AACC changes system to track staff time off

The college will introduce a new system on July 1 to help employees keep track of their annual leave because the existing arrangement has created confusion among staff members, according to AACC’s executive director of human resources.

While employees have always accrued leave time incrementally—7.33 hours for each pay period—the self-service portal on MyAACC has displayed the total number of hours they would earn for the whole year, starting on July 1 with each new fiscal year. Some staff members have interpreted that to mean their year’s worth of leave was available to them on July 1, when, in fact, only the amount they accrued since July 1 was available for use, Suzanne Boyer explained.

“There’s a lot of confusion regarding actual leave balances,” Boyer said. “So when people look and they see their leave … what you actually see is a big, front-loaded [number]. But you don’t actually accrue it until you work throughout the entire fiscal year.”

The new system will display only the hours that the employee has already accrued rather than the full year’s benefit.

Boyer explained that in some instances, staff members took leave that they had not yet accrued and had to pay it back if they resigned from their jobs before actually earning those hours.

“People didn’t anticipate having to pay that leave back,” Boyer said.

Boyer said the new tracking system will eliminate the confusion about how much time off staff members have earned.

“I think that’s a good thing,” Cameron Caswell, a full-time reference librarian, said about the change. It “seems more fair, more correct, than what it was before … to eliminate that [confusion].”

“I was under the impression that we got all of our leave on July 1,” Ed Hall, an academic adviser at the college for more than 20 years, said. “Thank goodness I haven’t gone anywhere.”

Staff members still earn the same amount of annual and sick leave over the fiscal year, Boyer said.