News - Pay Progression Reminders (Agenda for Change) Launched
National changes to Agenda for Change (AfC) were agreed by the NHS Staff Council in June 2018 clarifying arrangements for employees progressing through pay bands (pay progression).
Pay point progression is considered to be a reward that is dependent on satisfactory performance, conduct and demonstration of meeting statutory and mandatory training requirements relevant to their role. While due to the changes in the banding structure not all pay points attract more pay, this review must be undertaken each year so staff are eligible for pay progression when they reach this point in their service.
And here in lies a problem... relying on busy managers to keep an eye on staff incremental dates and to ensure pay progression reviews are undertaken before the deadline is a high risk strategy that is almost likely to result in some employees not being rewarded for their hard work.
I've created a bot that will receive employee data from ESR, and send individual reminder emails to managers and employees ahead of the pay progression date containing all the necessary information for the appropriate action to be taken.
This will save HR staff manually typing and emailing letters to over 10,000 staff.
This process has a listener service which waits for HR colleagues to deposit a data file from into a shared drive. The bot ingests the data into a bot queue and then creates the employee letters using a template. Each completed letter is emailed to manager and employee along with a number of supporting attachments.
As shown in the video below, the bot works much faster than a human.
The final email output looks like this...
In the future I will look to automate the creation of the ESR data file but for now this was a quick solution to an immediate need and certainly ticks all the boxes.
This solution with supporting documentation is available on the NHS Digital Exchange for FREE!