XCD: Coronavirus and service continuity

We are closely monitoring official information sources from UK Government and the World Health Organisation.

What does XCD’s coronavirus response entail?

As the situation develops, we are focused on ensuring a safe working environment for our employees and continuity of service for our clients in the UK and around the world.

Owing to the cloud-based nature of our technology – and geographically disparate XCD teams in the UK, Bangalore and Kolkata – we can continue supporting our clients even in the event of a travel lockdown and curfew in both countries.

As a precautionary measure, to prevent contagion among our team, we have asked all XCD employees to take themselves out of the office environment and work from home for the foreseeable future.

Remote working is already a common practice in XCD, and our people have access to a robustly tested suite of secure cloud tools, ensuring effectiveness will not be impacted.

For mission-critical HR and Payroll processes, our clients should be assured that XCD will continue to support you as normal.

Our support teams are in isolation from each other, and in the highly unlikely event that all of one team are taken ill at the same time, we have multiple redundancy of knowledge and skills in the other support teams and in the rest of the staff at XCD, meaning there will be no interruption of service for our clients.

All XCD Payroll clients’ Year End processing will not be affected. Scheduled upgrades and Year End processing will proceed as normal.

XCD Bureau payroll will continue with no effect on deadlines. Payrolls will be put into final, with FPS created and submitted as normal. If any of the staff involved with this process are taken ill then we will backfill as required from other parts of the organisation. This is of course reliant on data being provided by you as per normal processing agreements.

Supporting our existing customers will take priority over any other activities at XCD.

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact XCD Support directly.

How will XCD deal with Professional Services engagements?

Most of our Professional Services engagements can be carried out remotely and that is exactly what we intend to do. Where our customers are happy to operate in that manner we will continue to engage as ‘normal’ both for new customers and existing. We have both the technology and working practice to make it as seamless as possible.

What can your XCD system do to support your coronavirus response?

Because the Salesforce platform allows XCD greater flexibility than many of our competitors, there are three reporting changes your admins can make immediately, with no hard coding, to assist your coronavirus response.

• Track self-isolators:
  You should already have a leave category: ‘Working from home’. You can use Translation workbench to change the label to ‘Self-isolating – Working from home’ (English UK for UK clients).
  Alternatively, XCD Support can help you set up a new ‘self-isolating’ leave category.
• Track overseas travel:
  We recommend asking employees to enter information about an overseas trip into the ‘Notes’ field on the holiday booking page. This can be supported either by adding helptext to the Notes field explaining the new requirement, or by using Translation to relabel the field to ‘Notes – include countries visited’.
• Report on self-isolators and overseas travellers:
  The standard Leave Request report shows employees who are absent. It should already include Leave category and the Notes field.

If XCD admins in your organisation require any help making the changes suggested above, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with XCD HR Support.

Our content team are maintaining a live list of useful HR and business advice articles, analysis and tools. You can find the list here. If you come across something you think we should add, please let us know.

Please don’t hesitate to contact your XCD Support or customer success representative if you have any specific questions or concerns.