Some longer notes. Emphasis is mine.
Last update: Wednesday, 02-Apr-2014 22:00:28 EDT
[TL;DR: faculty treat students as salaried employees, and payroll's wage model doesn't really fit, which is the underlying problem.]
I agree with the other sentiments expressed here about both the usability and relevance of TimeClock Plus (I can sympathize with C., since I have four UTAs in my course). I won't comment on the usability issues, since M. has already done that.
I can see that TimeClock Plus is/was probably motivated by issues managing written timesheets for hourly wage employees. I can imagine that folks responsible for payroll issues and tasks may see benefit from its use, compared to the paper- based system it replaced. But the underlying problem that faculty are writing about has to do with a mismatch between payroll's views of some paid positions and the reality of those positions.
Roughly speaking, paid positions here (and most places) can be split into two broad categories: salaried positions, which receive a fixed pay amount each pay period, and wage positions, that are paid on an hourly basis. This system is only for hourly employees.
The real underlying problem is that faculty are salaried, adjuncts are salaried, GTAs and GRAs are salaried, and faculty treat most other individuals at the university as salaried. UTAs for example, best fit the model of a fixed pay amount per pay period. Faculty treat them the same as graduate TAs for the purposes of time scheduling and time tracking. Most of the undergrad researchers who are paid that I've interacted with are treated similarly (i.e., similarly to undergrad versions of GRAs, paid with a much smaller budget amount). Sure, some weeks that put in more hours and some weeks they put in less, but faculty *treat* them as if they are receiving a fixed (10 hr/week) salary, and faculty do not track or verify the individual hours that students put in AFAIK.
However, Payroll classifies undergraduates as hourly wage employees, unlike the other employee categories we regularly deal with here. There is a mismatch between this classification and the realities of the work and responsibilities that are typically given to most (all?) of our UTAs. I can't speak to undergrads who might work hourly for office support tasks, but C.'s (perfect legitimate) list of complaints about the absurdness of TimeClock Plus from a faculty point of view stem from this fundamental mismatch.
The thing I'm worried about is that other parts of the university that are closely tied with the TimeClock Plus decision are more concerned about other hourly employees, and less concerned with the "faculty world" or hourly undergrads. After all, hourly undergrads have been using paper timesheets forever, so why would their problems be any different? Faculty have always had to sign off on those, so why should there be any issues?
They may not hear our "complaining", since it does not bear on the real issues with paper timesheets that they were trying to solve with this system. Rather than suggesting that we "ABOLISH" TimeClock Plus as C. suggested (after all, it may indeed help other problems we faculty don't directly deal with ever), it might be more prudent to simply convey that it really is ineffective for faculty members supervising student hourly employees, because undergraduates in reality are treated much more like salaried employees that wage employees, and forcing the TimeClock-based wage approval model on them simply wastes faculty time and resources. Basically, the hourly wage timesheet model was always an administrative wart forced on undergrads because of their payroll classification, not anything that ever really worked or had much meaning to supervising faculty (for many of the same reasons C. already cites). Most faculty members have *never* been able to verify/certify the actual hours worked by student employees--we just take their word for it, and ensure the totals work out to the expected values, completely undermining the intended purpose of both the timesheets and the supervisor verification. The difference is that the old paper system required less faculty time and urgency, so we faculty were insulated from the majority of the problems/issues associated with paper timesheets.
By forcing faculty to integrate verification of hourly wage performance into their weekly (or daily!) tasks, TimeClock Plus has just made blatantly more apparent the mismatch between payroll's classification of undergrad employees and the faculty model of how they are utilized.