Campus communication - May 2, 2018

Dear Colleagues,

As a reminder, we are moving from PeopleSoft to Workday because PeopleSoft will not be supported in the future and it will cost more to maintain than Workday, which is a superior cloud-based platform. As we implement Workday, we are evaluating all of our businesses processes to ensure an efficient and coordinated approach among the three participating institutions: the University of New Orleans, Southeastern and Louisiana Tech. After a careful analysis, we have determined that one key area we will need to alter is our payroll schedule.

In order to reduce the amount of time that staff spends on correcting payroll-related items, all three universities will drastically reduce the number of distinct payroll cycles across academic, unclassified and classified employees. The University of New Orleans currently has 74 distinct payroll cycles. There are many benefits to streamlining pay frequencies, and the change will put all three UL System Workday institutions on the same schedule. Failure to decrease the number of payroll periods will leave us vulnerable to increased rates of inaccurate leave entry and will require inefficient blackout periods in order to correct payroll errors. The move to Workday is prompting us to standardize our processes as well as employ additional best practices throughout our institutions.

Academic and unclassified employees are currently paid on a semimonthly (twice a month) basis. Starting in August 2018, academic employees will be paid monthly and unclassified employees will be paid biweekly (every two weeks), meaning they will receive 26 paychecks per year, instead of 24. We recognize that this change will be a deviation from your previous payroll schedule, so we want to give you plenty of time to plan for it. There is no change in frequency for classified employees, who will continue to be paid biweekly, although we will have to shift the weeks they are paid.

While the HR and Financials phase of Workday does not go live until the summer of 2019, we need to incorporate these payroll changes well in advance so that we can do parallel testing alongside PeopleSoft and ensure everyone continues to be paid once we have launched the new platform.

If you have any questions about payroll frequency, please email businessaffairs@uno.edu. As we have noted from the outset of the Workday project, this will bring significant change to the way we operate but it will also be a huge upgrade for our university.

Sincerely,

John Nicklow, President
Mahyar Amouzegar, Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs
Gregg Lassen, Vice President for Business Affairs