Time And Attendance Baylor Scott And White Revolutionizing Workforce Management In Healthcare

Setting Up Time And Attendance Baylor Scott And White Revolutionizing Workforce Management In Healthcare

Baylor Scott and White Health runs one of the larger healthcare systems in Texas, with locations across the state handling tens of thousands of employees. Getting their workforce management right is a logistics problem, not a technology problem, even though the technology layer is where most people waste time. The system they use for time and attendance is typically integrated through the OneBW portal or the Kronos / WorkforceNOW platform. If you are a nurse manager trying to pull a schedule or a payroll coordinator reconciling time, you will encounter a few friction points that are not documented anywhere useful. Here is how it actually works in practice.

Time And Attendance Baylor Scott And White Revolutionizing Workforce Management In Healthcare

The Basic Workflow

Employees clock in and out through the WorkforceNOW application, either via mobile or a physical time clock depending on the facility. The data flows into Kronos, which then feeds into PeopleSoft HCM for payroll processing. That is the ideal path. The real path involves exceptions, missed punches, and managers spending three hours every Friday cleaning up data. Your first step as someone managing this system is understanding the clock-in method at your specific location. Some Baylor Scott and White facilities use badge swipe, some use biometric scanners, and some still rely on PIN-based time clocks that were installed before anyone thought about mobile clock-in. This matters because the exception types and available edits differ by device type. For shift-based staff like nursing, the system relies on scheduled hours. Employees are assigned shifts in the scheduling module, and their actual clock-in and clock-out times are compared against those scheduled hours. Variance reports show where people punched in early, stayed late beyond authorized limits, or missed entire punches. Managers are responsible for approving or correcting these variances before the pay period closes.

What Nobody Tells You About the Approval Workflow

The approval hierarchy in Kronos is not always intuitive. A time card does not simply go to your direct supervisor. It routes based on a combination of employee classification, department, and sometimes cost center. I spent two weeks once tracking down why a time card from a telemetry nurse was sitting in an approver's queue who had no idea who that person was. Turns out the nurse had been floated to a different unit for a two-week assignment, and the system had not updated the cost center routing rule. The workaround was straightforward but not obvious: check the employee's assignment history in PeopleSoft, not just their current schedule. If someone has moved departments within the last pay period, the routing rules may still point to the old department manager. You have to manually adjust the time card routing or get HR to update the assignment in the HCM system first. Otherwise your time cards sit there unapproved until someone notices.

Common Pitfalls That Waste Your Week

Missed punch correction takes time and burns approval cycles. When an employee forgets to clock out, the system creates an exception that requires manual intervention. The standard correction process involves logging into WorkforceNOW, navigating to the timecard exception, selecting the missing punch type, and entering the correct time. But here is the thing most people miss: if you correct a missed out punch after midnight, the system may recategorize the punch as belonging to the next day entirely. I learned this the hard way when a nurse called me at 7 AM saying her hours were wrong. Her missed out punch from 11:45 PM had been auto-corrected by the system to the next calendar day, which threw off her overtime calculation by several hours. The fix was to reverse the correction and resubmit it with the original date code. Schedule posting deadlines are strict and non-negotiable. If you are a manager responsible for posting schedules, you need to know your facility's cutoff. For many Baylor Scott and White locations, schedules must be posted at least 14 days in advance for bargaining unit employees, and sometimes longer depending on the union contract. If you post a schedule late, the system may block timecard editing for that pay period, or it may create a compliance flag that goes to HR. This is not something you want to discover during payroll lockout week. Overtime rules vary by facility and employee group. There is no single overtime configuration across the entire system. ICU nurses, administrative staff, and part-time techs each have different overtime rules. The system calculates overtime based on configured rules per job code and union designation. If you see overtime calculated incorrectly, the first place to check is not the employee's timecard. It is the job code configuration in the Kronos rules engine. A single character difference in a job code can route the timecard to a completely different overtime calculation rule.

Working With the Mobile App

The WorkforceNOW mobile app is used heavily at Baylor Scott and White. Most clinical staff clock in and out through it. There are a few things that make this harder than it should be. GPS geofencing is configured per facility, but the accuracy varies. I have had staff on the surgical unit report that the app would not let them clock in because their phone was registering 30 feet outside the geofence boundary. The workaround was to have them clock in using the building's internal WiFi network instead of cellular data, which bypasses the GPS check. Not every facility has this option documented, so you end up sending people back and forth on email. Offline mode is another area that causes problems. If a nurse is working in a basement radiology suite with poor signal, the app allows clock-in offline and syncs when connectivity is restored. The issue is that the system does not always flag the delayed sync as an exception. The timecard looks clean in the report, but the actual clock-in timestamp is from hours earlier. This caused a compliance audit finding at one of our locations because the stamped times did not match the badge swipe logs at the unit entrance. The fix was to run a comparison report between mobile clock-ins and physical badge swipes monthly, not just rely on the exception reports.

What Actually Works for Reconciliation

If you are responsible for reconciling timecards each pay period, stop trying to do it all manually in the web interface. It will take you hours. Instead, use the Kronos reporting tools to pull a variance report filtered by pay period and exception type, then export it to Excel. From there you can sort by exception category, prioritize missed punches and negative hours, and batch-approve the clean ones. I use a simple spreadsheet template with columns for employee ID, exception type, recommended action, and status. When I find a pattern like the same employee missing out punches every other Friday, I escalate it to training rather than fixing it repeatedly. At one location, three charge nurses had the same issue because they were doing handoff report at the end of shift and forgetting to clock out until the next morning. We set up a calendar reminder system in their scheduling tool, and the missed punch rate dropped by about 80 percent.

The Limitations You Need to Accept

This system is not seamless. Kronos WorkforceNOW has known limitations around its reporting engine. Custom report building is cumbersome and requires access to the Kronos Designer tool, which not all managers have. The standard reports cover most needs but they are rigid. If you need a report that combines attendance data with scheduling conflict data, you will likely end up pulling two separate reports and merging them manually. The integration between Kronos and PeopleSoft is generally reliable but not instant. Timecard approval in Kronos can take up to 24 hours to fully propagate to the HCM system for payroll submission. If you are working against a tight payroll deadline, plan for that lag. I have seen payroll errors occur because managers approved timecards at 4 PM on Thursday expecting them to be reflected in the Friday payroll run. They were not. For smaller clinics or satellite locations with fewer than 50 employees, the full Kronos implementation can feel overbuilt. The setup time, training requirements, and administrative overhead are significant. In those cases, some facilities supplement with simpler spreadsheet-based tracking for part-time and per-diem staff, though this creates data silos and makes system-wide reporting less accurate. If you are in that situation, the best approach is to push for a phased rollout rather than trying to maintain two parallel systems.

Where to Get Help

If you are already at Baylor Scott and White and need to access the system, you start at the OneBW portal. From there you can navigate to WorkforceNOW or search for time and attendance support. The internal IT service desk can walk you through login issues, geofencing problems, or routing errors. For configuration questions that require deeper Kronos knowledge, the human resources shared services team has access to the configuration tools that frontline managers do not. There is no public download link for the software since it is an enterprise system licensed to the organization. Employees and managers access it through the existing corporate SSO credentials. If you are an external consultant or vendor trying to integrate with their system, you need to go through the Baylor Scott and White procurement and IT integration channels. They have standards for third-party system connections that are documented in their vendor onboarding materials. The system works if you understand where it breaks. The configuration is solid for a health system of this size, but it assumes a level of administrative discipline that not every manager maintains. The biggest ROI you will get is not from the software itself but from catching the patterns before they become payroll errors or compliance issues. Run the variance reports weekly, not just at pay period end. Train staff on clock-out habits as thoroughly as you train them on clock-in. And keep a log of routing anomalies so you can spot when a department reorganization has broken the approval chain.