Rick Bell, Author at Workforce

March 30, 2021September 30, 2021

What employers and HR should expect from new Labor Secretary Marty Walsh

Department of Labor Secretary Marty Walsh

Recently confirmed L abor Secretary Marty Walsh will be the first union member to head the U.S. Department of Labor in half a century.

Given Walsh’s extensive union background, labor-management issues such as the unionization push among employees at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama will be front and center during his tenure as the Labor Department’s new leader. It’s also expected that Walsh’s leadership of the agency will prompt a crackdown in the enforcement of wage-and-hour laws and workplace safety regulations, among other worker-friendly policies.

According to a post on law firm Fisher Phillips’ blog shortly after Walsh was nominated in January to lead the Labor Department, “Many view Marty Walsh as a leader who aims for pragmatic solutions to problems and strives for unity and consensus-building. His first allegiance, however, will be toward workers. ‘Working people, labor unions, and those fighting every day for their shot at the middle class are the backbone of our economy and of this country,’ Walsh said in a tweet soon after Biden announced him as the nominee. ‘As Secretary of Labor, I’ll work just as hard for you as you do for your families and livelihoods. You have my word.’ ”

Kevin M. Young, a partner in labor and employment in Seyfarth’s Atlanta office, Jason E. Reisman, co-chair, Labor and Employment Practice Group, for Blank Rome in Philadelphia, and Christopher D. Durham, partner in Duane Morris’ Employment, Labor, Benefits and Immigration Practice in Philadelphia, offered their thoughts on what employers should expect as Walsh begins his tenure as the new Labor secretary.

Aggressive enforcement

Durham said employers can expect the Labor Department to more vigorously enforce employment laws through audits, investigations and court actions against employers, contrasting with the Trump administration’s focus on securing employer compliance through education, outreach and other less adversarial means.

“These shifting enforcement priorities will be supported by regulations and sub-regulatory guidance that is more protective of employee rights than the generally business-friendly interpretations of the prior administration,” Durham said. “We have already seen examples of this regulatory shift in the DOL’s moves to undo the prior administration’s regulations on joint employer status and tipped-employee wages.”

Also see: Simplify labor compliance with accurate time and attendance tracking

Young pointed out that while the Labor Department under Trump was not as light on employers as some might assume — the Wage & Hour Division set a new record for back wages recovered in 2019 — it took a softer approach than previous administrations on the topic of damage enhancements. Liquidated damages, which is a penalty in an amount equal to back wages owed, were taken off the table in all but the rarest cases, he said.

“The new administration has reversed course on that issue, and it’s likely that other enforcement measures will reenter the picture, too,” Young said. “It’s not clear yet whether the number of investigations will increase — that depends on the budget as much as anything else — but employers should certainly be preparing for more aggressive investigations than in past years.”

Reisman said that although Walsh was confirmed with strong bipartisan support, employers should expect his reputation as someone who is a consensus-builder to be tested early with so many critical items on his agenda, including the pandemic response and some critical Trump-era regulatory initiatives.

Employers also should expect there to be an ongoing clash between the age-old tensions that exist between the Labor Department when operated under a Republican administration and under a Democratic administration.

“There is no question, given Walsh’s labor background and leadership of the building trades, that he will be a staunch supporter of workers’ and unions’ rights,” Reisman said. “He will not want to alienate his base of union support, or that of President Biden, especially in light of Biden’s promises to empower workers and unions.”

Employers can expect a return to a Labor Department that resembles and likely surpasses the enforcement efforts of the Obama administration, Reisman said. The DOL will be back on the trail of finding violations and holding employers accountable.

“The focus will be less on assisting with compliance and educating employers and more on the gotcha game of penalizing employers who — knowingly or unknowingly — are not in compliance with the laws the DOL enforces,” he said.

Enforcing wage-and-hour and overtime violations

Nowhere will the shift in Labor Department enforcement priorities and positions be felt more by employers than enforcement of the Fair Labor Standards Act’s overtime and minimum wage requirements, Durham said.

“I expect the number and scope of audits conducted by the DOL’s Wage & Hour Division to increase substantially, and that the DOL will not be as willing to settle violations for less than ‘make-whole’ relief for affected employees,” he said. “In addition to back wages, the DOL is more likely to insist that employers pay liquidated damages when settling a wage-and-hour investigation, and the DOL likely will increase the use of civil monetary penalties as a potent deterrent to send a message to employers.”

Also read: Wage and hour violations cost restaurant $697,000

Employers should expect a return of the enforcement tools of the past, liquidated damages being almost automatic as penalties in wage-and-hour investigations, Reisman added. “We expect more willfulness assertions by the DOL, which allow a back wage look-back period of three years, rather than two. And, yes, the use of civil money penalties will be used more broadly as a tool than in the last four years.”

Minimum wage and the tip credit

Young said that the new administration clearly supports increasing the federal minimum wage. And there’s also little doubt that the benefit of any increase will apply for tipped workers.

“The question here is whether the FLSA will continue to allow a portion of a tipped employee’s minimum wage to come in the form of tips,” he said. “A recent federal legislative proposal would remove this so-called tip credit, requiring restaurants to directly pay the full minimum wage to each tipped employee, without credit or concern for the amount of tips they earn on the job. If passed, this could have a seismic impact on a restaurant industry that operates on thin margins and has spent most of the last year on life support.”

Supporting fair workweek and predictive scheduling

Fair workweek laws have swept the nation and in particular the retail, fast food and hospitality industries over the past decade or so, Young said. These laws are likely on the radar of Biden and Walsh.

One recently took effect in the president’s back yard (Philadelphia), and another has been the focus of lobbying efforts in Walsh’s home state of Massachusetts, Young noted.

“Instituting this sort of reform at the federal level would require an act of Congress,” Young said. “After all, the DOL can’t make new law, only interpret and enforce what’s on the books, and I don’t get the sense that this sort of measure is among Democratic lawmakers’ core labor priorities.”

Also read: The fair workweek squeeze on employer scheduling

In the past couple of years multiple local jurisdictions including Chicago, Seattle and San Francisco passed predictive scheduling laws, with more such laws likely to hit the books in the coming years, Durham said.

Absent new legislation at the federal level, it is highly unlikely the Labor Department will impose requirements similar to these laws because the FLSA generally does not impose requirements on employers related to scheduling employees, he added.

“However, one way in which the DOL could enhance the financial benefit to employees of such laws would be to take the position that certain penalties under predictive scheduling laws, such as penalties for shift cancellations or other scheduling changes with insufficient notice to employees, need to be included in the regular rate of pay for purposes of calculating overtime under the FLSA,” Durham said. “The DOL’s current position, set forth in a Fact Sheet published in December 2019, is that most such penalty payments do not need to be included in the regular rate of pay.”

Reisman also questioned whether the Labor Department will have the time or resources to make its way far enough down its priority list to fair workweek/predictive scheduling regulations, or what its authority would be in seeking an impact in that realm.

Still, he added, “Anything that would entail a nationwide policy or regulation such as paid leave could be well-received by many employers if it serves to preempt state and local laws and regulations that have created an almost unmanageable web of compliance pitfalls for multi-state employers.”

Labor law enforcement can strike your business at any time. Ensure simplified and automated compliance to federal, state and local labor regulations and avoid costly penalties. Book a demo and see Workforce.com’s powerful compliance tools in action.

March 24, 2021

How to choose which remote work employees to bring back

coronavirus, remote work, COVID-19, remote workforce

For the past year, an astounding 44 percent of employees have been working remotely full time, and two-thirds of employees have done remote work at least one day per week. With vaccination rates on the rise and offering a light at the end of the pandemic tunnel, employers are starting to plan for bringing employees back to the physical workplace.

These decisions involve a lot of key questions an employer needs to answer in planning for where employees will work in a post-vaccine, post-pandemic world.

Here are four questions to think about.

1. How have employees performed during the pandemic while working remotely?

Has an employee been less productive, as productive, or more productive? Have they stayed connected and in communication? Can you trust them to continue to work remotely, or do they need closer monitoring? Have you gotten more productivity out of employees during the pandemic because of the resulting blurring of work time and personal time (i.e., if one’s home is now the workplace, do they ever really disconnect from working)?

2. What is an employee’s preference?

Do they want to continue working remotely, would they prefer to return to a physical office or workspace or do they want some type of flexible or hybrid arrangement? Do they have long commutes that eat into their available working time, and will remote work create greater productivity as a result?

3. Does remote work makes sense for your business moving forward?

How interactive do your employees need to be in performing their jobs? Is their work highly collaborative, and being with people, in person, will assist in getting the job done quicker and at a higher quality? Or does your business involve production processes that cannot be done or effectively managed remotely? Or can employee “get it done” just as well without being face-to-actual-face with others?

4. What about high-risk employees and working parents?

COVID-19 more disproportionately severely impacts older people and people with certain underlying health conditions. And, working parents who lost child care during the pandemic had other reasons to remain at home. Thus, separate from stay-at-home order and social distancing rules that have kept everyone home, these employees have a greater reason to have worked remotely and remain remote. As individuals are vaccinated and schools and childcare reopen, these concerns should melt away, but employers still need to be mindful of not discriminating on account of age, disability, and parental/caregiver status as they bring employees back to work and reintegrate them into the workplace.

COVID-19 has changed how most businesses think about work from home. That genie is likely never going back in the bottle. Each business will have to answer all of the above questions in deciding what work from home looks like for them and their employees as we move into a post-pandemic world and workplace.

March 23, 2021October 6, 2022

Labor Department fines, penalizes contractor $100K for falsified overtime records

employment law, labor law, overtime records

Recent wage and hour violations by a New Hampshire contractor is a signal to other employers that they should review their workforce management policies and overtime records for compliance with federal, state and local labor laws.

Facades Inc., a commercial exterior surfaces applicator-installer in Hampstead, New Hampshire, falsified pay records to cover up its failure to pay employees the required overtime wages they earned, according to a U.S. Department of Labor investigation.

The Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division recovered $87,360 in back wages owed to 28 Facades Inc. employees. It also assessed a civil money penalty of $19,516 to address the willful nature of the violations, which included the employer’s falsification of payroll records, according to a DOL press release.

Check your workforce management policies

Small business owners have numerous priorities, and accurately managing payroll and time and attendance policies should always remain at the top, as the Facades case shows. Effectively tracking employee hours with an automated workforce management solution will clean up compensation and support compliance practices.

Investigators found Facades Inc. violated the Fair Labor Standards Act when it paid straight time for overtime hours worked by employees and concealed those payments as “reimbursements” in payroll registers. Rather than recording and paying for overtime hours at time-and-one-half workers’ regular rates of pay, the employer recorded only up to 40 hours in their records and masked their straight time payment for any additional hours, the release stated.

“Workers deserve to get paid all the wages they have earned, and our enforcement of the law ensures that happens,” said Wage and Hour Division District Director Daniel Cronin in Manchester, New Hampshire. “In this case, the employer attempted to conceal illegal straight-time-for-overtime payments. In addition to being held accountable for back pay, the employer paid a significant civil money penalty. Other employers should use the outcome of this investigation as an opportunity to review their own pay practices to avoid violations like those found in this case.”

Automate your processes to avoid penalties

Employees deserve their paychecks on time and to be accurately compensated for the time they spend working. Automated payroll practices help eliminate delays, improve compliance and minimize costly errors.

With employment contracts, timesheets, benefits and labor laws, there are a lot of factors involved in payroll that can result in miscalculations. Workforce.com’s payroll integration solution connects with more than 50 payroll systems to ease compliance and enhance efficiency.

Ask for a demo of Workforce.com’s powerful time and attendance platform today and see how to make workplace compliance effortless and effective.

March 19, 2021July 24, 2024

Wage and hour violations cost restaurant $697K

The U.S. Department of Labor under the Biden administration is ramping up its enforcement of wage and hour violations as a popular Chicago restaurant whose employees often worked for tips only was fined nearly $700,000.

The department’s Wage and Hour Division recovered $697,295 in back wages for 60 employees following an investigation of Tank Noodle Inc. Investigators found the employer owed some workers more than $10,000 each in back wages and identified numerous violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act’s minimum wage and overtime requirements.

Inaccurate time and attendance records

The agency also found the business owner failed to keep accurate records of the number of hours employees worked, as required by law.

In October 2020, the wage and hour division notified Tank Noodle, a popular Vietnamese restaurant in Chicago’s trendy Uptown neighborhood, that they were in violation of the FLSA. Tank Noodle signed an agreement to pay the back wages they owed Dec. 7, 2020.

Using an effective time and attendance system helps prevent the kind of wage and hour violations that led to the steep penalty incurred by Tank Noodle, said Tasmin Tresize, president of Workforce.com.

“While it’s unclear what type of workforce management system was utilized, it has evidently led to major violations in the wage and hour code,” Tresize said.

Shortly after the November presidential election, Michael Lotito, an attorney with Littler in San Francisco and co-chair of Littler’s Workplace Policy Institute, offered his thoughts on changes in Labor Department enforcement under the Biden administration. He was quoted as saying the division will likely revisit overtime standards and issue rules dealing with pay entitlement for off-the-clock work, like checking email from home.

“Enforcement will be aggressive, especially against certain industries like fast food, janitorial, construction and other targets. The department will also coordinate with state DOLs to cooperate with one another as investigations progress,” Lotito said.

Large amount of back wages owed

The Tank Noodle investigation recovered a considerable amount of back wages for 60 employees in an industry whose essential workers are often among the lowest paid, said Wage and Hour Division District Director Thomas Gauza in Chicago.

“Failing to accurately record the hours employees work does not prevent a federal investigation, the discovery of violations and ultimately, back wage recovery,” Gauza said in a press statement. “This case shows that employers that attempt to gain an unfair competitive advantage by flouting the law will be held accountable.”

Violations of tip pooling, overtime requirements

Investigators found that Tank Noodle employed some servers to work only for tips, failing to pay them any direct wages, as the law requires. Tank Noodle also shorted servers when the employer pooled tips each day, and divided them evenly among all staff, which illegally included management, according to the Labor Department.

The FLSA does not permit management to participate in tip pooling arrangements. The restaurant violated overtime requirements when it paid some workers flat amounts per day, regardless of the number of hours that they worked, the Labor Department said. Doing so resulted in violations when those employees worked more than 40 hours per week but the employer failed to pay overtime.

Tresize noted that as the Labor Department looks to be taking a more aggressive approach to each case, “It’s important that businesses invest in solutions to reduce their noncompliance risk.”

Effective restaurant employee scheduling best practices

Using best practices for an effective restaurant employee schedule will boost wage-and-hour compliance, avoid understaffing and labor cost overruns. One way to start scheduling in advance without the hassle of paperwork is with an online restaurant scheduling system.

See how to build your restaurant’s employee work schedule with ease and remain in compliance with all labor laws. Sign up for a free trial of Workforce.com’s shift scheduling software today.

March 18, 2021

Employers facing lawsuits for failing to pay for pre-shift COVID-19 screenings

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, I asked this question: “Are employers legally responsible for paying workers for the time it takes to record their body temperatures before entering the workplace?”

My answer was a legal, “Probably,” and a moral, “Definitely.”

This isn’t a “what does the law allow” issue; this is a “what’s right is right” issue. If you’re requiring your employees to queue in a line to take their temperature before you’ll let them enter the workplace, pay them. Don’t be cheap and don’t count pennies.

Your employees are scared. They are risking their own personal health and safety, and that of everyone who lives in their homes, to keep your essential business up and running. They could just as easily stay home, limit their exposure, and collect unemployment. What they need is your compassion, not your penny-pinching. Times are tough for everyone. I get it. But your business shouldn’t go belly up if you pay each employee for a few extra minutes of time each day.

But since this is a legal blog, we might as well take a fresh look at the legal issue, courtesy of a recently filed lawsuit against The Merchant of Tennis Inc., a San Bernardino, California, racquet sports retailer. According to Law360, among other wage and hour violations, José Hernandez Solis claimed that his former employer illegally failed to pay employees for their time spent undergoing

COVID-19 temperature checks at the beginning of the shifts.

Law360 points out that Walmart faces similar allegations in another recently filed California lawsuit. According to that lawsuit, Walmart failed to pay its employees for the 30-45 minutes spent each workday for COVID-19 temperature screening and questioning.

Legally, the standard, per SCOTUS’s decision in Integrity Staffing Solutions v. Busk, asks whether the pre-shift activities are “integral and indispensable” to an employee’s principal activities (“necessary to the principal work performed” and “done for the benefit of the employer”). It’s hard to fathom a situation during a pandemic in which pre-shift health screenings don’t meet this standard.

I think employers getting sued over this issue have real (and expensive) exposure. Don’t join them. Do the legal thing. Do the right thing. Pay your employees for this time.

March 17, 2021

CDC allows large employers to establish vaccination sites

The CDC released guidance permitting large employers to establish temporary sites to vaccinate employees.

The CDC on March 16 said that employers should consider opting for an on-site vaccination program if they have a large number of employees with predictable schedules and enough space to set up a pop-up clinic while still allowing for COVID-appropriate social distancing.

Employers should consider pushing employees to off-site vaccination clinics if they have a smaller number of employees, employees with flexible or non-predictable schedules, mobile employees who don’t have one worksite, or employees who’d prefer not to have their employer administer their vaccine.

Employers who choose to set up a vaccination site still must follow the EEOC’s guidelines on managing vaccines under the ADA, Title VII, and GINA (which I summarized here).

Bravo to the CDC for implementing policies to encourage as many employees to get shots in their arms as quickly as possible. It’s the only way we are going to stay ahead of the more contagious (and perhaps more deadly) variants and beat this pandemic. To this end, I highly recommend that you check out the CDC’s COVID-19 Vaccine Communication Toolkit for Essential Workers, in addition to these 5 tips on building vaccine confidence in your workplace:

Encourage your leaders to be vaccine champions. These leaders should reflect the diversity of the workforce. Invite them to share with staff their personal reasons for getting vaccinated and remind staff why it’s important to be vaccinated.

Communicate transparently to all workers about vaccination. See Key Things to Know, Frequently Asked Questions, and Myths and Facts for up-to-date information.

Create a communication plan. Share key messages with staff through breakroom posters, emails, and other channels. Emphasize the benefits of protecting themselves, their families, co-workers, and community. This fact sheet is available in numerous languages.

Provide regular updates on topics like the benefits, safety, side effects, and effectiveness of vaccination; clearly communicate what is not known.

Make visible the decision to get vaccinated and celebrate it! Provide stickers for workers to wear after vaccination and encourage them to post selfies on social media.

Now please do your family, friends, coworkers, me, and society in general a huge favor and get vaccinated as soon as your state allows you to do so. We are all counting on you.

March 17, 2021June 29, 2023

Allied Universal boosts its hiring as demand for security services surges

Security services will play an important role as businesses reopen their doors and rebuild their staff in 2021.

Anticipating this growing need, security staffing services provider Allied Universal recently announced plans to hire hundreds of new employees across the country. Two recent hiring events in the Phoenix area alone were held to add 500 new security professionals there.

Building the hourly workforce

The greatest number of Allied’s open positions are hourly, said Morgan Price, senior vice president-recruiting and talent acquisition, though there are open positions across the organization.

“From security professionals to various leadership positions in operations, human resources, and other functions, we have tremendous opportunity,” Price said.

Allied included a virtual solution to interviewing and hiring to engage a large number of potential employees who may otherwise not apply or interview for a position, Price said. Adding that virtual component also makes the entire application process easier and more efficient.

“With altered school schedules for children or just the inconvenience of arranging transportation, being able to take the first step of employment through our virtual open houses helps Allied Universal find the best talent available,” Price said.

Safety through security staffing services

Price said that Allied executives are seeing an increased need for security staffing services and facilities management. They plan to hold a number of virtual hiring events over the remainder of the year nationwide and beyond 2021.

“Our clients and the public at large rely on us to keep our communities and businesses safe and secure, especially during these challenging times,” said Steve Jones, chairman and CEO of Allied Universal, in a press statement. “Our security staffing professionals play a pivotal part ensuring facilities can continue business as usual. Other businesses that had to close can rest assured that their assets will remain protected.”

For full-time positions, company benefits include medical and dental coverage, life insurance, 401(k), holidays and more.

Hiring and scheduling security personnel

Hiring unqualified security guards can be a detriment to a company’s reputation and its financial livelihood, according to the “Officer Reports” blog. To find quality security guards, they say, be the kind of company that your current guards want to tell their friends to apply at.

Once hired, experts recommend that employers maintain consistent scheduling practices for an hourly workforce of security personnel. It creates optimal productivity, reduces fatigue and helps employees retain focus toward the end of a shift. Teamwork also is important among security professionals, so also consider scheduling the same people on at the same time if they work well together.

To get around unreliable manual communications such as call trees and text messaging, security company managers are realizing the advantages of employee scheduling software. Besides managing staffing levels, automated scheduling solutions offer effective communication tools, particularly in the event of unforeseen emergencies or last-minute schedule changes.

Complying with fair workweek and predictive scheduling laws also is important. A regular schedule cuts down on overtime, leads to happier employers and better workers, experts point out.

Focus on employee safety

Price said that throughout the pandemic Allied Universal’s top priority has been employee safety. The company is doing everything possible to deal with the personal impact this is having on all of its employees and their families.

Morgan Price, SVP-recruiting and talent acquisition

“Since the start of the pandemic, Allied Universal has delivered more than 3 million masks and hundreds of gallons of hand sanitizer to our frontline employees and staff,” Price said. They also have a dedicated safety team constantly monitoring all COVID-19 developments ensuring that Allied continuously educates its employees to understand and follow CDC guidelines.

Allied, which is based in Santa Ana, California, has 265,000 employees and revenues of more than $9.5 billion. The company will grow by thousands of new employees as the long-anticipated $5.28 billion acquisition of rival security company G4S came to fruition March 16. Allied will add G4S’s workforce of 558,000 employees and operations in about 85 countries stretching across six continents, according to published reports.

Allied also announced in January the acquisition of Atlanta-based SecurAmerica, which has 13,500 employees and $467 million in annual sales, and Waco, Texas-based Eagle Systems Inc., which has 210 security officers and revenue topping $10 million, according to the Orange County Business Journal.

Looking to grow like Allied Universal? Workforce management solutions are important for scaling and day-to-day frontline operations. Book a Workforce.com demo today.

March 11, 2021March 29, 2024

5 retail scheduling best practices – higher sales per labor hour

Effective retail scheduling isn’t easy.

Do it well and you’ll engage your associates, reduce turnover, cut costs and build customer loyalty. But poor execution leads to lost revenue, disgruntled employees and inadequate customer service in many ways.

With the right processes, workplace culture, and retail shift scheduling software, you’ll avoid employee scheduling conflicts and build the most accurate schedule possible. Customer loyalty rises as employee morale and productivity improves.

If you are a manager or business owner in the retail industry, here are the five retail scheduling best practices.

1. Build predictable schedules

Inconsistent schedules are a major complaint among retail workers. More stability helps employees balance the rest of their lives and responsibilities while still getting enough hours.

Plus, a Harvard Business Review study revealed that stable employee scheduling in retail actually builds productivity and profits. Researchers discovered that sales in stores with more stable scheduling increased by 7 percent and labor productivity increased by 5 percent.

Managers should consider the needs of their staff when building a schedule. It seems obvious but can be easier said than done, especially when managers get a handful of time-off requests.

While the retail industry can be unpredictable, store managers should avoid scheduling retail workers on short notice. Employees need time to plan for everyday needs like transportation and child care.

Also avoid scheduling employees for “clopenings” — where an employee closes the night shift and opens the following morning. Too often employees are forced to get by on just a few hours of sleep between shifts.

The Economic Policy Institute notes that irregular work hours, such as clopenings, lead to longer work hours. Policies that reduce or eliminate clopenings and other unstable work schedules will lead to a more productive workforce while helping to avoid unnecessary overtime.

Perennial work-life imbalance is a proven detriment to stress and health. And in the retail industry, constant juggling of employee scheduling to maintain profits and keep labor costs to a minimum isn’t really necessary.

When employers establish predictability in work schedules, it helps develop clear career paths for employees and provide more opportunities for training. Effective scheduling also is critical so that employees feel like they are supported and part of the organization instead of just punching a time clock.

While having a predictable schedule is better than scheduling on the fly, avoid manual timekeeping methods. They can be manipulated by employees to steal time and also are subject to wage-theft abuse by employers.

Using automated scheduling software is a great way to make it easier, more cost-efficient and less prone to fraud for a manager to handle this process. Managers can create and share work schedules for all employees to see on their phones, as well as send automated reminders to them before each shift.

Once a workable shift calendar is established, stick to it. And give employees plenty of notice if you plan to change what the average shift looks like.

2. Adhere to predictive scheduling laws

Is your business in a jurisdiction that already has or will have predictive scheduling or fair workweek laws?

Employee scheduling laws vary by city or state, but they generally include four common provisions, according to the National Retail Federation. They are:

Advanced posting of schedules.
Employer penalties for unexpected schedule changes.
Record-keeping requirements for employers.
Prohibitions on requiring employees to find replacements for scheduled shifts if they are unable to work.

Predictive scheduling dictates advanced scheduling notice. In general, most require two weeks notice, but it can be more.

Violation costs can add up quickly. New York City, for example, requires retail employers to pay $500 or damages (whichever is greater) for on-call shifts or shift changes with less than 72 hours’ notice, according to the National Law Review.

If you’re running a retail outlet in a city that isn’t yet affected, don’t wait for it to become law. Fair workweek laws will continue to spread across the United States to protect shift workers, so stay ahead of the game by starting to make changes in your organization now.

Simplified and automated solutions such as Workforce.com’s scheduling software assures that you’ll avoid costly infractions and comply with federal, state, and local labor regulations. You’ll know exactly where you stand with predictive scheduling and fair workweek laws.

3. Allow employees to swap shifts

Most retailers have a large number of part-time staff. A Korn Ferry survey found that of all retail positions, part-time hourly store employees have the highest turnover rate, with 76 percent average turnover in 2019.

While a part-time workforce is a necessity, it also presents volatility in your retail scheduling. Store managers spend a lot of time sorting and tracking employee time-off or shift cancellation requests. Last-minute scheduling changes also means managers spend valuable time off the floor to find a replacement.

A well-designed shift swapping policy can work for both sides and ensure that both the retailer and employees eliminate guesswork and get the staff scheduling they need.

Rather than bog down managers with scheduling headaches and leave employees to guess whether their shift is covered, allow your staff to swap shifts through an automated scheduling solution.

Any employee can request a shift swap in the Workforce.com mobile app. Assuming their manager approves the request, employees available and qualified for that shift will get notifications on their phones. Any of them can indicate in the app that they’d like to swap. When a manager approves the swap, the system automatically updates schedules, which everyone can see in the app.

4. Improve clarity around retail employees’ schedules

Retail employee schedules have been written out on paper or logged in an Excel spreadsheet for decades. It may be a tried-and-true method for some business owners but the only absolute tradition is that manual scheduling leads to confusion.

With pen-and-paper employee schedules, employees often are unaware of last-minute changes. There is no visibility since managers only post the schedules in a break room or near a time clock.

As you can imagine, there are unintended time and attendance violations that managers, HR and payroll must investigate and address. The lack of transparency in scheduling can also lead to disengaged employees who may think managers have a hidden agenda and that favoritism plays into their shift scheduling process.

Knowing whether you’re overstaffed or understaffed and how resources are being managed is at best an educated guess and at worst a crapshoot.

An automated scheduling solution for retailers puts schedules online and visible for all to see.

There’s no need for last-minute phone calls or texts to see who is scheduled for that day’s shift. Managers can easily see who’s coming in, what time they’re scheduled to start and which location they’ll be at all from their phone.

With Workforce.com’s workforce app, retail managers keep lines of communication open with all of their full-time and part-time employees. Seeking employee input when possible can help them feel like they have a little more control over their schedules.

“We are seeing much more communication coming from employers, and what [employers] are sharing with us is employees like it,” said David Kopsch, principal consultant at Mercer in a June 2020 story posted to Workforce.com. “They like this high level of communication. They like the engagement and the concern and empathy that employers are demonstrating.”

5. Assess staffing needs to avoid overtime

Labor forecasting is a must when scheduling your retail workforce.

Predicting customer demand peaks and valleys to plan ideal staffing levels shouldn’t be left to chance or a manager’s gut instinct.

You may read suggestions that you determine the lowest number of staff required to run your store. “Begin with a bare-bones number and build from there,” some expert may tell you. That is a fool’s errand and completely unnecessary when you use effective labor forecasting software and implement an automated scheduling solution.

According to the Harvard Business Review study, “Practices such as having barebones staff in stores and unstable scheduling (schedules that vary on a day-to-day basis) have flourished in the guise of enabling greater profits for retailers.

“In study after study for over a decade, operations researchers have found that retailers understaff during peak hours. Increasing staffing, they found, could increase sales and profits. And yet this message on the costs of lean scheduling fell on deaf ears.”

Overstaffing and understaffing can be dangerous for any retailer, which typically runs on small profit margins and must monitor the company’s labor budget. A staffing decision that smartly cuts labor costs while maintaining superior customer service benefits your bottom line.

Varying the types of employees that you schedule helps keep your full-time employees from accumulating overtime hours that can drive labor costs up. And allowing part-time employees to work alongside experienced full-timers provides valuable on-the-job training that they can’t get anywhere else.

The Workforce.com Live Wage Tracker allows managers to adjust staffing levels to optimize profits.

Building retail schedules every week that can change at a moment’s notice is a constant challenge. But with retail scheduling best practices and implementing automated retail scheduling software, you can save time, reduce turnover, build employee morale and cut costs. Book your demo today.

March 9, 2021June 29, 2023

The future of automated employee scheduling

The promise of algorithms completely taking over scheduling and eliminating all human input seems too good to be true — and it is.

Take Starbucks’ scheduling challenges in 2014, which was the focus of a 2015 investigation by the New York attorney general’s office that also looked into the scheduling practices of 12 other retailers. Starbucks was criticized for its use of their legacy software to algorithmically generate schedules, which many claimed caused chaos and uncertainty in employees’ lives. When they didn’t know when their next shift would be or whether their shifts would get canceled at the last minute, it became increasingly more challenging for many employees to find child care, take classes, hold a second job or plan for the future.

Algorithms optimize efficiency and are part of the equation for creating the best schedules, but organizations can’t forget about the other key factor: employee input and flexibility. Without the human factor, the employer benefits while the employee must suffer through potentially chaotic and unreliable schedules. While solely focusing on employee input, the workers benefit while the employer loses the efficiency that scheduling algorithms carry. Luckily, a win-win is possible when combining these strategies.

The role of technology in auto-scheduling

People have been trying to create shifts with algorithms and machine learning without ideal results for a long time, as far back as 20 years ago, said Josh Cameron, Chief Strategy Officer at Workforce.com, citing a paper that explored the academic literature on personnel scheduling problems as far back as 2004. One issue that has arisen with this is that the quality of a schedule is dependent on the type of data and amount of data that managers input. Quality data will help produce a better schedule, but, conversely, “rubbish in, rubbish out,” Cameron said.

Further, when managers create a schedule by hand, they’re considering many factors, not all of which can be quantifiable as data or easy to capture as data, he added. For example, employee shift preferences are not easy to capture because individuals have their own preferences that are constantly changing.

“When we use machine learning algorithms, that’s only about half the equation, and there’s a limit to how well we can do it,” Cameron said. “Regardless of how good algorithms get, there will always be limits on how much information we can reasonably collect from employees on their preferences.”

The approach Workforce.com is taking is completely novel to what other companies are trying to do, he added. Rather than solely investing in making the algorithm better, the company is going a step further, he said.

“We’re some of the first people to realize how potentially limited the approach is,” he added. “We stepped back and asked, ‘How can we also let employees get the most value from their schedule, in an equal win-win way?’ Because happy workers are productive workers.”

Relying solely on algorithms sets scheduling as a zero-sum game where employees have to lose out in order for the business to gain or vice-versa. Auto-scheduling is a harder solution to build, but at Workforce.com we treat this as our core belief that employee-employer relationships should be built on win-win.

The key steps to auto-scheduling

To create the best, most accurate schedule, managers need to be able to accurately predict demand, create the right shift pattern and fill that shift panel with the right employees. Each of these individual steps poses its own pain points for managers, but by investing in the right scheduling technology, organizational leadership can make this process smoother and more accurate.

Demand prediction is the first key step in scheduling. The more applicable information a manager can collect, the more accurate and confident they can be with demand prediction. The right software will take into consideration factors such as weather or time of year, but managers also have a human role in this. They can identify demand predictors that are unique to that location.

Once managers have confidence in their demand prediction, shift building is the next step. Software like Workforce.com can help managers create shift patterns for the amount of work that needs to be done while keeping in mind regulations that set limits on how few or many people can be working at a given time. Still, managers need to ascertain certain information from employees to help make this possible, such as by approaching employees and getting hard numbers on how long it takes to complete basic tasks within their shifts.

Shift filling is where the most innovation comes in, especially with the recent development of shift auctioning, a mechanism that allows staff to indicate their preference for shifts. An idea that initially came from University of Chicago researchers and built by Workforce.com, shift auctioning is what allows flexibility to truly shine through in the algorithm plus scheduling process.

Benefits of scheduling flexibility

Factors such as autonomy, task variety and level of flexibility help workers feel more satisfied with their jobs, according to the 2020 University of Chicago paper “Reservation Wages and Workers’ Valuation of Job Flexibility: Evidence from a Natural Field Experiment.” The paper looked at Uber drivers — gig economy workers who have control over when and how much they work. A major finding here was how much workers value job flexibility, so much so that Uber drivers needed a wage increase to take undesirable shifts. A step further, “drivers would demand much higher wages if they had to commit to pre-set work schedules.”

The appeal of flexibility for hourly, shift and contract workers is something also supported by other research. The 2013 University of Chicago paper “Work Schedule Happiness: A Contributor to Employee Happiness?” found that varying start and end times depending on the day was associated with greater employee happiness. And this association was generally stronger among hourly employees than salaried employees. Meanwhile, the 2015 paper “Why Schedule Control May Pay Off at Work and at Home” found that “having discretion as to when, where, and how much one works is an important remedy to both chronic and acute time pressures and work–life conflicts, with potential health, well-being, and productivity benefits.”

This connection is also pretty instinctual. Ultimately, using an algorithm-only method strategy of scheduling ignores the profound impact employee preferences and flexibility can have.

The reality for shift workers is that scheduling has a considerable impact on employee’s job satisfaction and quality of life — a fact that most people in an operations role are aware of. And currently, the way schedules are generally created is not the most beneficial for employees. What may help organizations with this transition is to try a trial run on a smaller group of employees and work out any kinks in the implementation process, Cameron suggested.

Putting employees first

Happy and efficient workers make for a competitive business. And smart scheduling especially matters for the happiness of hourly shift workers. While it’s tempting to invest in solutions that are totally dependent on technology, the truth is that no matter how sharp this technology gets and no matter how efficient it is, it won’t be enough to fully satisfy workers and thus maximize productivity. That requires the human touch to be factored along with the algorithm.

“Algorithms can be limited,” said Tasmin Trezise, president at Workforce.com. “What’s hard is balancing that with the demand drivers of business, their labor requirements, the employee input and the overall culture of the company.”

Being smart at demand prediction, shift building and shift filling will ultimately both make employees more satisfied and help control budget efficiency. Managers can accomplish this with the right tools — tools that give them the best potential technology and algorithms while also giving them the opportunity to put the employee in the process.

This auto-scheduling method is the future of scheduling, especially for hourly shift workers. Workforce.com’s platform was created with a win-win philosophy in mind and we understand that employers and workers don’t need to be at odds over schedules. Technology built on this win-win philosophy is the future of automated employee scheduling with both parties getting what they want with forward-thinking solutions like Workforce.com.

March 4, 2021

Please pay your employees for time off related to the COVID-19 vaccine

Earlier this week, the House passed an extension of the FFCRA as part of its $1.9 trillion COVID-19 stimulus bill. (I’ll cover its details in a future post, but if you’re curious now, head over to Jeff Nowak’s FMLA Insights.)

One of the new measures in this proposed extension is the inclusion of leave taken by an employee to obtain a COVID-19 vaccine or recover from any injury, disability, illness or condition related to the vaccine.

Bravo! But here’s the thing. Until this passes and becomes law, and even if it doesn’t become law, employers should be paying employees for time off related to the COVID vaccine. At least for now, vaccine appointments are scarce and employees who are eligible to get vaccinated must take appointments when they can get them. Many will need to get their vaccines during the workday. Moreover, post-vaccination, some employees will have a reaction serious enough to keep them house-bound for a day or so.

The way through the end of this pandemic and returning our lives to normal is by getting enough shots in arms as quickly as possible. As employers, want to encourage our employees to get vaccinated.

We don’t want employees to feel like they have to choose between obtaining a vaccine and obtaining a paycheck. Some will choose poorly. By paying employees for time off from work related to COVID-19 vaccinations, we are making the decision that these vaccines are a priority, and that we are not standing in our employees’ way from obtaining them as soon as possible.