In the Spotlight

ESS TIME UPDATE: For Biweekly employees and their supervisors!

Thanksgiving Break

UNL will be closed Thursday, Nov. 27 and 28, except for essential designated operations. Biweekly employees eligible for holiday pay, should enter HOL in ESS TIME on both of these dates. If you are not eligible for holiday pay, please talk to your supervisor about working those hours earlier in the week and enter the time when worked. Employees not eligible to receive holiday pay may instead choose to request vacation leave through ESS LEAVE, or if you don’t want to use vacation leave, you may enter unpaid leave (UNPL) on either or both of these dates. Please keep in mind employees selecting unpaid leave as an option do not accrue leave on those dates.

Holiday Break

UNL will be closed Wednesday, Dec. 24, 2014 through Friday, Jan. 2, 2015, except for essential designated operations. All biweekly employees will be responsible for entering their own hours (via ESS TIME or ESS LEAVE) over the shutdown including holiday, floating holiday, vacation, nonpaid, etc.

Dec. 12-Dec. 25:
Biweekly employees, please ensure all time has been entered, released and approved by your supervisor no later than Dec. 22 so that you will receive the proper pay for the Dec. 12-25 period. For this two week period, employees need to enter regular hours worked as usual, then estimate hours you anticipate working on Dec. 22 and 23 or request Vacation or Sick Leave through the proper process of ESS LEAVE REQUEST. Estimating hours is an exception to the usual policy of not entering hours worked until they’ve actually been worked. If you estimate incorrectly, please contact Carrie Brownyard immediately to determine the proper adjustment. Also please pay special attention to Dec. 24 – Floating Holiday (FLH) and Dec. 25 – Holiday (HOL) or vacation (VAC) or unpaid leave (UNPL), if you’re not eligible to receive holiday/floating holiday pay.

Dec. 26-Jan. 2:
We are currently asking staff to delay the entry of the hours for Dec. 26 through Jan. 2 until we return from break on Jan. 5. Due to the way the holiday falls this year, there is a chance the president (and then the state of Nebraska) will declare Dec. 26 a federal holiday, and hourly staff will be asked to use Administrative (Admin) leave for this day instead of a floating holiday. This would then affect the number of hours of vacation or unpaid leave a staff member would have to use during closedown. By delaying, there will hopefully be less corrections required to hours entered and staff won’t have to delete or request any changes.

We will provide more information on how to enter hours or request leave as soon as we know more about any additional federal holiday declared for Dec. 26.

If you have any questions, please call Donna Hahn (472-3866) or Carrie Brownyard (472-8674).