The University is rolling out a new online sexual misconduct prevention course for employees who have not completed the prior sexual misconduct course. The details are as follows:

• On July 3, 2023, the following employees will receive an email assigning them the course and instructing them to complete it by July 31, 2023:
  • employees who have been hired since December 2022; and
  •  employees who were previously assigned the old course upon hire, but failed to complete it. 
•  In the future, new employees will receive a course assignment email on the first business day of the new month after the employee’s hire date and will be required to complete the course by the last business day of the month.
• The new course takes approximately one hour to complete. 

To review a list of employees newly assigned to the course, view the PIPSM Dashboard.  If you need access to the PIPSM Dashboard, please submit a ticket request via TDX.

If an employee would like to request an exemption from the course, please advise them to contact the Aurora Center or The Gender and Sexuality Center for Queer and Trans Life. 

This new course meets our legal obligation to provide sexual misconduct training to employees but unfortunately does not include much additional information on other forms of discrimination.  There are currently very few high-quality vendor-provided courses on these topics, and the ones available generally do not meet UMN accessibility standards. We plan to use this new course for about 18 months and may develop an in-house course for use moving forward.  

Contact Sunni Cohoes at sunnic@umn.edu with course enrollment questions and Tina Marisam at marisam@umn.edu with course content inquiries.

In preparation for when Governor Walz is expected to sign the recreational marijuana bill into law, we have drafted a communication to Twin Cities faculty and staff regarding the law's impact on working life. There is no change to expectations as people cannot come to work under the influence now, but we are making it clear in this email. We are also explicitly calling out that people cannot grow plants in their offices as the new law will allow people to do so in their homes. The email has been shared with communication leads on system campuses in advance and will be sent to Twin Cities faculty and staff upon confirmation of the bill signing.

On Monday, we’ll be sending out an email to all leadership, supervisors, and HR leads systemwide clarifying what the recognition of Juneteenth on Monday, June 19 means for operations and employee holiday pay. Those who are scheduled to work will receive holiday pay in accordance with University policies, Civil Service policies, and collective bargaining agreements.  

Please ensure that supervisors who oversee staff needed to work on Juneteenth are aware that this is now a paid holiday. Our ELR Consultants are available to answer any additional questions. 

Did you know that the Talent Strategy Center of Expertise (TSCoE) team maintains a community of external consultants available to help develop the skills of top and/or promising employees? The more than 60 consultants specialize in leadership coaching and consultation as well as more than a dozen additional specialties. Each consultant has an understanding of the academic world and has been identified as well-prepared to work with leaders at the University. Learn more online and reach out to TSCoE to determine if the service can help in further developing your top talent.

Based on recent feedback from HR units, ELR and the Talent Acquisition team have made some additional refinements to the Priority Hire Process. Under the refined process, the Talent Acquisition team will match a Priority Hire candidate based on the minimum qualifications of the job posting rather than giving the candidate five business days to submit their application. During this process, they will remove the position from the website and inform the candidate about the match. They will also let the hiring manager know so they can immediately schedule an interview with the candidate. 

The streamlined process is compliant with the collective bargaining agreements and Civil Service Employment Rules and helps ensure that we achieve our goal of connecting qualified candidates more quickly with job opportunities. These updates also allow for easier administration of the Priority Hire Program and will help reduce the number of Priority Hire candidates waiting for a match. We are confident these changes will lead to a better overall experience for everyone involved in the program.

As a reminder, you can find the Priority Hire Process documentation on the HR Community Page at: HR Community > Employee Relations > Labor and Civil Service. If you have questions, please contact your Talent Acquisition Specialist. 

OHR has produced a short video for supervisors to clarify the process for when employees request an extended leave of absence, such as a parental, medical, or personal leave. The six-minute video explains:

• The types of leave handled by the central Leave Administration team
• The process for requesting a leave
• What leaves qualify under the Family and Medical Leave Act

Employees should always request leave using the My Time tab in MyU (see this OHR web page for instructions). If employees cannot request a leave themselves due to an emergency, their supervisor or a family member can initiate a request by emailing leaveadmin@umn.edu or calling 612-624-8647 or 800-756-2363 and choosing option No. 2.

Wondering what to do about all that technology when an employee leaves the U? There is a new Offboarding Checklist created by a workgroup of the Google Advisory Council to assist you. You can find it on our OHR website under HR Community/Employee Relations/Onboarding and Offboarding. 

HireRight is the official background check provider for the University of Minnesota. To ensure timely and seamless service, the OHR Talent Acquisition team has created a new form to fill out to request access for a new user or help with an existing account. 

For more information about HireRight, please see this OHR Hiring Resources webpage.

As a reminder, HR Leads and University senior leaders can get a statistical overview of employees in your unit who are on extended leaves using the new Leave of Absence Scorecard. Simple bar graphs, filtered by RRC unit, show how many employees are on leave, total leaves this fiscal year, and total requests this fiscal year (including upcoming leaves). For more unit-specific details on leaves, HR Leads can use nine specific queries available in the MyU Reporting Center under “Human Resources.” 

Additionally, the latest report showing I-9 timeliness for February is now available. You can review the report by going to the secure HR Executive Dashboard and selecting the I-9 Timing Dashboard tile in the lower left-hand corner.

The ELR team recently updated the Work. With Flexibility guide to remove the word “preliminary” and create a public-facing version of the guide as well as one for HR professionals. The HR pro version is located in the “HR Community” and features working out-of-state information that was removed from the public version. The goal of the change is to direct employees to connect with HR to start a conversation.