep in mind when bringing new employees and volunteers into your organization and ways your Sage HR Module can streamline the process.

Track Their Time
Whether an individual is a hired employee, volunteer or unpaid intern be sure to track their time.  Tracking time enables you to measure the investment an individual makes to your organization and enables you to recognize them for their contribution.   Volunteers love to be recognized.

What’s more there is a strong business case for tracking time.  Your funding organizations and many donors want to know what resources your organization has received and where the resources came from.  Volunteer time is both a resource and a measure of your organization’s effectiveness – demonstrating your ability to recruit and retain volunteers. Too often volunteer contributions are not tracked adequately. Without volunteer data your organization is not able to calculate the actual cost for hosting a gala or conducting a food drive.    Finally, properly tracking volunteer time can help you meet funding requirements.  For example:  if two volunteers spent a total of 200 hours serving as event planners for your gala, depending on your location, the value of their time could easily be $20,000. Tracking time and assigning a value to the time are measures worth watching.

The Sage HR module enables you to create different processing groups for full time, hourly, seasonal, intern or even volunteer groups.  You can configure the software to meet your organization’s needs, for instance you can allocate 50% of your employee’s time to Grant A and 50% to Grant B. Additionally, the Employee Web Services module means that individuals can securely enter and update their time, relieving the burden of tracking time from your HR Manager or Payroll Administrator.

Be Mindful of Age
If your nonprofit hires teens for summer jobs, be sure to review state laws for workers under 18.  They are often protected by child labor laws that limit the:

• Number of hours they can work, 
• Number of hours worked in a given time period, as well as,
• Types of tasks they are permitted to do for example: no heavy lifting or machinery.

The Sage HR module makes it clear to you whether or not a new employee is over 18 by first requiring you to enter their birthdate and then calculating the age for you automatically in the next field.  This will help you keep their age top of mind and enable you to determine whether their responsibilities should be limited. 

Want to learn more about the Sage Human Resources Management Module and Employee Web Services Module? Click here to register for our upcoming webcasts on May 26 or June 8, 2011 with Bonnie McLain, Senior Solution Consultant at Sage. 

It seems like it was yesterday when I reached out to those affected by severe weather. I can’t believe how little time has passed and Hurricane Season has yet to begin.  With fires across Texas, rising flood waters of the Mississippi and another devastating tornado in Joplin, Missouri – sadly, it seems as though “2012” is already here.   

On behalf of Sage Nonprofit, please know that our thoughts are with you.  In the event that you have been affected by one of the natural disasters, we have several options for helping nonprofits affected by the storm quickly get up and running.   

We send you our very best, and encourage anyone impacted to reach out to us for help 866-564-2378.

Editor’s Note:
Bob Lewis, this week’s guest blogger, has been working with our leadership team at Sage Nonprofit Solutions to guide them through exercises using Strength Finder 2.0. The program was found to be so valuable we are now rolling it out company wide.  Check out Bob's post below. 

Have you ever been told you do something extremely well?  Maybe at one of your kid’s school functions you excel at selling raffle tickets.  You could have been told at a party that you meet people easily and everyone feels comfortable around you.  All too often we shrug off such compliments and move on to the next group or volunteer activity.

During the past decade, John Maxwell and others at the Gallup, Center for Creative Leadership, have been pushing the strength movement as a way of developing our strengths and managing our gaps.  I have found much of the information to be exciting and truly a new way of managing our talents and of others. 

Be careful….not all cultures are ready for strengths as a company wide initiative.  It takes time and careful planning to ensure that people don’t receive a label or become leadership psychologists.  It takes great leadership, risk, and a love for people to help people grow with their strengths.  So, here are my suggestions: 

• Take a leadership assessment that evaluates your strengths.  Strength Finders 2.0, Creative Leadership-Skill Scope, Meyers Briggs all can be good tools to validate your current strengths as a person.  
• Start talking to people in your groups and asking, “Where do we want to be in five years with our talents?” “Who will carry on our great company mission?” 
• Ask yourself this one question—when do I shine at work?  Narrow it down to one behavior and share it with a colleague.  Ask them to validate if it is true or not. 

Stay tuned for more insights from Bob Lewis, principal of LTC, Lewis Training and Consulting, LLC and Lead Training Consultant at Texas Parks and Wildlife.  With more than 25 years of experience in education, human resources & leadership/management, Bob has worked in helping organizations develop talent management processes such as selecting talent using behavioral interviewing, coaching and counseling employees, setting up mentoring programs, building leadership assessments, developing and implementing leadership programs and certifications, retention and exit strategies, and many other areas related to employee and leadership development.  Bob earned his B.A. in Education from the University of Nebraska at Kearney and his master's degree in Educational Management from the University of Houston.

The Memorial Day Holiday Weekend will be here soon and with its arrival comes a unique set of HR and Payroll challenges.   Now is the time to prepare for employee vacations and unavoidable summer “sick days”.   To ensure there is adequate coverage for your nonprofit, ask yourself, “Is the vacation policy working?” Recall last summer, was there a particular time when a project was delayed or you were short staffed? If the answer is yes, then you may want to consider incorporating the following best practices into your vacation policy:

• Ask employees to coordinate their vacation schedules with each other before they submit their requests for time off to their supervisor.
  
• Encourage employees to develop a coverage plan that details and prioritizes the work they will need help with during their absence.  A coverage plan provides team members with an expectation and understanding of the workload they will carry while a colleague is on vacation.
• Once schedules have been worked through at the team level, require employees to seek time off in advance and receive approval from their immediate supervisor or team lead.
• Empower employees and managers with the ability to submit, track and review requests for vacation by using an integrated, accessible HR Management or Payroll system. 

Including these best practices in your vacation policy and procedures takes the burden of coordination off your HR/Payroll department and ensures that individuals are responsible and accountable for coverage during their vacation.

Of course, no matter how much planning goes into ensuring adequate coverage in the summer months, there will always be unexpected absences.  The symptoms of summer “sick days” are easily recognizable. The first symptom is a great weather day and the second symptom is when an otherwise healthy employee calls in unexpectedly with Friday fever.  Left unchecked repeat sick day offenders affect team productivity and morale as workloads unexpectedly increase for team members.  To avoid this scenario be sure to have a policy in place to confirm illnesses in a consistent manner.  Keeping a calendar view of employee days off helps to quickly reveal a pattern of repeat, unexpected absences.  Managers are then empowered to address the issue one-on-one.  Or, if there is an epidemic of absenteeism during warm weather months, you may want to consider implementing a "Paid Time Off" policy that doesn't distinguish between vacation and sick time. 

Ideally your HR or Payroll system will 1) provide managers with visibility into employee vacation days and absences and 2) enable individuals to self manage their time whether its vacation requests or entering sick days once they have been taken. 

Do you have any tips for dealing with summer HR challenges? If so let us know by commenting below.   

Want to learn more about functions and tools for streamlining summer schedules? 

Sage Fund Accounting has two new modules that can help: Human Resource Management and Employee Web Services. Click here to register for our upcoming webcasts on May 26 or June 8, 2011 with Bonnie McLain, Senior Solution Consultant at Sage.