Andie Burjek – Page 4

September 17, 2020June 29, 2023

Workforce technology partners pair priorities with patience

For organizations to choose the right workforce technology partners for their unique needs, the process isn’t quick and simple.

Workforce experts explained the steps organizations can take to choose the best option for themselves.

Also read: How technology can help your employee engagement strategy

Taking the initial steps to finding your workforce technology partner

To find the right workforce technology partners, the first step organizations must take is to define and identify their business requirements, said Karen Piercy, a partner in Mercer’s Philadelphia office. Also, they should define what the key user experience requirements are:

How will users interact with it?
Is it mobile enough?
Will HR be able to adapt to it?

Another important factor is to consider the organization’s unique needs. When a company puts together its extensive list of requirements, generally speaking the large vendor solutions will already cover around 80 percent of them, Piercy said. Rather than focusing too much on these standard requirements, companies should spend more time considering their unique needs for their business and situation.

“Carve out the critical things that are somewhat different and figure out how each solution will meet those needs. That will really help separate the marketplace,” she said.

Another area to consider is the service and support aspect of the vendor solution, she added. How does the vendor work with the organization on an ongoing basis after the partnership has been made? How do they handle problems, and how much do they let customers be involved in new technology or new functionalities that they’re in need of?

Consider your unique needs

Enterprises should go after partners that can accelerate their business goals, said Chris Bruce, co-founder and managing director of Thomsons Online Benefits.

According to Thomsons’ research, 49 percent of organizations with fully centralized HR operations exceed their employee engagement targets. Meanwhile, only 33 percent of firms that have not fully centralized their HR operations have seen the same result.

“By working with partners that can help businesses meet or exceed their goals, whatever they may be, they will be better positioned to thrive,” Bruce said.

Common software customer concerns

Most HR professionals are not intimately familiar with all the HR solutions available, Piercy said. There’s a lot of ongoing change in the marketplace including mergers, acquisitions and new technologies, and HR needs someone who understands what’s going on in the industry.

Experts can help HR prioritize how they’ll evaluate vendors on everything from functionalities and features to user experience, she said.

“Companies often list a whole lot of requirements, and consultants know that 80 percent of them are standard functionality. So we don’t need to focus as much on that. It’s finding that 20 percent that are the things that not all technologies do well or that they might do very differently,” she added. “That role in helping pull out that 20 percent is very valuable, and helping them prioritize how they’ll evaluate the vendor.”

Questions for companies to consider include: What’s important to me? Is it mostly about user experience? Is it mostly about features and functionality? What’s the balance between these things for me? From there, these experts can help evaluate what vendors meet these needs and this balance the best.

While this is a best practice, many companies do not make decisions this way. The Workforce Business Intelligence Board’s “2020 HR State of the Industry Survey,” developed by Workforce.com’s research team, asked 809 survey respondents what their top three most important factors are for choosing a workforce management technology vendor. Unsurprisingly, 32.5 percent of respondents put “cost” in their top three. On the other hand, only 19.4 percent chose “ability to customize for our business needs.”

Experts can also help organizations compare costs for different vendors, Piercy said. Each vendor prices differently, which makes apple-to-apple comparisons more difficult, and certain experts can peel back these pricing models for the closest cost comparison possible.

The longevity of the selection process

Organizations should expect the vendor selection process to take at least two to three months, Piercy said. “You don’t want to short-cut a lot of that process,” she said. “Also, once you’ve picked the technology, you need an implementation partner, so there’s another round of selection right there.”

She advises that organizations start looking six months in advance and stay on task.

A lot of organizations know how early they need to start, but where they falter is they start to lag after that initial start date, she said. Then suddenly they realize they’re going to have to rush the process in order to get everything done on time.

Consider total cost of ownership

Once you have decided on the top vendor choices, that next step is to build the business case for leadership.

While getting that apples-to-apples cost comparison is important, leadership needs more cost information before they make the vendor selection. They also want the total cost of ownership of the technology, Piercy said.

“Leadership is going to need to know the total cost of owning the technology. What’s the business case or ROI involved in that?”

September 16, 2020

Federal court holds state indefinite Covid-closure orders are unconstitutional

COVID-19, coronavirus, public health crisis

In County of Butler v. Wolf, Judge William S. Stickman IV of the United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania (a recent appointee of President Trump) held that state-imposed shutdown orders that closed businesses, required people to stay home, and placed limits on public gatherings—all aimed at stopping the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic—were “well-intentioned” but unconstitutional.

At issue was a series of business closure and stay-at-home orders issued by Governor Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania shortly after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Judge Stickman concluded these orders were unconstitutionally overboard.

The court concluded as follows:

Limitations on “events and gatherings” of 25 persons for indoor gatherings and 250 persons for outdoor gatherings violate individuals’ First Amendment right of assembly and their related right of free speech.
Orders closing “non-life-sustaining” businesses and imposing a lockdown through stat-at-home orders violated individuals’ liberties guaranteed by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

In sum, the court did not believe that the ongoing pandemic sufficiently justified an infringement on constitutional liberties in the name of protecting public health and safety:

The Court closes this Opinion as it began, by recognizing that Defendants’ actions at issue here were undertaken with the good intention of addressing a public health emergency. But even in an emergency, the authority of government is not unfettered. The liberties protected by the Constitution are not fair-weather freedoms—in place when times are good but able to be cast aside in times of trouble. There is no question that this Country has faced, and will face, emergencies of every sort. But the solution to a national crisis can never be permitted to supersede the commitment to individual liberty that stands as the foundation of the American experiment. The Constitution cannot accept the concept of a “new normal” where the basic liberties of the people can be subordinated to open-ended emergency mitigation measures. Rather, the Constitution sets certain lines that may not be crossed, even in an emergency. Actions taken by Defendants crossed those lines. It is the duty of the Court to declare those actions unconstitutional.

Just as important as the court’s overall holding is his dismissal of Jacobson v. Massachusetts—the century-old U.S. Supreme Court precedent that recognized the broad police power of the state to regulate to protect public health and safety—as old, stale, and no longer constitutionally relevant.

Jacobson was decided over a century ago. Since that time, there has been substantial development of federal constitutional law in the area of civil liberties. As a general matter, this development has seen a jurisprudential shift whereby federal courts have given greater deference to considerations of individual liberties, as weighed against the exercise of state police powers. That century of development has seen the creation of tiered levels of scrutiny for constitutional claims. They did not exist when Jacobson was decided. While Jacobson has been cited by some modem courts as ongoing support for a broad, hands-off deference to state authorities in matters of health and safety, other courts and commentators have questioned whether it remains instructive in light of the intervening jurisprudential developments.

County of Butler v. Wolf is narrow—it only applies to Pennsylvania law and then only in Western Pennsylvania. There is little doubt, however, that this case is headed for the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. This case, however, has the potential to have a broad national impact. This pandemic isn’t going away anytime soon, it is likely that we may face more closure orders and other restrictions as we head into winter, and other courts could seize on the rationale of this case to limit the authority of other states to regulate to protect the health and safety of the public. For this reason, County of Butler v. Wolf could end up as one of the most significant federal court decisions of 2020, and warrants close watching.

September 15, 2020June 29, 2023

Cloud workforce management saves on costs, resources and time

While cloud-based human resources applications are now the standard for new buyers, many organizations still use on-premise systems, according to Sierra-Cedar’s “2019-20 HR Systems Survey.”

The report noted that 40 percent of organizations still use at least one on-premise HR application, and that number is decreasing at a relatively slow rate. Meanwhile, 70 percent of organizations use at least one cloud HR system, the report stated.

Organizations that aren’t investing in cloud workforce management systems may be missing out on many advantages.

“If you’re not in the cloud right now or if you’re not on the path to the cloud, then you are considerably behind,” said Wilson Silva, senior vice president of outsourcing at Alight Solutions. “You’re missing out on the opportunity for many workplace benefits.”

Also read: Unify those far away workplaces with global mobility tools

Simplify the data entry process

Typically with a cloud workforce management system, a big benefit is that organizations just have to deal with one source of information, Silva said. A manager could enter a data element in one place, and that can be considered for multiple processes. They don’t need to use several competing platforms and make sure they are all in sync with the correct shared information.

A united platform allows managers to be more efficient with data entry and focus on the quality of data entry rather than the amount of time it takes to sync up multiple platforms with the same data, he added.

More frequent updates

Most cloud-based workforce management systems come with automatic updates multiple times a year, unlike older types of workforce management platforms for which organizations must wait a year or more for more hands-on updates, Silva said.

Anything that allows you to adopt new functionality and apply it in a timely manner is a strong benefit for any organization, he added.

Compliance with new laws

While cloud-based software can’t do all the compliance work for a manager, it can make their job much easier, Silva said. For example, with payroll, cloud workforce management systems can consider tax rates of different geographies. And the cloud allows companies to more quickly address legislative changes.

The ongoing update piece of this also allows companies to feel comfortable that they are on the same page as competitors, said Jake Soliman, vice president of cloud services solutions at Alight Solutions. They have access to the same functions and features as others.

Given this standardization of much of the workforce management process, organizations can more easily benchmark themselves against their competitors and see where they stand.

”This is what the software delivers. ‘This is the best practice for 90 percent plus. Let’s use it as our benchmark and use it for a more standardized process.’ It can be that driving engine behind helping HR to be as efficient and standardized across the globe as they can,” he said.

Easing the workload of your workforce

The cloud essentially allows organizations to offload infrastructure onto a third party, Soliman said. The costs, resources, time and expertise that in-house IT or HR departments used to save for maintaining a workforce management system can now be used for something else.

“You get out of what might not be a core competency for your organization, and are able to move that into a company that specializes in that delivery. It’s a cost save and a resource save as well,” he said.

Better data security

While some people might worry about the safety of their information in the cloud, the reality is that for cloud workforce management systems, data security is usually better than the old way of doing things, Soliman said.

Also read: Labor analytics add power to workforce management tools

“Do your due diligence and put your security team on it, and I think you will be pleasantly surprised that their standards are more likely than not better than what you’re running now,” he said. For cloud based systems, he added, “they all understand their business is predicated on data security, and one breach could be catastrophic to their organization. So their budget and their attention to controls are above and beyond what most would do on their own.”

There’s always the implication that “outside my network” means “not safe,” but that’s just not true, Silva said.

“It is possible to have your data outside of your network or in the cloud and it is just as safe if not safer for them as when it was in your network,” he added. “Where you find potential for breaches is when the data is when somebody is handling data outside the cloud or passing spreadsheets around.”

Rely on the experts

For the customer who hasn’t moved on to the cloud yet, there’s no need to do the switch alone, Soliman said.

“Having the in-house resources can be daunting, but having a partner help build that design and run it is becoming much more commonplace,” he added.

Having someone who has expertise in deployment is critical, Silva said. Whether an organization chooses to rely on the vendor’s expertise, there are many consultancies that also help clients maneuver the cloud because learning a new software takes time, he added.

“It’s not just a data entry system. It’s a transactional system, and understanding the configuration and workflow that goes with it is sometimes harder than it may seem,” he said. “If people view that an HR or payroll system is simply ‘You just enter data in,’ I think they find out pretty quickly that’s not the case. The skill set around it is a whole lot more challenging.

“So get some help,” he added. “It’ll make your project way more successful.”

The future of the cloud

Wilson noted that there is a level of maturity in the cloud software marketplace now. Large players have either through acquisitions or in-house developments created comprehensive services that offer everything including HCM, payroll, compensation, time tracking, performance and recruiting. But now rather than building out their product offerings they’re moving on to analytics and benchmarking.

The question software companies are seeking to answer is, “How do you leverage the data that companies input to give them analytics on how to drive performance?” Wilson said. How can analytics help drive value through data companies already have?

The next direction he sees things going is benchmarking, he added.

Also read: Labor analytics: A how-to guide for company leadership

“It’s not just about the ability to let customers utilize data, but the question now is, ‘I have this metric or insight. But is this good or bad?’ ” he said. Cloud systems can allow companies to compare themselves to what competitors are doing. An organization can assess “if I’m doing well or not based upon what other companies have the ability to do.”

September 10, 2020

Coronavirus Update: The coming wave of Covid-related age discrimination lawsuits

The EEOC has sued Ohio State University for age discrimination, alleging that the school discriminated against a 53-year-old human resources generalist because of his age by assigning a substantial substantial portion of his duties to a short-tenured co-worker 25 years his junior.

“If a termination is age-discriminatory, disguising it behind a supposed reduction in force will not change that,” says EEOC Regional Attorney Debra Lawrence in discussing the filing of the lawsuit.

What does this lawsuit, which challenges a termination that occurred all the way back in March 2018, have to do with the COVID-19 pandemic?

According to this article in the ABA Journal, it is reasonable to expect a flood of age discrimination lawsuits from COVID-19 and the economic downturn it has caused.

“My clients are being told they’re laid off because of COVID and are asking why the kid they trained for two years still has a job,” says Stephen Console of Console Mattiacci Law in Philadelphia, who’s filed about 30 age and disability discrimination cases with administrative agencies since the pandemic started. “The question is what criteria they’re using to say who stays and who goes.”

Employers need to be vigilant in laying off older workers. “High risk for Covid” and “highly compensated” might by proxies for age discrimination. Moreover, if your RIF includes most or all of your older workers and retains most or all of your younger workers, it’s going to look like you are using COVID-19 to mask a discriminatory intent. Simply, you cannot use a COVID-19 reduction in force to purge your workplace of older workers. The EEOC and the plaintiff’s bar are watching.

August 31, 2020June 29, 2023

Workforce tracking solutions do not always track with company culture

Workforce tracking solutions for employers continues to grow, especially as remote work has become more commonplace in 2020.

One reason for this is that organizations worry that employees aren’t as productive when they’re working remotely and that managers can’t peek around the office to see who’s working and who’s online shopping, said Matt Stevenson, partner and leader of Mercer’s Workforce Strategy and Analytics practice.

Additionally, now there’s just more data as more people work online. For example, with more health care delivered through telehealth now, he said, there’s much more data on patient interactions that used to just be recorded in doctors’ notes. And it’s possible to connect this data with actual patient outcomes.

Also read: Labor analytics add power to workforce management tools

In health care and beyond, organizations are beginning to invest more in this technology, Stevenson said. As workforce tracking becomes more commonplace, there are some key considerations employers must keep in mind to use it correctly.

Track productivity, not activity

There is a lot of metadata that organizations and vendors can track, like how many clicks per day or meetings per day an employee has. Either party can tap into this data and interpret it, but one important consideration is they are tracking the right thing, said Matt Stevenson, partner and leader of Mercer’s Workforce Strategy and Analytics practice.

“if your’e just tracking activity and micromanaging activity, that probably won’t end well. But if you have a way of seeing whether activity is a leading indicator of productivity, that’s fantastic,” Stevenson said.

He gave the example of judging athletes’ “productivity” by how much time they spent on the field rather than how many goals they scored. There is a big distinction between activity and productivity, and it can be a difficult distinction to make in the workplace.

Also read: Monitor Responsibly: How Employers Are Using Workplace Surveillance Devices

Consider how much you trust who you’ve hired

John Lacy, chief operating officer at Idea Grove, said that at his organization, they do not believe in workforce tracking. Rather, there should be a culture of trust.

“We don’t believe monitoring tools of that nature are necessary to ensure people are doing their jobs. It comes down to the culture we’re building. When we looked at going fully remote, that question came up as not so much ‘What technology do we need to track them?’ but ‘How will we know work is getting done?’ and ‘How will we know we’re still meeting client needs?’ ” he said.

“It came back to that level of trust,” he added. “If we don’t trust [employees] to do what they need to do — whether they’re working at the office or from a remote location — we believe we’ve hired the wrong person.”

To ensure that people are getting work done, Idea Grove instead uses a series of tech tools that help with project management. Team members track their progress on projects with the project tracking tool Teamwork. They communicate with each other via Slack. And the organization regularly gets employee feedback about how employees are feeling about the office culture through the culture tracking tool Officevibe.

Lacy also said that the organization uses The Great Game of Business to help educate employees on how to run a business, how their work contributes to the organization and how exactly their successes can lead to rewards and bonuses.

“A philosophy I truly believe in is that everyone can understand business. It’s not that hard,” he said. “A lot of companies hide that from their employees, but we want to empower employees with that knowledge so that they understand that if they want long-term employment with the company, we have to make sure we have a company that is healthy, profitable and engaging, and they can participate in that directly.”

Avoid micromanaging

A real risk of workforce tracking is the presence of micromanaging, Stevenson said. He suggested “nudging” as a solution to micromanaging.

For example, perhaps a company found out that employees’ sending emails after 10 p.m. led to burnout and lower productivity. If a manager finds out through workforce tracking that an employee is regularly sending emails at this time, the solution wouldn’t be to have a stern discussion with the employee and tell them to stop. Rather, the employee could receive “nudges” through pop-ups on their computer that encourage them to sign off at a certain time.

Also read: Employee performance shines bright with valuable, continuous shift feedback

There’s a good deal of research supporting that nudges help with behavior change rather than direct orders. Stevenson said.

With this logic, what organizations should do first is find that link between activity and productivity. Once they’ve figured out that link, they could use that insight to create nudges rather than try to directly guide employee behavior, he added.

“It’s a two-fold problem,” he explained. “What predicts the things you care about, and if you have those predictions, what do you do about it without making things worse?”

The conversation about micromanaging ultimately comes back to trust, Lacy said.

“Everything starts with culture,” he said. “If you’re in an environment where trust is not the baseline, I could see a more command-and-control type manager having trouble with not knowing if everyone’s doing what they need to do.”

“My advice to them is to take an inward look,” he added. “What is it about your internal self that is not trusting your team to get its work done?”

How to calm employee’s concerns

Some employees may have concerns about workforce tracking, which comes down to is company culture and how employee data is being used, Stevenson said. Some cultures may breed more suspicion in employees while others are more trusting.

Also read: Give managers the time they need to sharpen up their all-around skills

Things get tougher in organizations where there is a more adversarial relationship between employees and employer. “And, in my personal opinion, that’s where you may see more labor organizations showing up,” Stevenson said.

He gave the historical example of Henry Ford and the creation of assembly lines. Strikes would often happen when factory operators sped up production. A similar trend happened with coal miners, who were paid by their output of coal every hour. They would strike when the number was supposed to go up, if they were concerned it was unsafe for them to do so.

Using “speeding up the assembly line” as a metaphor for “increasing productivity” in the 21st century, Stevenson said that when organizations attempt to “speed it up” by tracking emails or whatever other metric, people notice.

“If you’re the sort of organization that will take this data to speed up the assembly line, you’ll get pushback,” he said. “If you’re on the sort that will use this data to make the product on the assembly line better then you won’t get push back.”

Further, he added, sometimes it’s legitimate to speed up the assembly line and look for higher productivity. What’s key here is how an organization shares the benefit of increased productivity. If it speeds up productivity and shares the profits with employees, those employees may very well be satisfied. But if profits mostly go somewhere else, like to shareholders or executives, then there will be less of a positive reaction, he said.

August 28, 2020June 29, 2023

Decentralized scheduling in nursing helps care for health care professionals

COVID-19 has highlighted the importance of treating health care workers well. A population of employees that was already at high risk of burnout, the pandemic has added even more pressure on certain medical professionals who must endure higher workloads, abide by stricter reporting and safety routines, and witness the carnage of a pandemic.

Nurses are one group of these medical workers. Even before COVID-19, burnout among nursing staff was a concern, with one 2017 study finding that nearly 50 percent of nurse respondents saying they have considered leaving the field for reasons such as feeling overworked, being swamped with paperwork and not feeling satisfied with their job.

Best practices to keep nursing staff engaged include deciding the right shift length for your workforce, hiring the right number of full-time versus part-time employees and determining if centralized or decentralized scheduling in nursing works for your organization.

Also read: Shift scheduling strategies can be improved through technology

Centralized versus decentralized scheduling in nursing

With a centralized model, the organizations manage staffing and scheduling through one central office, while with a decentralized model, these decisions are made as an individual hospital or unit.

The decision between centralized and decentralized scheduling in nursing is partly based on geography and if the hospital system exists in one city versus many time zones, said Matt Stevenson, partner and leader of Mercer’s Workforce Strategy and Analytics practice. A centralized model can work for a location or several locations in one city. It allows two locations from the same hospital system to use the same centralized staffing pool, and nurses can potentially move from one location to another instead of getting sent home if they’re scheduled for an overstaffed shift.

There are also efficiencies in terms of how payroll. Financials and training are handled the same way across locations, he added.

However, this may not work if an employee has to drive long distances to get from one location to another, he said. That’s why a decentralized model may work better for a hospital system that is multistate, rural or widely spread out.

In addition, from the cultural perspectives, many hospitals don’t prefer a centralized model because they’d have less control and they’d be at the mercy of a centralized system for staffing needs, Stevenson said. If they don’t get extra staff that way, they’re out of luck. A decentralized model provides more independence.

Forecasting patient census

There are different types of hospitals that may have different scheduling concerns, but one challenge they share is that they can’t predict how many patients come through the door in a given day or how sick they’ll be, Stevenson said. While hospitals can depend on some big-picture trends, they aren’t always reliable, which causes a lot of stress internally.

If nurses are understaffed, that may mean that nurses are overwhelmed and overworked. If nurses are overstaffed, that may mean having to send people home without working or getting paid.

Systems are getting more sophisticated about forecasting patient census — how many patients are expected to come in during a given time period, Stevenson said. And those hospitals and health systems that do it better will help the morale of nurses and other health care workers, he added.

Scheduling and managing full-time versus part-time nurses

Nursing organizations fall onto different parts of the continuum of mostly full-time employees versus mostly part-time employees, and having more of either can be advantageous for different companies, Stevenson said.

Full-time nurses generally stay at an organization longer, but hospitals must pay them more and give them a full-time schedule. Using more part-time nurses means more flexibility in the schedule but can also mean more turnover.

Also read: How to avoid overstaffing through wage tracker software

The challenge here is that each supports competing priorities — one financial and one operational, Stevenson said.

“Finding the sweet spot of the right mix between full time and part time is really tough, and we find it different for every hospital,” he said. “Those organizations that can figure out the sweet spot will win every time.”

For hospitals trying to figure this out, the first aspect to consider is what the labor market looks like in the area. Are there more full-time or part-time options available?

Second, it depends on how the hospital is set up and how many recruiters and trainers there are on staff. With more part-time employees, there will need to be enough people to find, interview, hire, and train talent. A hospital may not be able to change the full-time to part-time ratio if the staff infrastructure of the organization does not support that new mix.

Finally, it depends on how a hospital sets up its nurses’ shifts. Are they mostly six hour, eight hour, or 12-hour shifts? If a nurse works many shorter shifts, they tend to be part-time.

How to set up nursing shifts

The length of shifts depends on factors such as the type of care nurses are providing and the age of the workforce, Stevenson said. In general, younger workers are more open to 12-hour shifts. Also, employees start to get burned out at hour 12, so caring for high-acuity patients with challenging medical conditions and unpredictable needs may not be the best option for them.

On the other extreme, four or six hour shifts present more opportunities for infectious disease to spread, he said. If a patient has something infectious, the fewer number of nurses who care for them in a given day, the less likely that will spread their infection to more people.

August 27, 2020June 29, 2023

Management tips on overtime equalization and tracking hours

scheduling; time and attendance; forecasting

Many schedules like 24-7 operations have built in overtime, just to make sure there’s coverage, but in any organization there’s potential that employees may accrue unplanned overtime. For managers trying to run a tight ship, this can complicate a precisely planned schedule and budget.

Sometimes there’s too much work and not enough resources or employees to accomplish these tasks, leading companies to give too much overtime. “That’s a matter for management and leadership to assess and to determine whether they need to hire additional talent,” said Chuck Buiocchi, senior director of BPS operations at Kelly Services.

It’s vital that managers get payroll correct, and while many companies still use old school paper time cards, third party platforms can help a lot, he added.

Several workplace experts shared management tips for organizations trying to manage overtime more accurately and precisely. Here is their advice.

Overtime equalization can help you decide who gets extra hours

Some employees may want more overtime hours to help ensure financial stability, Buiocchi said. Managers want to be fair to employees in situations like this, and if there’s more demand for overtime than supply, they’ll want to create a method of allocating those hours fairly.

Overtime equalization — the attempt to balance overtime among employees — can be dependent on factors like employee tenure and reliability. But more often than not, organizations have to consider the people with the most relevant skill sets first, Buiocchi said.

Sometimes overtime is built into schedules and interested employees can ask for those hours, but in general managers want to avoid unnecessary overtime as much as possible.

Also read: A technology integration is an intervention to dissolve common payroll errors

The key here is understanding the root cause of this increased need for labor, Buiocchi said. If employees are spread too thin, maybe it’s time to hire more employees. If the reason for more overtime is a decrease in productivity, drill down on what’s impacting productivity and address it. This is a much bigger project and requires deeper discussion, but it’s necessary if something is impacting the team to such a degree, he added.

Allocating overtime hours during the pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has complicated overtime allocation to some degree. Now when determining overtime equalization, organizations may deal with a world of juxtaposition, said Traci Fiatte, chief executive officer, professional and commercial staffing at Randstad US. Some employees are dying for extra hours and income for a variety of reasons, like those working 60 or 70 hour weeks at two different jobs because their spouse lost their job. But others don’t want to go to work at all or are scared.

Meanwhile, employers are desperately trying to manage overtime and not pay it, because many organizations’ revenues have declined since the pandemic began.

Smart scheduling is especially important during the COVID-19 pandemic, when offices or places of operations might have to stagger out their shifts so that employees can be socially distanced, Fiatte said. Or maybe they need to operate at a lower capacity than usual so that employees can more easily stay away from each other. She also suggested adopting scheduling tools that allow managers to take floor plans into account as they create schedules and socially distant staff appropriately.

“Overtime is best managed when you know who is working when and where, even in terms of floor planning — which is a concept we never had to worry about pre-COVID. We certainly had to worry about shift scheduling before, but we never had to worry about who was where,” she said.

Even during the COVID-19 pandemic, companies are eager to produce as much as they usually have or more, but whether or not they’ll have the same employee headcount as before is uncertain, she said. And with fewer employees, maintaining that production schedule can be tricky.

One strategy organizations have adopted to address pandemic challenges is relying on more shifts with fewer employees, she said. During times like this, that may be more effective than longer shifts with more people on the floor at the same time.

Actions speak louder than words

One of the main problems with labor tracking and monitoring is that it’s difficult to accurately track or monitor overtime, said Albert Rizzo, adjunct assistant professor at the NYU School of Professional Studies within its human capital management program. HR needs to do it and not just pretend to do it, he said.

Also read: Shift scheduling strategies can be improved through technology

Also, he added, HR needs to make sure the overtime policy is not just a few lines in the employee handbook but something that’s actionable. Best practices here depend on the size of the company.

For a mid-sized company with many employees, for example, one common mistake is that HR is given the responsibility to track labor, Rizzo said. But it’s actually be more efficient and accurate if lower level managers were given the task of tracking this.

“Rather than put the burden on one department like HR or one HR manager to track, the best practice would be to get the person closest to the employees typically incurring the overtime and have that person manage it,” he said.

While many managers view overtime as a problem, they should be looking at it more from the solution mindset, he added. When team members are accruing too much unplanned overtime, there’s a solution to be discovered. Managers can speak to the people accruing the extra hours and find out why that’s occurring. Maybe there’s no clear policy on what constitutes overtime and what doesn’t. Maybe the location is short staffed.

Ensure that your employees are properly classified

HR needs to make sure they’ve properly classified employees to begin with so that exempt employees are truly exempt and nonexempt employees are truly nonexempt. Misclassification frequently happens in HR, Rizzo said.

Regarding overtime, perhaps an analysis could be done on what exact duties employees are performing. Managers can potentially shift certain duties from A nonexempt employee to an exempt employee who won’t be paid overtime for working extra hours.

“HR should be very careful about classification of exempt and nonexempt employees,” he said.

Cover your tracks with labor tracking

An important part of this conversation is what the burden of proof is on overtime claims and who holds that burden, Rizzo said. If an employee claims they have worked unpaid overtime, employers must have the information on file to disprove that claim. If the employer doesn’t have any records that accurately track if the claim is true or not, the U.S. Department of Labor will pursue assuming the employee is telling the truth.

Also read: Labor analytics: A how-to guide for company leadership

“If an employee says 60 hours and the employer has no way to refute the claim or doesn’t refute it sufficiently, then the employee’s statement of how many hours they worked will be taken as the truth,” Rizzo said, adding that this is something employer often take for granted or don’t know.

“There has to be a real tracking system, Rizzo said. “It doesn’t have to be sophisticated but it does have to be monitored carefully.”

August 26, 2020

Coronavirus Update: New DOL guidance explains employers’ obligation to track compensable telework time

timeclock, wage and hour, schedule, timesheet rounding

With more employees working from home than ever before (thanks to COVID-19), employers are facing the new reality of tracking working time for remote workers and paying for that time.

The DOL recently published a new Field Assistance Bulletin explaining the obligation of employers to pay for non-exempt employees’ “working time” and the obligation of those employees to track this time. It’s not a change in the law, but instead a great reminder of the obligations the FLSA imposes on employers and employees.

An employer is required to pay its employees for all hours worked, including work not requested but suffered or permitted, including work performed at home. If the employer knows or has reason to believe that work is being performed, the time must be counted as hours worked. An employer may have actual or constructive knowledge of additional unscheduled hours worked by their employees, and courts consider whether the employer should have acquired knowledge of such hours worked through reasonable diligence. One way an employer may exercise such diligence is by providing a reasonable reporting procedure for nonscheduled time and then compensating employees for all reported hours of work, even hours not requested by the employer. If an employee fails to report unscheduled hours worked through such a procedure, the employer is not required to undergo impractical efforts to investigate further to uncover unreported hours of work and provide compensation for those hours. However, an employer’s time reporting process will not constitute reasonable diligence where the employer either prevents or discourages an employee from accurately reporting the time he or she has worked, and an employee may not waive his or her rights to compensation under the Act.

What does this mean:

Generally an employer must pay a non-exempt employee for all time during which the employer knows, or should know through the exercise of reasonable diligence, the employee is working.
If an employer has reasonable reporting rules detailing an employee’s responsibility to report the employee’s working time, an employer must pay the employee for all such time reported.
However, if an employee fails to report time pursuant to those rules, the employer is excused from any obligation to pay for that unreported time. An employer is not required to undertake efforts efforts to investigate, uncover, and pay for unreported time.
An employer cannot, though, prevent or discourage employees from reporting working time to avoid paying for it.

What should you be doing now? Dust off your handbook and make sure it contains a policy explaining to employees their obligation to report working time and advising that they will not be paid for unreported time. Absent such a policy, you are responsible to exercise reasonable diligence to discover time employees are working, an exercise that will almost certainly miss time and result in exposure for unpaid time/overtime.

August 25, 2020June 29, 2023

Labor tracking in an increasingly complex legal environment

Labor tracking is necessary for employers to ensure they’re paying their workforce correctly, but the unique labor laws of certain cities and states throw a wrench in an organization’s practices.

The word “complex” does not even scratch the surface of how complicated labor tracking is given the various state and local labor laws that govern sick leave, overtime, minimum wage and more, according to Traci Fiatte, chief executive officer, professional & commercial staffing at Randstad US. “If you’re not using an automated [employee] scheduling software and you have employees in multiple states, I’m not sure how you keep track of it all,” she added.

According to Workforce.com’s 2020 “HR State of the Industry” report, only 40.5 percent of respondents said they used HR software for workforce management, including time and attendance, and only 29.5 percent said they used it for compensation management. There’s still room for improvement for organizations who’ve yet to use automated software to help with labor tracking and management.

Rely on specialized employees and software

Fiatte suggested that organizations have personnel dedicated to understanding varying laws and a payroll system that can be programmed to understand the different laws.

For example, overtime is an area of labor law where different regulations can confuse an already complex process, and software may have the capabilities to allow managers to take overtime laws into account when they plan schedules. In most states, “overtime” is defined as anything more than 40 hours a week, but in California it’s defined as more than 8 hours worked in a day.

“Unless you have a system to track that, you almost need a staff dedicated to manually tracking it, which I can’t imagine any large employer being able to do,” Fiatte said. “The name of the game is automation and making sure you have the right systems to help manage it.”

The biggest gap here is that while big national brands have this figured out, others may not.

“The companies I worry for are the companies that are small enough that they may be family-owned, regionally-based or [spread across] four or five states, but they don’t have the level of sophistication to have legal teams or HR teams to be managing the variances between state laws,” Fiatte said. “It’s those companies that could be taken by surprise two years from now when they get audited, and they’ve broken a bunch of laws they didn’t know they were breaking.”

Organizations in a situation like this can find a specialist to help them manage the dynamic and complex labor law environment, she added.

Encourage managers to stay up to date on the latest labor laws

Chuck Buiocchi, senior director of BPS operations at staffing company Kelly Services, said that at his organization they use the latest technology to ensure managers aren’t expected to know everything. They also have a group whose sole purpose is to keep the rest of the organization abreast of changing labor laws.

Buiocchi said he would encourage managers to stay as up to date as possible on changing labor laws. While they may not become experts, keeping themselves educated is a smart thing to do.

Keep documentation

Labor tracking helps organizations control wage costs, but that’s not the only benefit. It’ll also help any organization audited by the Department of Labor.

“I can’t stress enough the importance of labor tracking, not only from a financial standpoint in terms of making sure people are paid properly but even in terms of the legal standpoint,” said Albert Rizzo, adjunct assistant professor at the NYU School of Professional Studies within its human capital management program.

“If the company ever gets audited by the Department of Labor, it only takes one employee to make a complaint about failure to get paid minimum wage or overtime for that to trigger an audit by the Department of Labor,” he added. “And once that audit is triggered, they could very well go after the employer and every employee to see if the employer has paid any one of those employees improperly, even if they’ve never lodged a complaint.”

Encourage straightforward conversations

Companies must be very deliberate about payroll policies, procedures and expectations and how that information is communicated among leadership, management and employees, Buiocchi said.

“We will not allow people to work off the clock,” he said about his own organization. “We don’t trade for comp time or anything like that. We live to not only the letter but the spirit of the laws in which we operate, and we expect our leaders and our employees to do the same. And we set those expectations and we manage the performance for those who don’t meet those expectations.”

Also read: Give managers the time they need to sharpen up their all-around skills

If someone works off the clock, in this case, supervisors can have a conversation with that employee, make sure they get paid, make sure they don’t do it again and discipline them if necessary. Maybe the supervisor finds out that the direct manager of the employee is mismanaging something or overworking employees, and then it’s up to the supervisor to find a resolution for that.

August 25, 2020August 25, 2020

Coronavirus update: This example of WFH is WTF

Alison Green, who pens the super engaging and helpful Ask A Manager blog, reached out to me to help with a reader question.

You should jump over to Alison’s post to read the whole bonkers scenario, but the TL;DR is that an employee’s spouse asked about the legality of an employer-installed app on her work-from-home husband’s phone that audio recorded everything happening in the home (whether work related or not).

My answer:

First things first. Legal or illegal I’d get away from that employer right now. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. Just get your resume in order and start job hunting ASAP. This is a horrible HR practice that tells me this is not an employer I want to work for any longer

As for the legality of the practice, it depends on the state in which you live. Recording or otherwise listening to the conversations of others are covered and regulated by state wiretap statutes. These laws come in two flavor – one-party consent laws, and two-party consent laws.

Most state wiretap statutes are one-party consent laws. This means that as long as one of the parties to the conversation has consented to the recording, no law has been violated. In the scenario presented, I’d want to know whether the husband has consented (expressly or implicitly) to the recording. If so, in a one-party consent state, no statute has been violated. I would still, however, have concerns over a common law invasion of privacy tort claim since the employer is unreasonable intruding into the private lives of your family, legal wiretap notwithstanding.

A minority of states (11 to be precise — California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Washington, plus Hawaii, which requires two-party consent if the recording device is in a private residence) have two-party consent laws. This means that unless all parties being listened to or recorded have consented to it, an illegal wiretap is occurring. If you are in one of these states, the recording described would likely be illegal, since the spouse and anyone else within earshot of the phone other than the employee would not have provided consent. In this case, I’d raise the issue with the company, and if you can’t get satisfaction, I’d talk to an attorney.

A recent story in the New York Times asked if COVID-19 has forever changed the office. It has, and largely for the better. For example, lots of companies who were resistant to work-from-home have had to bend.

But this example bends so far that it breaks the employer/employee relationship.

If you have so little trust in your employees that you need to monitor everything they do by eavesdropping on conversations in their homes, you shouldn’t be in the business of employing others. You are simply not suited to be an employer. The employer/employee relationship is one of mutual trust, and without that trust there is no relationship of value, period.