Having worked four different on-campus jobs since I began as a Spanish tutor in the spring of my first year here at EMU, I was surprised to hear we would be transitioning to a new payment management system this fall. Instead of continuing to use Paycom, EMU recently shifted to using Automatic Data Processing, Inc. (ADP.) I know that changes in administrative instruction come with the territory, and over the years I’ve seen a few—the infamous implementation of the ‘clock in–clock out on school-administered computers’ being most notable (see “EMU’S Paycom System Has Gone Too Far This Time,” a Weather Vane staff opinion piece.) However, jumping to an entirely new payment management system left many student employees with questions.
To begin my search for answers, I interviewed EMU Director of Human Resources Marilyn Harris. According to Harris, discussions about the switch “began this past summer,” as EMU hopes to “provide the best systems and service that we can to our customers—the employees of EMU.” Harris described the ADP system as more streamlined, comprehensive, and user-friendly than the Paycom system, and that while the “implementation of a new payroll/HR system is extremely time consuming, in the end it will be worth it.”
Over the first few weeks of the semester, both student and faculty/staff employees received emails from HR facilitating their registration, explaining the system transfer, inviting them to attend training sessions, and distributing training materials. At first glance, ADP boasted all the same features that could be accessed from Paycom, so learning the system for the first time felt fairly intuitive.
As ADP is a popular competitor for Paycom, other students were already familiar with it. When first year Sophia Nguyen learned of the change, she “was surprised, but also excited because ADP is an app that I already [use] in my other job.”
Senior Anna Filipkowski expected that ADP “should be better than Paycom,” especially after Filipkowski’s technical issues with the previous system. “My experience with Paycom this semester has been up and down. I have been locked out a few times and forgot to clock in a couple of times making the hours incorrect and there is not an ability to edit the time sheet,” Filipkowski shared. “I thought it was good that we were changing, I know plenty of people had a lot more issues than I did with Paycom (locking them out of their accounts, not being able to log in or see their jobs, etc.)”
Employers are hopeful, too. Lexi Brown, Assistant Director of Undergraduate Admissions, shared her thoughts as a supervisor: “…[In Paycom,] trying to read timecards, punch change requests were always very messy, and it was not easy to understand which department the request was for, if that employee holds multiple jobs on campus. Overseeing 20+ paid employees at the time was very difficult so I am hoping that the new ADP system will be much easier … with approving timecards and punch requests, and hoping to easily see which departments the requests are being allocated for.”
The ability to easily designate which department I was working for on a given clock-in was also a concern for me. I currently work four on-campus jobs, and while Paycom had a drop-down shortlist available for students working multiple jobs to select from, ADP seemed to have no such feature. I reached out to Harris for help, who quickly replied to my email and looped me in with Payroll Administrator Julie Tieszen.
Tieszen gave me a preview of the information that would be sent in an email to the 50+ students who work multiple positions at EMU later that afternoon, explaining that each student will have a “home position,” for which a student could log hours with a simple clock-in-and-out, while logging hours for every other position would require using the “Transfer” feature and selecting the desired job from the 20+ rows of accounts on campus.
I was very grateful for the prompt clarification, as it allowed me to show up to my campus commitment while minimizing the number of mistakes I made in the process. Since learning about this feature, I have found it to be intuitive and easy to use.
All of this aligns with Harris’s own hopes that the new system “provides an improved experience for our end users, and that it allows for efficiencies in the HR office, that allow our staff the bandwidth to provide additional services that will help EMU become an employer of choice.”
As employers and employees adjust to the new system, reactions are varying. Bonnie Bowser, Circulation/Office Manager at the Hartzler Library, shared that since the change wasn’t implemented until October, in the beginning of the semester “work-study students learned how to report in the [Paycom] system” and the subsequent change was “very confusing to many.” Of ADP, Bowser said, “The new system seems a little easier and cleaner to use but there was not much training on how to use it. For upperclassmen, they seemed to make the transition well but I still have first year students that are having problems reporting in ADP.”
After using ADP for over a week, Brown shared more thoughts about the transition: “[ADP] has not exceeded my expectations from the supervisor lens because there’s still a lot of complications. The big thing I was hoping for was that it would be much easier for people with multiple jobs to clock in/clock out and mark which department they’re working for,” which hasn’t been the case for Brown. Of the aforementioned complications, she went on to say: “Right now, it still feels all over the place. I’m going to try to trust the process, but right now [it] doesn’t feel any better than Paycom; it feels the same.”
To junior Ally Welty Peachey, employee in the Academic Success Center, ADP “feels like it’s the same as Paycom, just a slightly different interface.” While the new system doesn’t feel unfamiliar to Welty Peachey, she noted that “it’s just like another hassle, like another thing I have to learn.”
Junior Garrett Nyce also suggested that the ADP system could bring frustration: “I think we have to approve our time card, so that could be a little bit of a hassle. If that is easy, then great, but I could see it being a bit annoying.” Despite concerns, Nyce clarified that “it has been fairly unproblematic so far. I have not loved the transfer feature rather than the allocation drop down, but other than that it has been fine.”
Harris and HR anticipated this apprehension, writing in an email to EMU Staff and Faculty on Sept. 11, “We understand that change can be challenging, but we believe that this transition will ultimately benefit our employees and the institution as a whole…We are excited about this new chapter and the opportunities that it presents to improve our payroll and HR processes.” Anyone with questions or concerns is encouraged to reach out to the HR department at hr@emu.edu.
