About

Please join us in congratulating our November employee of the month, Greg Howard, STAR Grant and Contract Administrator. Greg is always working towards process improvement and generously shares his findings with the team. Two contributions stand out: he built a lookup tool to find the relationship between Workday's object class, spend category, and ledger codes — helping the team customize reports and correctly enter journals, purchase orders, and expense reports. He also created an Excel script that takes the raw data export from payroll report RPT616a and displays it in a pivot table, presenting a clean summary by pay period showing employees, their positions, and effort percentages by grant. He has shared these tools broadly across teams, and the amount of time saved is incalculable. When asked for variations to help troubleshoot specific needs, he kindly adapts his work to fit the request.

 

When a colleague first started in Sponsored Programs with no experience in grant administration, Greg was extremely generous with his time — a great teacher and incredibly patient. As the team has grown, he has voluntarily taken on additional portfolios to better support everyone.

 

Greg is also not afraid to take on tasks outside his normal scope. When working on an unfamiliar award, he asks clarifying questions rather than assuming issues will be caught downstream — a level of due diligence that helps prevent unallowable expenses from slipping through. He also serves as a valuable second set of eyes, often catching missing pieces others might overlook.

 

Greg's cheerful outlook and commitment to accuracy and thoroughness are stellar!