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Effective Date, New Starter Info & Policy Reminders

In edition 12, our last for the year, we will discuss the process for capturing onboarding and user information in an effective way and reminding our team of policy content:

System - Effective Dates function
Best Practice - Capturing new starter info
HR Operations - Policy reminders

Effective Dates

After reading up on the new Effective Date and Change History feature, this is what we found.

The feature was enabled last week for all systems, but the Effective Date option can be disabled via Admin > General > Configuration tab.

The Effective Date feature is only available to ELMO clients who have HR Core.

In a nutshell, any change made to a User’s Details tab or Profile tab can now have an effective from and to date set for that change and a reason provided for the change. This function doesn't apply to the Role tab.

The master Reason list can be added to or edited by Admins by going to:

In the profile tab, Admins are able to review changes before submitting and then the updated values, including effective date information, appear on the Change History and Employment History pages.

The Change History page lets admins manage completed, scheduled or failed user profile change transactions.

Scheduled transactions are changes that were recorded with a future effective date and are applied automatically to the user profile after midnight on the future date.

It’s important to note that the Effective To date does not revert values in the user profile.

Admins can delete and edit transactions in the Change History tab for users, but this does not revert or update any values. Deletions will only affect reporting.

At this stage Effective Dates cannot be reported on, other than via a csv download from the user's profile; however, this is definitely on the roadmap to be released by ELMO in the new year.

These are the articles to read, that explain the new features (links to the ELMO Help Centre page, which requires a log-in):

Capturing new starter information

When a new starter joins the organisation, and where a client has HR Core, it is best practice to capture as much information as possible via the user's profile.

A few of our clients are still holding on to forms for capturing some of the new starter's information. In some cases, this is because of operational reasons or needs; however, we will always encourage clients to conduct a likelihood assessment of their perceived risk and consider the onboarder's experience before making the decision to capture additional information from the onboarder outside of their profile.

If a client does not have HR Core, we will work with them to consolidate all commencement information into a single form with multiple sections (e.g. a form that contains TFN Declaration, Bank Details, Super Choice, Personal details, emergency contact etc).

An onboarder is far more likely to have a positive experience the easier it is for them to complete the information in a central place, without the need to download multiple online or paper forms and complete multiple steps.

For information that cannot be captured in an existing profile section, that additional information can be collected in two places - the diversity questions, or the user profile in a custom profile field.

An example of a question you might include in the diversity section

The benefit of using the diversity questions section, is that you can direct the onboarder to the specific part of their profile using the Update Profile Task. Once the new starter clicks on the task, they are directed to the fields in their profile that they need to complete. They need to fill out the required sections of their profile before the section is marked as "Done" and the user can submit (and close out) the Update Profile Task.

The Update Profile Task that will take an onboarder directly to the Diversity Questions section of their profile.

Where a question does not fit naturally into the section with diversity questions, the information can be captured in a custom profile field.

This is an example of a (checkbox) question that is captured as a custom profile field in the user's profile

While it is a little harder to direct an onboarder to edit their profile, via a direct link to that section (https://yourorg.elmotalent.com.au/controlpanel/edit-my-profile/) along with some instructions in a task, other relevant information can be collected.

It could be argued that this could be either a diversity question or a custom profile field.

Once you have decided on where the question should sit and who should be able to see and edit the information, you will need to contact ELMO Help Centre and raise a ticket outlining your request.

Once onboarded, if an employee goes back into their profile at any time and makes adjustments to their personal information, the change date will be captured in the Change History tab, outlining what was changed and by whom.

How you reinforce policy information

At this time of year, we often need to remind our team of the expected behaviour and conduct of an employee especially at work, at work-related events, or with work colleagues outside of the workplace.

So, as you know, and as we've discussed in prior editions; when you're issuing policies to current or incoming employees, there are three main ways you can do this.

You can use a form to present them with a link to a document on a SharePoint site, intranet, or wherever the document is stored, and then ask them to download, acknowledge the policy, and mark the form as them having read and understood the policy. The form can also contain questions about the policy to check understanding or seek feedback about the policy document itself.
For those clients who have the learning module, you can also deliver policies via an acknowledgement. This functionality has been designed in the learning module specifically for the purpose of gaining a document acknowledgement and why the recordable activity is called an acknowledgement. Within this section you can also force a download; and while you can't force them to read the document, you can at least make them download it before they acknowledge that they have read and understood the document.
Finally, you can use the policy content to develop an online course using Course Builder in which you can embed the policy. In the course, you can refer to the key points of the policy; you can include a policy acknowledgement quiz question that's required by everybody answering the quiz, as well as some additional questions that checks understanding of the content of the policy.

It is the third option that we would usually recommend, as it provides a better method for delivering the key policy information, checks understanding and links out to the policy all in one course.

Recently we've gone through the process for one of our clients where we took some collateral that they already had in the form of a policy and also some information in the handbook and combined that to issue a new learning course that was assigned to everybody.

That client had had some challenges with employees not following a procedure, which created some risk for the business. This was a really good way of making sure that those requirements in those standards were made very clear to the employee group by putting them all through this learning.

With regard to the process for developing the online learning course, our best practice is that we take that policy, we look it and then, using a Microsoft Whiteboard and the virtual sticky notes, we put together a storyboard mapping out what each of the slides is going to look like and the high level of what the content is and where it will likely come from out of the policy.

We also then consider where we're going to have interactive elements. We endeavour to have an interactive element every two to three slides so that it keeps the learner engaged.

An example storyboard created using Microsoft Whiteboard.

And so, when we're storyboarding, we also consider where we're going to have an interaction and potentially even what type of interaction will suit the content.

Once we put the storyboard together, it's then a case of jumping into Course Builder and starting to build the course. Obviously, if you've storyboarded first, that makes the course building process much quicker because you can essentially build all the slides based on the outlined post-it notes for each slide.

Then we go back and we can refer to where the content is within the policy or document that we're going to transfer the content to the slide, find an image and/or an interaction from another course.

Also, as a reminder from a best practice perspective, because ELMO invests time and effort into ensuring that their courses are up to date and compliant with legislation, if you have a policy that relates to a course that has already been pre-built by ELMO, we recommend that you start with that as the template. So even if you end up significantly changing it because there are specific things that you need to cover from your policy that wasn't in the pre-built ELMO course, you have still started with the base course that ELMO have pre-built and vetted. This means that if you are referring to legislation or particular practice, you'll know that the information contained in the pre-built course has been kept up to date by ELMO.

At this time of year any sex-based and sexual awareness training is a good idea.

This week we are assisting a client with regard to an incident that occurred at a Christmas party. So, this is the ideal time to reiterate to your people the importance of appropriate conduct in the workplace and also at workplace events.

There is sex-based and sexual harassment awareness training for both employees and for managers that has been pre-built and is available in the course library and you could use that as the basis for some learning that you roll out this week.

And inside the course you could put your respect in the workplace policy or whatever the policy is that relates to sexual harassment.