Pete Barron, TSS director of Human Resources Operations
Pete Barron’s team is responsible for HR and payroll administration as well as related tax, accounting and benefits activities. Over this past year, he has spent a lot of time refining processes within TSS, always looking for ways to make services as efficient and user friendly as possible. Not to be confused with his colleague, Peter Barone, he gave up the second syllable of his first name. Pete came to Tufts with more than 20 years in HR systems, service centers and improving the employee experience.
What do you find most satisfying about your role in TSS?
I’m here to create the best possible employee experience. Now that the first year is almost complete, we are better positioned to plan and be more forward thinking.
I’m really excited about improvements we can make from a PAF (personnel action form) perspective. It’s not the PAF itself, it’s the process that needs to be fixed. Going electronic will take some doing — that’s going to happen further down the road — but there are many improvements we can make now.
What specific improvements are you focusing on?
I would like to make our activities, such as processing PAFs, more transparent so people can see where things are. When someone sends us the paperwork, there’s still a lot that has to be done from an approval perspective. But we’re doing it behind the scenes and people feel cut off from the process. I call it a black hole.
We also need a better way to communicate what the payroll processing timeline is. I think if people had more visibility into the process, it would be easier to understand why we have the deadlines that we do.
Looking back on your first year, is there anything you would do differently?
We didn’t engage end users to determine functional requirements before we upgraded PeopleSoft and that was a missed opportunity. We could have learned a lot by including a small group of department administrators during system testing. In retrospect, I wouldn’t have done the upgrade that way, but I wouldn’t have had five snowstorms closing the campus in our first winter either.
Now that we have almost a year of experience, we can provide knowledge based on the questions we get. We even know what kind of unusual questions we’ve received and are ready to answer a lot of those as well.