Personio's functionalities for managing short-time work are included in a basic product that is quick and easy to implement, and supports you in collecting and maintaining employee data relevant for registering and implementing short-time work (in Germany).

Perform the following nine steps in the sequence provided to set up your account accordingly.

See the article "How do I manage short-time work in Personio?" for further helpful information on how to use your account efficiently after the initial setup.

Step 1: Finalizing the Setup Wizard

First, finalize the setup process. To do so, go to Settings > Company and follow the relevant note. The setup wizard takes you through the three initial, basic steps for configuring your account. Settings made can be changed later on.

Once you finalize the setup wizard, all sample employee data is deleted so that you can get started with configuring your account. Please also make the following settings:

• Assign Account Owners and Contract Owners: Go to Settings > SUPPORT > Support > to define Account Owners and Contract Owners. Account Owners can contact Customer Service for technical questions, while Contract Owners are in contact with Customer Growth for subscription-related matters. These employees will also be authorized to issue instructions within the scope of the EU GDPR.
• Access restriction to customer accounts: Personio employees do not have access to your account by default. You need to share your account temporarily to access support during the initial setup and allow Personio to review your account settings.

Step 2: Creating Employee Profiles

Employee profiles deliver the baseline data from which Personio records employees' master data, attendance and absence periods and salaries, and generates consistent data reports. Initial employee profiles can be quickly and easily created by importing the relevant data. When importing data, all necessary employee information is uploaded to the account. Your account already contains various special employee attributes, which allow you to store essential information about short-time work in your employees' digital personnel files and then include this information in the relevant calculations. These attributes will make your work vastly easier, as they are also available as filter criteria or for automated reminders.

1. Download our Excel import template (available in German only). Your account already contains some attributes that are specifically relevant for managing short-time work. These attributes are also stored in the Excel template. 
2. Read the worksheet with helpful information on completing the template in the import template.
3. Next, fill the columns with your employee data. Each line represents one employee, and employees are uniquely identified by their email addresses. Required columns are highlighted in yellow. These must be populated.
4. Save the completed Excel file.
5. Import the data into Personio by by following the instructions provided here.

Please note that email addresses are defined as unique identifiers within the system. As a result, the system requires an email address to be entered for each employee.

Step 3: Configuring Public Holiday Calendars and Offices

Personio automatically generates a basic structure of your offices and departments when employee data is imported. Go to Settings to add information on your public holiday calendar, which is essential for ensuring that attendances and absences are recorded correctly.

1. If required, set up customized public holiday calendars or use calendars already predefined under Settings > Public Holidays in the next step.
2. Go to Settings > Company to define your custom public holiday calendar. If you have different public holiday calendars for different offices, set these up accordingly in Settings > Offices. If no specific public holiday calendar is defined for an office, the company's default calendar applies.

Step 4: Importing Salaries

Personio allows you to store one base salary plus other forms of remuneration for each employee.

1. First import your employees' base salaries, i.e. the gross amounts your company currently pays to its employees. To do this, follow the instructions in this article.
2. Next, go to Employee profile > Salary to enter employees' Kurzarbeitergeld (KUG/short-time work benefit) amounts as one-time compensations every month.Click here to find out how. With this method, you will be able to run evaluations of the scope and development of the KUG using Custom reports. 

Step 5: Configuring Work Schedules

Use work schedules to store information about the days of the week and daily hours worked by your employees in Personio. This forms an important baseline for ensuring that working hours and absence periods are calculated correctly.

Create all work schedules applicable to your company in Settings > Attendance and assign each employee to the appropriate work schedule. Relevant instructions can be found here.

Please note that you cannot assign more than one work schedule to an employee at the same time.

Step 6: Configuring Absence Types 

The absence types "remote work," "Sick days" and "Sick child" are already predefined in your account's Settings > Absence for recording absence periods. Review whether the predefined settings match your company's needs and make any adjustments if required. Click here for detailed information on configuring absences. 

The absence type "Paid vacation" in the special accounts for managing short-time work mainly serves to record vacation days that employees are able to take during periods of short-time work so that you can then report them to the German Federal Employment Agency. This absence type is therefore predefined in a very basic form without any accrual policy.

Step 7: Checking Access Rights and Approval Processes

Personio applies a sophisticated set of rules and roles to control the functions and views available to your employees. Your account is already set up so that you only need to make minimal adjustments before you can start using Personio.

The roles All employees and Administrator are already predefined in your account's Settings > Employee roles. The Administrator role is associated with universal rights in Personio and should therefore be used carefully. However, we recommend that at least two employees be assigned the administrator role. Check whether the role is assigned to all employees who are to be given administrator rights.

The All employees role applies to all active employees by default. It should therefore be set up with particular care. This role is preconfigured to allow your employees to use the following functions:

• Information in the employee profile: Employees have viewing rights for their own data; supervisors additionally have viewing rights for their subordinates' data.
• Attendance: Employees are able to enter attendance periods that need to be subsequently approved. Supervisors are additionally able to view their subordinates' attendance periods and propose changes.
• Absences: Employees are able to submit absence requests for "remote work," "Sick days" and "Sick child" absence types. These must be subsequently approved. Supervisors have additional access to the Absence tab in their subordinates' employee profiles and can propose changes.
• Absence calendar: Only administrators are able to view information on other employees' absences in the Company Calendar.
• Documents: Employees can upload short-time work agreements and medical certificates to their own profiles and retrieve (but not edit) them again at a later time. Their supervisors have the same rights. The corresponding document categories are already predefined. 

Reminders:

Use the date attributes created under Chapter 1 for the start and end of the short-time work period to set up automated reminders for yourself or employees responsible for payroll. For example, you may want to set up a reminder to change an employee's salary back to the original value two weeks before their short-time work period ends. See this article to learn how to set up and manage reminders. 

Approvals: 

By default, your account is set up to require all attendance and absence requests to be approved before they are stored in the system. The predefined approval process is generally subject to the following logic: The respective supervisor must approve a request first, followed by an employee with an Administrator role. Adjust approval processes as required by going to Settings > Approvals, or create additional special approval processes for certain groups of employees.

Step 8: Inviting Employees to Personio

Congratulations! You have successfully set up your account and are ready to invite your employees to Personio. The article on Finalizing Account Setup: Inviting Employees to Personio contains step-by-step explanations of how to do this. The article also contains links to further information that you may find helpful for rolling out Personio internally. 

Step 9: Using Reports

Using Personio's reporting functions, you can flexibly retrieve important data such as the total hours worked per employee, changes to employee information or even absence times at any time, and export them in .xslx format if required.

The system report Attendance periods shows the working hours in decimal numbers. It can be generated flexibly with regard to the reporting period.

Your account also already contains two Custom reports on attendances and absences and on employees in short-time work. Naturally, these can be customized further as required.