Soccer, soccer and more soccer!

My son has been busy twice a week with soccer. He sure loves the game. I never played soccer growing up. I don't think it was as big for kids when I was his age. I enjoy assistant coaching his team. It's a faster pace than baseball that's for sure.

And being a compensation person, I even devised an incentive plan for the team. We wanted to get them go after the ball. So I came up with the "Go Get 'Em" award. Each game, if they've tried their best and went after the ball at least once, they get a star. Their goal is to get four stars. When everyone on the team gets four stars then the whole team will get a surprise at the end of the season. It's nothing fancy, but the kids like having a goal to work towards. They all ask me "do I get a star?" at the end of the game. So far, everyone has stepped up their game and they've all received a star. And I'm not just handing out stars "just because". I really want them to try their best and reward them for the effort (since we aren't so concerned about results in U8 soccer!).

Major upgrade to RESULTS TABLE

We've been monitoring the performance of the database over the past few days and noticed that during peak times, especially earlier in the morning, that the overall performance of the database was getting bogged down. We've narrowed the issue to the "Results Table" being updated.

The Results Table is updated after refreshing survey matches, changing survey aging factors, and loading new My Organization data.

We spent the day redesigning the entire update process for the Results Table. We've increased the overall speed by a factor of 10 (at least). For instance, updating a Pay Plan with 100 jobs and several hundred matches used to take over 1 minute and during peak times it could take several minutes. Now, it should take less than 15 seconds to update the results for the pay plan.

We will continue to monitor the database performance to ensure that we've got the issues ironed out. We're also working on finishing an update to the MY JOBS table and a major enhancement to the SEARCH SURVEYS page. We'll keep you posted.

MY JOBS redesign preview Quicktime movie

We've been busy working on a redesign of the MY JOBS table. The MY JOBS table allows you to view your organization's jobs along side the average market data. The table is in need of a "make-over" so to speak. We've been gathering feedback from users and have a "preview" of the new table.

Here are some notable new features. The new MY JOBS table gives you the ability to:

• Drill down into a job and see the employees in the job
  
• Exclude or include certain employees in the average salary/wage for a job
  
• View employee details right on the My Jobs table
  
• Duplicate a MY JOB along with the employees in that job
  

This last feature, the ability to duplicate a job, will allow you to maintain a copy of a job but only market price specific employees in that job. It's like having an employee organization-level matching tool.

Here's a 1 minute demo in Quicktime to show some of these new features. The demo is a preview and the actual release may look different. We still need to finialize the look of the grid lines and colors and the finish the buttons on the page.

We'll keep you posted on the release of this new tool.

New CUSTOM QUERY fields added for Employee data

We've added 13 new fields to the Custom Query tool specifically related to My Organization Employee data. The new fields are available in the Reports page on the Custom Query tab. The fields are listed in the "Details" section of the tool.

Here is a list of new fields:

• FTE Percentage
  
• Shift
  
• Hire Date
  
• Date In Position
  
• Cost Center
  
• Assigned Hours
  
• Union Group
  
• Zip Code
  
• Incentive Eligible (Yes/No)
  
• Bonus / Incentive Amount
  
• Manager Full Name
  
• Notes
  
• Employee Record Update Date
  

The addition of these fields makes it possible to conduct more extensive analysis against employee data. You can use the data in these fields to export to Excel and then run cross-tab analysis based on Cost Center for instance.

We'll continue to post as we add new features in the coming weeks.

Enhanced MY JOBS and SEARCH SURVEYS config. tools and some bug fixes

We've uploaded enhancements to the My Jobs and Search Surveys table configuration tools. Along with the enhancements we've fixed the bug that would generate the "Invalid attempt to read data when no data is present" error when a user configuration is edited by another user, a configuration is deleted, or when a user clicks the cancel button after editing/viewing a configuration.

We've also fixed a bug in the My Organization data import where the employees job number was not updated when the employee changed jobs. Now the correct job number is assigned to the employee.

Here are some screenshots of the changes:

Changed the My Jobs button images



Added three sort fields to the My Jobs configuration tool



Added three sort fields to the Search Surveys configuration tool


We fixed one minor bug with the sort fields in the My Matches table configuration tool as well.

We also made some minor visual changes to the Edit Employee Detail page. The page is now consistent with the rest of the site.

We're working on some additional enhancements for uploading in the next two weeks.