New tech lets city track workers’ hours with just touch of a finger
$762,500 system, part of larger upgrade, could help assure Santa Feans taxpayer dollars are well spent, officials say
It was a minute before 8 on a recent Friday morning. Rita Arellano was early and ready to go to work at City Hall.
“Am I always here at 7:59? No,” said Arellano, who works in the mailroom. “Sometimes I’m here a little bit earlier, but I’ve never been late.”
While Arellano may be a conscientious employee who always shows up to work on time, the city no longer has to take her at her word.
In April, the city started to roll out a new computer-based timekeeping system that forces employees to punch in and punch out, creating a precise and paperless record of hours worked.
The new system, designed by Massachusetts-based Kronos Inc., was implemented to boost productivity and increase efficiency.
“I’ve never seen the [employee] parking lot so full at 8 in the morning,” a highlevel city administrator said privately.
The new timekeeping system may also help assure Santa Fe residents that taxpayer dollars are being spent well, especially when trust in city government has waned in recent years.
“There’s always that perception” that
government employees are coming into work late or leaving early, said City Manager Brian Snyder. “This definitely helps to make sure it’s not a reality.”
“I think in any industry, especially the government sector where you’re being watched in a way, I think we owe it to the public to make sure that we’re here when we say we’re going to be here,” he added.
Making sure public employees account for their time is part of a wider technology upgrade at City Hall. The Kronos software cost the city about $762,500.
And new software by Tyler Technologies Inc., which will support the city’s financial, human resources, land use and community development functions, will cost nearly $8.2 million under a multiyear contract.
“This is a seven-year cost that includes implementation costs, plus annual software subscription costs,” said Renée Martínez, deputy city manager, referring to the contact with Tyler Technologies.
Under the Kronos system, employees can check in and out of work using a fingerprint scanner on a wall-mounted clock. They can also punch in and punch out at their computers. Some employees are allowed to clock in and out remotely using city-issued smartphones.
The smartphones have GPS tracking technology to ensure employees aren’t checking in from home, though in some cases, that may be necessary. For example, city spokesman Matt Ross recently clocked in from home late at night when a reporter working on deadline called him with a slew of questions.
“There’s safeguards to make sure that you clocked in from the location you were supposed to be at,” Martínez said. “It will show a map of exactly where you are.”
Miles Conway, a spokesman for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 18, a union representing city workers, said “there’s good and bad” to the new system.
“The system is really designed for an 8-to-5 office setting, automatically deducting an hour of pay for lunch,” he said. But workers such as bus drivers sometimes have to punch out after their shifts end because they’re completing their routes, and that causes supervisors to question them, Conway said.
“Pretty much every driver at transit is having a red flag day because of when their shift ends, especially for the swing shift guys,” he said.
Conway said the city has assured the union that it will work out the glitches.
“As far as the accountability stuff and the city standing to save more money, I suppose we’ll find out if that happens,” he said. “Most of the blue-collar guys have been punching clocks since forever. I have been told that some managers and whitecollar workers are being reduced to tears by this thing. They never punched in and out before, and they don’t like it.”
Martínez said the system offers a host of capabilities and creates multiple benefits for the city, including allowing supervisors to adjust work schedules to improve operations and customer service.
“It’s really giving the whole organization good data in order to manage the workforce more effectively,” she said.
“I’ve been getting almost entirely positive feedback from both managers and employees,” she said. “Managers are saying, ‘Hey, I really feel I’ve got more information to help me with managing the staff I have and providing the services that I need to provide.’ Employees feel it’s really a fairness thing because everybody is using the same system and has to be accountable.”
Only high-level administrators and department directors are exempt from having to punch in and out, though at least one — City Attorney Kelley Brennan — clocks in and out of work alongside her employees.
“If I ask my people to, I feel I have to, too,” Brennan said after punching in at 8:02 a.m. on a recent Friday.
“She’s a woman of the people,” Alfred Walker, an assistant city attorney, said after clocking in after his boss.
Martínez said the city started to implement the new timekeeping system in November and went live with the first group of employees in April.
Only employees in the police and fire departments aren’t using the system yet. Martínez said public safety employees will use an advanced scheduling system called Kronos Workforce Telestaff. The fire department is already using Telestaff but will “upgrade to the latest and greatest version” in July, she said. The police department will make the switch in October.
“We had hoped to have them in before August, but because of their busy summer schedules, we decided to skip and go to October, which is fine,” she said.
According to city documents, Telestaff will streamline the staffing process and help track weekly work assignments.
Before moving to Kronos, the city used a paper system to keep track of employee time. Administrative secretaries and office managers in each department or division acted as “payroll monitors,” gathering time sheets and leave slips.
“It was a paper process, largely, that has been done away with,” Snyder said. “It’s all electronic now.”
Martínez, who worked as the city’s head of information technology and telecommunications before becoming deputy city manager for innovation in December 2016, said such a system is standard practice nowadays.
“This is a standard way that organizations collect time, account for time and pay employees,” she said. “For the city in particular, given the proportion of our budget that represents salaries, I think we need to be as accountable and transparent about this as possible. We want to make sure that we can feel very confident when someone asks, ‘Are city employees at work and productive?’ I can say, ‘Absolutely, I know that.’ ”
For years, elected officials have talked about the need to replace the city’s outdated technology. The new timekeeping system is the first phase of the city’s socalled enterprise resource planning, which Martinez described as “software that is used by private and public organizations to automate and streamline financial and human resource processes.”
In the future, for example, residents will be able to submit permit applications or schedule inspections with the Land Use Department online.
“They’re doing that with their banks and everyone else,” Martínez said, referring to online capabilities. “Why not do this with the city?”
She said the city has “underinvested in technology for quite a long time.”
“We’ve been way behind, very far behind. Our systems are 10 to 20 years old. Just think about what’s happened with technology in 10 to 20 years. We have new mobile applications. We have webbased applications. We have a lot of automated workflow. It’s really moving us into the modern age.”