HR Update - FY 22 Issue 04

Issue Date: February 16, 2022

In This Issue

• IRIS Advanced Go Live on Tuesday, February 22, 2022
• Importance of the I-9 (Employment Eligibility Verification) When Appointing a New Employee
• Performance Management Updates
• Reminder for Flex Promotion Processing
• Continued Maintenance of Supervisory Hierarchy
• Reminder About Mandatory Posters

IRIS Advanced Go Live on Tuesday, February 22, 2022

IRIS Advanced, the upgrade to the IRIS HRM, Employee Self Service (ESS), IRIS Financial/Procurement (FIN/PRO), and Vendor Self Services (VSS) modules, will be going live on Tuesday, February 22, 2022. All the functionality that is available today in IRIS will continue to be available in IRIS Advanced including some added features such as expanded browser compatibility, improved user interface design, enhanced search feature, and the ability to customize table views. With the upgrade to IRIS Advanced, we will have a unified application for IRIS use with a single website address (URL) for access, users will not have to keep track of different URLs for their access to HRM, FIN/PRO, and ESS.

As we are transitioning to this new IRIS experience IRIS HRM and IRIS FIN/PRO will be unavailable from the afternoon of Thursday, February 17th until the morning of February 22nd. During this time the Division of Finance (DOF) IRIS Project team will be working diligently around the clock to move data from one system to the next. Also impacted during the cutover is ALDER access, ALDER will be unavailable starting the evening of Friday, February 18, through Sunday, February 27.

During this downtime, we highly recommend that all employees who take action in IRIS today take some time to familiarize themselves with the new interface and navigation. In AspireAlaska, DOF has created several IRIS Advanced Learning Series curriculums to help users get initial exposure to IRIS Advanced before Go Live. DOF will be assigning curriculums to users by Monday, February 14, some users may receive multiple assignments based on their role(s) in the IRIS, with all users receiving at least one assignment as an Employee. If learning items are repeated between the curriculums, users will not be required to complete an item more than once, AspireAlaska will apply the completion to the repeated learning items. These curriculums are a great introduction to the updated look and feel and some of the new functionality available in IRIS Advanced.

If you would like to view other curriculums that were not assigned to you, you may use the following steps:

1. Access your AspireAlaska › Learner Home page at https://soa.csod.com/samldefault.aspx?returnurl=/ui/lms-learner-home/home
2. Search for IRIS Advanced Learner Series to find all the potential modules and curriculums
   1. Users may filter by provider (SOA-DOA-DOF - ONL) to ensure your search results are limited to the official training content provided by DOF.
   2. Users may also filter by curriculums, you will find learning that is specifically set up for Employees, Managers, General Go Live, Employees with timesheets, etc.

The recommended browser for IRIS use will change with the implementation of IRIS Advanced. Previously, the only supported browser for IRIS use was Microsoft’s Internet Explorer v.11, which will be going out of support later this year. With the go-live of IRIS Advanced, Internet Explorer v.11 will no longer be supported or work for IRIS access. Instead, users may access the application using several other browsers including Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, and Mozilla Firefox.

Finally, users will need to be aware that their bookmarks for the IRIS Application will likely need to be updated. IRIS will have a new website address (URL), https://iris.alaska.gov, that currently directs users to the IRIS Advanced webpage on the DOF website, but on February 22, this URL will be redirected to the IRIS Advanced application login page. The URL for the Employee Self Service module of IRIS Advanced will continue to be https://iris-ess.alaska.gov, but employees may also login at the new https://iris.alaska.gov URL since we will have a unified application going forward.

Importance of the I-9 (Employment Eligibility Verification) When Appointing a New Employee

DOF Payroll Services has been noticing that many of the I-9 forms submitted to appoint a new employee are often missing information or include incorrect information. In that light, we wanted to take some time to remind admin staff and hiring managers how important it is for the I-9 information to be accurate and to include copies of all required documents to verify employment eligibility.

Without this information being correct DOF Payroll Services cannot legally appoint a new employee to a position.

Here are some important details to pay attention to when reviewing the I-9 and supporting documentation submitted by a new employee:

• Confirm that the new employee filled out all required fields under Section 1 on Page 1. (The only optional fields are the Employee’s Email Address and Employee’s Telephone Number).
• Confirm that all documents provided to verify employment eligibility are either not expired or that they have an approved receipt to replace an expired document per the instructions provided with the I-9 form.
• As the admin staff or hiring manager reviewing the I-9 documentation you are required to fill out and sign Page 2 of the I-9. This includes writing down the information as provided on the supporting documentation.

It is critical that this information gets provided to DOF Payroll Services correct and in a timely manner otherwise it can potentially affect the timely pay being processed for a newly hired employee or worse could affect their ability to remain employed if not corrected. New hires have 3 days to provide the unexpired documentation to the state as a condition of employment per the US federal government.

As part of this we do recommend that when confirming a start date with new hires to provide the instructions for completing the I-9 and note that they will need to provide copies of the documentations as listed in the instructions. (https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/forms/i-9instr.pdf)

Performance Management Updates

The new Performance Management process has been live since 1/1/2022 and we have received a lot of good feedback to help us improve the process. We are looking at incorporating some suggestions for improvements to the process for both the PDF process and those completing evaluations and planning in AspireAlaska.

Please make sure to check out the resources available on the Performance Management SharePoint site and many questions can be answered by going through the Performance Management Curriculum in AspireAlaska.

PMLDs for Separating Employees

Separation from State service evaluations continue to be mandatory. When an employee provides notice of resignation, supervisor should initiate the PMLD and request the employee provide their Employee Accomplishment Statement before their last day. This will allow the PMLD to be fully completed prior to the employee leaving State service. In the event the PMLD cannot be completed and reviewed with the employee prior to their departure, contact Employee Relations for assistance with a cover letter to mail the PMLD to the employee in draft form prior to finalization.

Updates in AspireAlaska

We are working on updating the notifications that are sent out when the Performance Planning or Performance Evaluation task gets triggered and working on getting reports and dashboards set up for leadership to supervisors. On top of that we are also working on some updates to the Welcome page layout as well updates to the corresponding job aids. Be on the lookout for additional information to be posted on the SharePoint site and to be emailed out from AspireAlaska.

Updates to the PDF Form

In regard to the PDF version of the form we know that there has been some issue with spacing and we would still like to encourage folks to be as concise as possible and really consider what must be included. At the same time, we do recognize that this first year is particularly difficult to be too concise so we are working on releasing a new version of the form that allows for a whole page for the Employee Accomplishment Statement and Supervisor Narrative, respectively. We will continue to allow the text to resize depending on what gets entered.

As a note, we have heard that folks are having issues where if they copy the text from a word document that the font does not resize and the solution seems to be you have to add a couple extra returns and then delete them to get the text to resize appropriately. There seems to be some formatting or something coming from word that affects how those fields read the copied text.

Reminder for Flex Promotion Processing

Employees in flexibly staffed positions (e.g. Administrative Assistant 1 / 2) must complete the training plan associated with their position and meet minimum qualifications for the higher level. Training plans are part of the official position description for flexibly staffed positions, and should be pulled directly from the Online Position Description (OPD) System to ensure the current version is being used.

When the employee meets requirements to flex promote to the higher level, the completed training plan should be emailed to Employee Relations (evaluations@alaska.gov). These are time-sensitive actions and cannot be backdated. As such, it’s recommended that sections with flexibly staffed positions have an internal process to avoid delays with completing the plan and forwarding it to Employee Relations. The flex action will be effective the first day of the pay period after Employee Relations receives the fully completed training plan.

Once the training plan is completed and submitted, a performance evaluation should be completed as part of the promotion process and a new Performance Plan needs to be set to account for the new position level.

If you have questions about this process feel free to reach out to the Employee Relations contact for your department.

Continued Maintenance of Supervisory Hierarchy

The Program Acceleration Office recently worked together with Divisions across all departments to correct critical information in OPD and IRIS. PCNs have now been corrected to reflect ‘a match’ in both systems based on the information submitted by the agencies contact.

Now that this has been done it is important to keep supervisory relationships up to date to ensure systems and processes that rely on supervisor hierarchy information, such as evaluations in AspireAlaska, flow correctly.

It is more critical than ever that supervisor relationships remain up to date with other systems reliance on this information.

Please submit updates to Classification through OPD for any supervisory updates that need to be made moving forward.

Reminder About Mandatory Posters

As many State of Alaska employees are working a hybrid telework schedule the Division of Personnel and Labor Relations wants to remind admin staff that State and Federal Mandatory Posters must be placed where they are conspicuous to or “clearly seen” by employees.

The state is required to have this information posted for all employees to have access..