In the Spotlight

Dec. 2, 2014
Dec. 2, 2014

Holiday leave details

All leave-eligible faculty and staff, please scroll down for important holiday closedown instructions (split between monthly paid and biweekly paid employees).

 

Electronic time update

Effective immediately, users submitting leave in Firefly's Employee Self Service (ESS) will be able to request vacation or sick leave for the calendar year 2015. For the remainder of 2014, employees will be limited to requesting up to 40 hours of vacation leave and up to 40 hours of sick leave for 2015.

When viewing the remainder balance, the information will not reflect your correct balances. This is because your balance will not reflect requests submitted for 2015 until the carry forward balance is moved to the new year in January 2015. The warning message shown below is legitimate because the leave balances are not yet recognized in 2015, but will not impact the processing of your request.

 
Sample leave request prompt.
Sample leave request prompt.

Holiday closedown payroll instructions

UNL will be closed Wednesday, Dec. 24, 2014 through Friday, Jan. 2, 2015, except for essential designated operations.

 

Monthly paid employees – 12 month faculty and staff

Any time a leave-eligible employee does not work, the hours must be accounted for as vacation/sick/etc. Normally, vacation/sick leave MUST be entered by the employee in ESS Leave. For the closedown time period of Dec. 24, 2014 – Jan. 2, 2015, Payroll will automatically post floating holiday, holiday and vacation hours. Based on an edit report from Payroll, the Business Center will individually contact an employee if they do not have enough vacation balance for the closedown. If an employee is taking vacation on days other than during the closedown, this would follow the standard process and be submitted through ESS Leave (i.e., Dec. 22 and/or Dec. 23 or after Jan. 2).

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. This would then affect the number of hours of vacation or unpaid leave an employee would have to use during closedown. If this happens, payroll will automatically adjust, therefore no action will be required by employees.

Please contact Donna Hahn (472-3866) or Tammie Herrington (472-2390), if you have questions.

 

For biweekly employees and their supervisors

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).

 
Originally published December 3, 2014 - Submit an Item