Automating Employee Merit Increases

• City of Frisco, Texas
• Number of Employees: 1,440
• Population: 193,225
• Tyler Client Since: 2007
• Tyler Products: Munis, Tyler Content Manager
• Website: www.friscotexas.gov

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Challenges

For more than 15 years, the city of Frisco has processed employee merit increases based on performance reviews that take place on employees’ respective anniversary dates. However, because more than 80% of employee performance reviews are given late, these merit increases require the city’s payroll department to complete manual calculations of back pay owed. With more than 1,400 employees, this task was extremely time consuming for HR and payroll.

As a result, the city of Frisco looked for a solution that would help automate the system so it could process reviews and merit increases on time, remove back pay calculations by payroll, and eliminate more than 1,000 one-off personnel entries.

Solution

After a thorough review of available options, the city of Frisco decided to utilize the automated processing capabilities available in Tyler Technologies’ powerful ERP solution, Munis®.

“At Tyler’s annual user conference, Connect, we learned how to implement mass pay changes based on merit,” said Lauren Safranek, director of human resources at the city of Frisco, Texas. “The benefits of this approach were immediately apparent to us, so we started thinking about how to make it happen.”

The city of Frisco’s HR department worked for almost a year with executive staff to determine how to fairly move all employees receiving increases throughout the year to one review date, as well as to manage new employees so they would receive an increase within one year. As a result, the city now generates all pay band increases through Munis on the same review date.

Each department is responsible for uploading completed review forms to the Munis evaluation module and entering an employee’s merit increase on the recommendation tab. Workflow then pushes the evaluation to an HR generalist who confirms the rating and merit recommendation and posts the action. Once all evaluations are received, HR processes the pay band increase to give employees their annual merit increase.

“This process change takes into consideration transitioning current employees in a fair and equitable manner and assures new employees will receive their first increase within one year and then move to the annual schedule,” Safranek said.

Results

The city of Frisco met both employee and administrative goals through its use of Munis:

• Evaluations are now completed in a timely manner, so employees receive merit increases on a regular schedule in alignment with the fiscal year budget cycle.
• Administrative efficiency has been achieved via the mass merit system update — enabling the city to avoid manual entry; keep to a consistent schedule; and monitor, track, and remove retro merit pay processing.

While a significant amount of time was spent by staff to implement this new process, it is estimated that it will eliminate 100 hours annually spent processing reviews and merit increases. Additionally, it will eliminate 56 hours spent calculating back pay by finance and payroll departments.

“Using Munis to help update our review process created ripple effects,” said Safranek. “It created better alignment across departments so we could be more consistent in our rankings and merit increases. It also enabled us to be more transparent than ever before; employees understand when they will be reviewed, what they will be evaluated on, and they know that their reviews will happen on time.”