New Employee Essentials web site offers several expanded features

Faculty and staff at Cornell have a new on-line system to check on their job, benefits and payroll information. Employee Essentials is a web-based system recently developed by the Office of Human Resources (OHR) and the Integration and Delivery group in Cornell Information Technologies. It uses straightforward web pages to display information from the PeopleSoft HR/Payroll database and is the first system of its kind at Cornell. The earlier version of Employee Essentials was suspended while the PeopleSoft HR/Payroll system was being implemented.

"Because PeopleSoft has integrated so much more information than did our old system, we are able to offer more features in this Employee Essentials than we could in the past," said Lyman Flahive, director of human resources information systems. "Before, it was difficult to show benefits, payroll and human resource data in one application, because they were different systems," Flahive added. "In the future, we will have even more capabilities for employees, including displaying a greater variety of data and the ability to update some things online."

Using Employee Essentials, people can view information from their record. The system displays benefits enrollments, the types of insurance coverages, and deduction/contribution information. Employee Essentials also displays biographic data (such as address and birth date) and limited job and payroll data.

"With benefits open-enrollment period coming up in November, the timing is perfect," said Paul Bursic, director of benefits. "Employees will be able to see useful information about their current benefits. The pages also provide easy links to our benefits web pages, as well as those of Aetna, CIGNA, TIAA-CREF and other vendors."

All Cornell employees can access their records in Employee Essentials with their net IDs. Privacy is maintained by requiring the net ID and password; people can see their information but no one else's. There are two other security features: a time-out feature, in case someone forgets to log out; and data encryption using SSL.

To use the system, employees should go to Bear Access and click on the Employee Essentials icon. If Bear Access is not available, enter the following web address, http://eessentials.ohr.cornell.edu.