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Acquisitions Department

Work Schedules & Leave Policy for Non-Exempt Staff

This document summarizes the Acquisitions Department’s schedule and leave policies for non-exempt staff. It is derived from the Stanford University Administrative Guide. Relevant Guide Memos are cited for selected sections.

Work schedules and leave requests must be approved in writing by your supervisor prior to any change or time off from work. In the Acquisitions department, e-mail is the preferred method of submitting leave requests and/or changes in work schedules to your supervisor.

Work Schedules (Administrative Guide Memo 22.4)

• The basic full-time workweek is forty hours of work on 5 consecutive 8-hour days, Monday through Friday.
• All schedules must fall into Acquisitions’ supervised hours between 6:30am and 6:30pm.
• Schedules should be set in advance and approved by your supervisor. Record your schedule in Kronos during work hours.
• If you expect to arrive more than 30 minutes earlier or 30 minutes later than your scheduled time, notify your supervisor as soon as you are aware of the change.
• The University allows a 15-minute rest period during each 4 hours of work. Rest periods should be arranged so that disruptions of work and services are held to a minimum. Employees who do not take rest periods are NOT permitted to use the time to shorten the workday nor to add the time to vacation leave.
• Lunch periods are normally one hour. The minimum time that must be allowed is 30 minutes whenever an employee is scheduled to work more than 5 hours in a given day.
• If a non-exempt employee elects (with the supervisor’s prior approval) to waive a lunch period, that employee may work no more than a total of 6 hours that day. Employees should give one day’s notice of election to waive a lunch period.
• Time taken for lunch periods is not part of the workday. If you will be taking a lunch that is longer than your lunch that is scheduled in Kronos:
• Update Kronos beforehand and
• Sign out according to unit procedure (e.g. on a whiteboard). Your sign out is important for our emergency preparedness.

Time Off

• ALL leave time must be requested and approved by the supervisor in advance.

Acquisitions supervisors support the use of leave to help employees maintain a healthy work/life balance. Help us approve your leave requests by asking for time off as far in advance as possible and specifying the amount and type of leave you are proposing. At a minimum, you should submit your leave request as far in advance as the amount of time you are requesting to take off. Submit requests for a partial day off at least one day in advance. Leave will be granted wherever possible given department work needs and scheduled absences of other employees. Do not buy plane tickets, etc, until you have received approval.

Vacation

See the Administrative Guide 22.5 for information regarding accrual and appropriate use of vacation time.

• Specific vacation arrangements are subject to supervisory approval.
• The supervisor's approval or denial of a request for vacation will be determined by whether or not the employee's absence can be accommodated .
• Supervisors will consider vacation requests in the order that they are received.
• At a minimum, “[v]acation should normally be taken in the fiscal year when it is accrued.” Supervisors may require additional use of vacation and will work with staff to schedule them.

Make-Up Time

See Administrative Guide 22.4 Section 3.C for the full text of Stanford’s make-up policy. An excerpt follows:

At the written request of the employee and with the approval of the supervisor, a non-exempt employee may reduce his/her hours on one day and make up the hours not worked on another day during the same work week…[emphasis mine].

• Make-up requests must fall within the same pay period as well as within the same week.
• Specific make-up arrangements are subject to prior supervisory approval.
• The supervisor's approval or denial of a request for make-up time will be determined by whether or not the employee's absence can be accommodated and by the request’s suitability to SU and Acquisitions Department guidelines.
• All make-up requests must use the Request for Make-Up Time form.
• Supervisors will consider make-up requests in the order that they are received.

Sick Leave

See the Administrative Guide 22.6 for information regarding accrual and appropriate use of sick leave.

• Unless prior arrangements are made, employees are required to call their supervisor on each day they cannot report to work due to illness.

Time off for Stanford events

Consult with your supervisor to determine whether or not you will need to use leave to attend a given Stanford event.

• When you attend a Stanford event, sign out according to unit procedure (e.g. on a whiteboard).

Leave without pay

Leave without pay [LWOP] should be used as a last resort and only under extenuating circumstances. The Associate University Librarian for Technical Services, following the procedures outlined below, must explicitly approve any leave without pay request in advance.

In order to accomplish the Acquisitions Department’s work, we need staff to be here for predictable amounts of work time (i.e., hours scheduled less vacation and reasonable sick leave). The ability to grant a staff member large amounts of leave without pay may give the impression that that staff member’s position and FTE are not critical to operations.

Leave without pay may affect an individual’s benefits status. It also imposes high overhead costs on the Department, which reduce productivity beyond the hours of the actual LWOP.

Leave without pay procedures (for staff):

Send your supervisor your leave request, including calculated hours of leave without pay (LWOP) and any other information that will support your supervisor’s request (see below). Do not make plans or especially purchase plane tickets until you have received final approval.

Leave without pay procedures (for supervisors):

Prepare a request with the following elements and forward to Christa. She will forward to Cath for final approval .

• Amount of LWOP.
• General reason requested, e.g., travel overseas
• Describe how work will be accomplished during staff absence
• In 1 or 2 sentences, summarize your recommendation of either approving or denying the leave.

NB: The Family Medical Leave Act and/or Pregnancy Disability Leave ensure employees leave, including leave without pay, for certain reasons. Consult Administrative Guide Memo 27.7, Sections 6-7, for detailed information. Note Section 6.c-d in particular. Based on Section 6.b, staff who worked more than 1250 hours in te past year are eligible. Half-time employees work approximately one thousand hours/year.

Types of leave

Leave is approved with specific hours of given leave type(s).

Employees may request a change in leave type prior to departure according to Acquisitions Department policies (i.e., in writing in advance)

• Should an employee need to change leave type or distribution during a leave, s/he must follow these steps

  • Inform the supervisor on or before the first date for which leave is changed; include the new leave type and the general reason it is needed.
  • Provide the supervisor with contact information. Depending on the nature and duration of the new leave type, there may be a legal requirement for the University to send you materials via the mail.
  • For a shift to sick leave, documentation is required unless that requirement is explicitly waived by the supervisor at his or her sole discretion. This documentation should include a doctor’s statement that certifies medical need for sick leave, the expected duration of absence, and any limitations and their duration when the employee is released to return to work (Administrative Guide Memo 22.6).

Kronos

Federal and state laws require nonexempt employees to keep a daily record of hours worked. The University has adopted Kronos/PeopleSoft HRMS as the system to record hours worked, overtime hours, vacations, sick leave, holidays, and other time off by each nonexempt employee.

• Non-exempt staff must have exact schedules recorded in Kronos and must account for any change from one’s schedule immediately on any day when s/he does not work scheduled hours. It is unacceptable to wait until the end of the pay period and make these changes retrospectively.
• It is not necessary to record variation in schedule under 15 minutes, though any time not worked and not recorded as leave is to be made up that same day. For example, if your usual schedule is 8-5 with a one hour lunch, and you arrive at 8:10, work until 5:10 without recording the variation in Kronos.
• Acquisitions staff are required to review and “approve” Kronos records on the penultimate day of each pay period.
• Non-exempt staff may only update and/or approve Kronos records at work and during the work day.

Leave and leave tracking highlights

• Changes to one’s schedule are subject to the university leave policy.
• Changes less than fifteen minutes
• It is not necessary to record in Kronos variation in schedule less than 15 minutes
• Any time not worked and not recorded as leave is to be made up that same day.
• Changes of 15 minutes or more—record in Kronos.
• Changes of thirty minutes or more—if you expect to arrive more than 30 minutes earlier or 30 minutes later than your scheduled time,
• Notify your supervisor as soon as you are aware of the change.
• Record your schedule change in Kronos
• Any other alteration to one’s schedule must be requested and approved in writing by their supervisor before the requested change takes place.
• Starting and ending a shift earlier or later than scheduled can be accommodated but require approval.
• A schedule that requires such modification on a regular basis should be changed as appropriate.
• Make-up time may be granted during the same pay period and week. Such an adjustment must be requested and improved in advance.
• The use of make-up time should only be an occasional occurrence.
• Make-up time should affect as little of the schedule as possible. Time from one day may be made up on one other day.
• The employee is responsible for keeping Kronos up-to-date on a daily basis to reflect approved changes to his or her schedule.

Part-Time Staff

Derived from Administrative Guide Memo 22.4 and based on departmental needs.

• Part time employees must have and follow a consistent schedule.
• Part time work schedules fall within the departmental hours (6:30am-6:30pm M-F) and are set in consultation with the supervisor based on departmental need.
• Staff members working a half-time schedule must work 20 hours per calendar (M-F) week; those who are three-quarter time must work 30 hours each week.
• Distribution of hours
  • Half-time staff should work either four 5-hour days/week or five 4-hour days.
  • Three-quarter time staff should work at least four days per week; they should determine the distribution of hours through the workweek in close consultation with their supervisors.
• Part time employees must follow departmental make-up time practice if they wish to work hours other than those they are scheduled.
  • Make-up requests must fall within the same pay period as well as within the same week.
  • Specific make-up arrangements are subject to prior supervisory approval.
  • All make-up requests must use the Request for Make-Up Time form.
• Consistency
  • Employees may not submit a new work schedule for each pay period.
  • Significant changes to a work schedule should not be requested each pay period

Last modified: December 4, 2006