If you’ve ever heard your employees say they “weren’t aware” of a benefit or “didn’t hear” about a meeting, maybe what you have is a “failure to communicate.” It’s time to try something different. Download our ebook of tips and best practices and get practical advice about communicating more effectively with your workforce.
Multiple lawsuits have been filed recently in California against retailers including BCBG Max Azria, The Gap Inc. and Forever 21 alleging that they do not pay their employees reporting time pay when they are required to report for on-call shifts but ultimately aren’t put to work or allowed to work. The lawsuits allege that the retailers tell their employees to consider on-call shifts as regular shifts, but that the employees ultimately don’t work the shift and are not paid for their on-call time.
Although it is not required under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, many states require that nonexempt employees be paid reporting time pay when they are required to report to work but aren’t put to work or work less than their scheduled day’s work. This reporting time pay compensates employees for the time that they are prevented from obtaining supplemental employment, etc. Robinson v. BCBG Max Azria Group LLC, Case No. BC597311, Superior Court of California, County of Los Angeles (Oct. 9, 2015); Kennedy v. Forever 21 Retail Inc., et al., Case No. BC597806, Superior Court of California, County of Los Angeles(Oct. 14, 2015).
Impact: Retailers or other employers using the practice of on-call shifts should carefully review each state’s laws where they do business to determine whether they require payment for such shifts, even if the employee ultimately does not work.
Dear Only the Best:
You raise an interesting question, especially at a time when many manufacturers are short-handed and hoping simply to find someone with enough related experience to perform the basic duties on the job description. Your question shows that you believe there is a ROI for digging deeper to select someone with a close match to the “ideal” job requirements.
In fact, the more closely the person you hire matches the “ideal” profile, the more confident you can be that the employee will learn job duties quickly, enjoy the type of work performed, and adapt readily to the personal and interpersonal aspects of the job.
Understanding the job is the first step in a successful hire, and creating a position benchmark — an outline of the “ideal” personal characteristics that lead to successful job performance — is the easiest way to gain that understanding.
Here are the steps in developing a job benchmark:
Step 1: Select the position and three to seven subject-matter experts (SMEs) who have a handle on the job’s key accountabilities.
Step 2: Facilitate a discussion with the SMEs to identify, rank and weigh the Key Accountabilities. This will ensure that you have a consistent picture of the position and its impact. Ask questions like:
Step 3: Then, keeping in mind what the SMEs said about the role, determine the personal characteristics that will be needed to be successful in the position. In addition to related job experience and education, your list may include individual preferences for working with people, or ideas, or tools and equipment. It may provide insights into the personal style characteristics, learning agility, motivations, values and communication style of the ideal candidate.
If you are able to integrate pre-hire testing into your process, to make the benchmarking process easier, look for an assessment that automates the benchmarking process, such as Prevue Assessment, so SME responses are automatically compiled into a profile of the ideal personal characteristics for the job.
Then, use a variety of selection tools — including pre-hire screening and testing, as well as multiple interviews and job simulations — to help you to identify the person who is best-qualified.
While some employers will opt for the quick route, using gut instinct, by taking the time to develop a solid job benchmark, and matching candidates to the benchmark, the trade-off will be lower turnover, higher performance, and happier customers.
SOURCE: Patsy Svare, The Chatfield Group, Nov. 23, 2015.
I found your article, “It’s about Time — and Attendance,” interesting and thought-provoking. It is structured, thorough, and should meet everyone’s needs, including regulatory. However, I would like to view the issue from a somewhat different angle, keying off the author’s first “Roadblock,” which alludes to an overemphasis of structure at the expense of human needs.
I certainly agree that this is an issue, possibly more fundamental in achieving corporate objectives. Rules are fine, but they are meaningless unless they are carried out to achieve the intended results. Experience shows that the human element is at the core of success of all such processes. By developing a plan-and-implementation strategy with the human element as the key driver, the rest generally falls easily into place. Let me illustrate with two examples.
The source experience is military aerospace, largely engineering research and development, and business development with periodic forays into startup manufacturing and quality assurance. In midcareer I was assigned to restructure and re-energize a problematic organization and get it back on track. Since then I have spent most of my career doing just that. All were successful, and I attribute that to a recognition that human factors would fundamentally determine outcome. And this is a source of my first example.
On my second such assignment, I was promoted to vice president of engineering. At the time we had a very creative vice president of human resources, and we worked well together. Unfortunately for me, he was equally appreciated by corporate and promoted to head up another division. I say unfortunate because his replacement was neither creative nor people-oriented.
His background was industrial, dealing with unions, and he used a confrontational approach with strict adherence to a highly structured set of rules as his objective. It worked, sort of, if one considers the primary objective adherence to rules and results secondary. This was the antithesis of my approach, which was based on as few “rules” as possible, relying on objectives and leaving considerable freedom for individual initiative. Procedures that were put in place focused on objectives and outcomes, leaving it up to the individual to figure out the best way. This approach applied to time and attendance and created some interface problems.
Time and attendance was flexible with a few hard-and-fast rules and some guidelines. These guidelines were generally communicated informally. Basically the guideline stated that normal workhours were from 8 to 5, but if a personal issue occurred that required an adjustment, that individual could do so without formal permission as long as they coordinated with anyone who might be affected and worked out an acceptable adjustment. The issue that bothered HR and finance, but for different reasons, was the opportunity for abuse.
Finance’s issue was clearly legitimate, and that was the legal requirement to track labor to contract, which was done through a timecard system. This was addressed by making it very clear that all timecards must reflect actual work. The agreement made with finance was that any shortfall of hours because of an attendance issue would be covered in the engineering overhead and would be included as such in the timecard. History indicated that this would be minor, and finance gave its blessing.
Not so with HR but we proceeded as planned over their objections. Their concerns were never realized. As for abuse, the results were quite the opposite. The motivator was trust, and that was the real motivator. It provided a far more effective incentive to meet the requirements than any detailed set of rules and our experience certainly bore this out. Meeting their work goals was taken on as a personal responsibility.
The second example concerns a recent experience with a high-tech startup manufacturing division I was hired to run. Problems in cost and deliveries have become critical. The ultimate customer’s program, a very advanced fighter, was being held up, and he was not pleased. Fabrication was based on a proprietary process applied to newly designed and complex hardware and was still floundering after five years of startup effort. In this case the facility was union, and one of my first priorities was to understand where they stood and take any necessary steps to avoid any labor-management issues that could compound the real problem.
The first issue was actually mine and not at the time on the union’s agenda, and it was that all the hourly people were on time clocks. I contacted HR at the parent company and told them I was yanking the time clock. That, as you might imagine, was not well-received. They could not allow that since the main plant was on time clocks, and, in any case, the government would not allow it because it was part of the company’s compliance procedures. I said that wasn’t a problem.
I had already coordinated with the government representatives (who were on-site as required with such military contracts). They agreed that it was legal and probably made sense. The basic issue I had with time clocks was their message: I don’t trust you.
Technically time clocks were redundant because labor required tracking on separate timecards to relate hours to specific contract effort. I found it particularly egregious that one group, the blue-collar workers, were singled out while everyone else was somehow trustworthy. I told HR that either everyone punches a time clock or no one does. They finally agreed on no one. The results were essentially as above. People were motivated by trust and time and attendance became nonissues. A couple of individuals tried to take advantage, and these issues were actually solved by peer pressure. Violation of trust reflected on the group and was unacceptable.
These are examples of a much larger and unfortunately fairly common issue, the bureaucratization of corporations as they age. This is manifest by the growth of rules, regulations and formalized procedures whose prime result is thicker operating manuals that few read or even understand. In my experience with turnarounds, bureaucratization is a core issue. In some cases I arrived after a previous attempt that substituted a new set of procedures for the old. Procedures as such were not the core problem. If they were ineffective or counterproductive it was because bureaucratic growth and that was what needed to be addressed.
What I am trying to communicate is that, while I fully agree that there is a basic structure required for a company to operate effectively and in compliance, and that this structure needs to be in place, communicated and monitored, the process of doing so and the design of the system needs to be driven by human factors. Design and implementation certainly should not be a rote exercise.
The human interface must be a driver with serious thought given to consequences and impacts on operational effectiveness, hopefully with creative approaches that can turn requirements to advantage (as they can but that is another discussion). In my experience this begins with a mindset driven by innovative processes and management that effectively address the human factors. When this happens there will be a real pay in off in the bottom line.
Dennis Barbeau
Principal and Director
InnSol Inc.
Mesa, Arizona
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Effective workforce management starts with in an accurate, efficient and user-friendly method for capturing work hours, pay rates and absences. Those critical details inform you of whether you are overstaffing particular roles, shifts or locations (or the opposite), provide a true gauge of worker performance through productivity and attendance rates, and – when fully automated – keep your payroll spend in check. In short, there’s immense value in getting the right time and attendance system.
In a growing business, the day will eventually come when managing time and attendance on paper becomes both inefficient and risky, especially when trying to balance things like overtime, paid time off, and myriad regulations. “It usually happens when companies reach 50 employees,” said Jose Gaona, vice president of product strategy for Replicon Inc., a cloud-based time tracking applications provider. “At that point it becomes too complex to do.”
It can also get extremely time-consuming, with human resources staff spending hours each week manually tracking timesheets or punch cards, and transitioning that data over to payroll. Gaona recalls working with a health care facility that processed 10,000 employees’ monthly payroll and had a manual time-keeping system.
“They had 10 people involved with processing time,” he said. Beginning two weeks in advance, the team would sit at a conference table and sort through piles of time cards, and then pass their work to the person next to them to check for accuracy. “And because they had to start two weeks in advance, they had to forecast the last two weeks of every month,” he said. Once they implemented an automated time and attendance system, that process went from two weeks to three days, and from 10 people to two. “It had a huge impact.”
ROADBLOCKS
- Don’t automate everything. A good time and attendance system will automate tedious tasks, like tracking data and generating reports, but you still need a human touch to do things like accommodate individual schedule goals or to adapt the schedule to accommodate short-term ebbs and flows in workforce planning.
- A major obstacle in this journey is that time and attendance has four stakeholders — payroll, IT, finance and operations, said Deloitte Consulting’s Lisa Disselkamp. “You need to choose a single owner, or the process will be driven by the individual with the most influence.”
Along with time savings, automated time and attendance systems can also eliminate errors, uncover time theft and, most importantly, help with compliance. “When we talk to companies, the No. 1 issue they are concerned about is compliance,” said Richard Allaway, general manager of ADP small-business services. A recent survey from ADP shows that 35 percent of respondents say they spend more time today on human capital management-related compliance tracking than they did two years ago. And it will only get worse. “The HR landscape has gotten incredibly complex regarding state and federal regulations, and if employers don’t stay in compliance with all of them, they face fines, penalties and even lawsuits,” he said.
According to PricewaterhouseCoopers’ 2015 Global CEO survey, 78 percent of CEOs are concerned with over-regulation and its effect on their ability to achieve their companies’ strategies. This is especially true for small businesses that spend up to 80 percent more per employee on federal regulatory compliance than large companies, according to a U.S. Small Business Administration survey.
An automated time and attendance system that is linked to payroll can reduce the risk of compliance issues because it provides the transparency and data management tools that companies need to track and audit their scheduling and overtime to ensure compliance with the Affordable Care Act, Family and Medical Leave Act, local rules and union contracts.
FAST TRACKS
- Consider a point system to deal with chronically late employees. Start every employee with five points, and take one away when they are late, then every six months add an additional point to their banks. Establish appropriate disciplinary measures for those who run out of points.
- ‘Think of time as an asset,’ Replicon Inc.’s Jose Gaona said. You wouldn’t throw away valuable products of resources, so give the same respect for your team’s time.
Value vs. Risk
Though if you want to get the most value from a time and attendance system, you need to think bigger than just compliance, said Lisa Disselkamp, director of HR transformation for Deloitte Consulting. “Time and attendance shouldn’t be treated as a back-office function,” she said. “It should be positioned as a driver of business outcomes.”
If companies want to get the most out of these tools and processes, they should align scheduling and attendance strategies with business goals that have measurable outcomes such as improved productivity, increased employee engagement, better customer satisfaction or reduction of operating costs. “When you focus on what you are trying to accomplish as a business, it reframes the conversation,” she said.
For example, if employee engagement is the goal, you might focus on creating schedules that are more predictable, consistent and adequate so employees can better plan their lives and budgets and reduce use of sick days and shift trading. “It creates shared value for the employees and the employer,” Disselkamp said.
Regardless of your business goals, it’s important to do your due diligence before implementing any time and attendance system. That means making sure you understand your pain points, what you want to accomplish and how you are going to measure the impact of a new system. And recognize that it is going to require a change in the way you operate, Disselkamp said. “It will feel disruptive at first, but in the long term it will add a lot of benefit.”
TIME AND ATTENDANCE CHECKLIST
- Once you hit 50 employees, it makes sense to transition to an automated time and attendance system.
- To measure the return on investment of a new system, factor time saved, compliance risk, “time theft,” and unexpected overtime into the equation.
- Update your scheduling process, and rules around attendance before choosing a tool.
- Choose a system that can grow with you and adapt to constantly changing regulations.
Plan
Organize the data. Gather all of your historical data on scheduling as well as documentation on attendance rules, payroll guidelines, union agreements and any other documents that influence time and attendance. “If all this data isn’t in place, the transition will be a lot more complicated,” Replicon’s Gaona said.
Review your process. Think about things like how you assign schedules, track time/overtime, and keep track of tardiness and vacation days, then consider whether you want to make improvements, said Joe Wang, chief services officer of ServicePower. “You want processes that clearly define what is expected, and when and where you will make exceptions.” Consider whether you want to update rules around how schedules are assigned, and the way you deal with employees who are chronically late, Wang said.
Look at the regulations. One of the biggest goals for time and attendance programs is to achieve and prove compliance. Before choosing a system, identify the rules you need to comply with, the data you will need to collect, and which systems will need to be integrated to achieve those goals, said Andrew Shopsowitz, manager of product strategy for Ceridian HCM Inc. “If you don’t link time, scheduling, payroll and benefits together, it can be hard to stay in compliance.”
Find the hidden roadblocks. Do an audit of every aspect of your time and attendance process, with a focus on “home grown” solutions that individuals create as workarounds, Disselkamp said. For example, the manager who does all scheduling on paper then enters the data later into the system or allows shift changes without documenting them. “If those hidden systems remain, it will impact your outcomes,” she said.
Set a baseline. Measure the time spent doing time and attendance today, including the costs associated with fixing errors, moving data from one system to another and compliance-related penalties. Use these as benchmarks to prove the effectiveness of the new system.
Set expectations. Figure out how time and attendance aligns with the business strategy, then establish key performance indicators — i.e. improved productivity, reduced turnover, lower operating costs. “When you know the outcome you want to achieve, you can plan back from that,” Disselkamp said.
Do
Assemble a shortlist of vendors. Focus on core functionality, like whether it is cloud-based, has mobile functions, is customizable by users and integrates with your broader HR management system. Then look at usability and performance. “It needs to be user-friendly or you won’t get buy in from managers,” Shopsowitz said.
Involve managers in the review process. If they are the ones who will use the tool, they have to like how it works.
Review reporting tools. The best solutions will give you real-time insight and alerts related to key performance indicators, like increased overtime, or too many hours for part-time workers. “You don’t want to review that data two weeks after it happened,” Shopsowitz said. “You want that feedback in real-time if you are going to avoid compliance issues.”
Make vendors prove themselves. Don’t let the system drive the process, Disselkamp said. “Tell your vendors the outcomes you are looking for, then have them show you the features that will help you achieve those results.”
Think about the future. Choose a vendor and system that can grow with your company and be easily adapted to accommodate new regulations, employees and scheduling strategies. You don’t want to be locked into a system that doesn’t meet your needs in three years.
Make an app for that. Take advantage of mobility features to give managers and employees the freedom to check schedules on the fly. “You want a system that can be used where the work happens,” Disselkamp said.
Train employees to use the system. The only way to get value from a new time and attendance tool is if managers use it effectively. Provide training and support tools in a variety of formats (e.g., live classes, Web-based modules and help desk support) to make sure they have the confidence to embrace the new software.
Communicate. Once you choose a tool and/or a new process, tell your workforce what the changes are, how they will work, and how they will benefit the employee and the organization, Wang said. “If employees understand why you are making a change to your time and attendance program, it will feel less like Big Brother is watching them.”
Review
Measure results against key performance indicators. Six to 12 months after you implement the system, gather data to review impact. Have you cut overtime? Improved engagement? More effectively aligned schedules to the flow of business? Quantifying the effectiveness of the system will help tie HR investments to strategic business outcomes.
Track adoption. Make sure managers and the HR team are using the tool effectively, including data analytics features to support real-time decision-making, and ensure rules and regulations are being met. Consider offering additional training or incentives if adoption is low.
Communicate results across the business. Share impact data with the executive team, managers and front-line workers, and customize your communication to the relevance of your audience, such as financial benefits to your CEO or chief financial officer, or more consistent schedules to employees and managers.
Use the data to build your brand. Reductions in turnover, improved employee satisfaction, and greater predictability in scheduling are all value-driven outcomes that can help you establish the company as an employer of choice.
Do something with the savings. Have a plan for how you will use the time or money saved as a result of the new system, Disselkamp said. Then communicate that plan to the company. “It helps people understand how they are contributing to the business, and that can be very empowering.”
RECAP
PLAN
DO
REVIEW
In the ever-changing corporate HR and talent management domain, one of the most exciting developments occurring in recent years is the emergence and growing adoption of integrated talent management product suites. Traditionally the human capital management (HCM) technology market has been highly fragmented with a variety of point solutions, each focusing on individual talent management functions.
Dear Future Is Passing:
The issue you raise is not uncommon — in fact, as the baby boomer retirement wave builds steam, the number of organizations challenged with succession planning issues will grow exponentially. Here’s how to think through such a challenge:
The first thing to do is define the requirements of the most critical senior jobs, including the CEO and the members of the executive team. Identify the responsibilities, challenges and performance expectations, as well as the knowledge, experience and personal characteristics needed in each role. Since this needs to be linked to your strategic plan, it’s important to take into account what will be needed 5-10 years from now, not just today. Doing this well takes a lot of work, so focus first on the enterprise jobs with the highest impact. Current incumbents are the primary source of this information, but the CEO and board members will have ideas as well.
Next, identify the people who are 1-2 management levels below each of the target jobs — specifically the best performers who have the potential to move up to bigger responsibilities. Conduct a formal talent review, where each person is measured against the experiences, knowledge, and characteristics needed across the jobs in the succession plan, using the people inside the company who are in the best position to judge. Include personal characteristics in your evaluations that are important both from a strategic and cultural perspective (e.g., bias for action, learning agility, being a team player).
Then, examine your vulnerabilities. You want to have 2-3 people who can be ready to move into each key job, but few organizations have such a deep talent pool. Are there gaps that are too big to fill with people inside your organization? Knowledge or experience can be gained through assignments, exposure, and education, but you may need to hire from the outside for personal characteristics. Do you have a few people who could fill many jobs? If so, this means that you don’t have as many successors as you think for a given position. Is there enough diversity in the talent pool? If not, look beyond the “usual suspects” to find diverse candidates whose development could be accelerated. And don’t assume that a designated successor actually wants that next job. Simply asking if this is part of his or her career game plan can easily avert this vulnerability.
Lastly, build talent review and development into your business planning process. Growing future leadership talent requires at least a ten-year horizon, starting with identifying of high-potential employees early. Focus on developing them through a series of assignments marked by increasing levels of difficulty, including jobs in different functions/divisions and “pivotal jobs” known to have great developmental impact. Appoint a group of senior executives to manage the process, as only they can make key development assignments available. Finally, be prepared to adjust the process as business conditions change and new opportunities and challenges emerge.
SOURCE: George Klemp, Cambria Consulting, Boston, Sept. 16, 2015.
Dear Pros and Cons:
There are many disadvantages to continuing to do poorly conceived or executed performance reviews. I’ve seen many poorly done reviews entered into evidence against companies in unemployment, EEOC and other cases. Doing evaluations takes time away from pressing business concerns. Managers and employees often feel awkward when doing and receiving them. Poorly done, they can cause perceptions of unfairness. The list goes on.
Many companies are just going through the motions and little value is added by the process. Managers have competing priorities and don’t see performance evaluations changing anything except the time they have available to work on, what they perceive to be, more important business needs.
Some companies believe that performance appraisals lead employees to expect regular pay raises, which they can’t afford or don’t wish to provide. The thought that failing to do performance reviews will reduce an employee’s desire for regular salary increase is naïve. If you want employees to feel both underpaid and under-recognized, stop doing good, regularly-scheduled performance reviews.
If you do performance appraisals and employee performance doesn’t change, there is little point in spending any more time on the process than is required. I am often asked to provide performance appraisal forms that are “quick and easy to fill out.” Getting forms done quickly is seen as more important than getting evaluations done well. When you start with a lack of understanding of the value of a good evaluation, lack commitment to do them properly and have a poor process to support the generation of a good evaluation, you have little chance of a good end result.
I spend much of my time demonstrating the benefits of doing good evaluations and designing efficient processes to support them. A few years ago, I did a study of terminations that occurred in organizations whose performance evaluation processes weren’t optimal. Out of those employees terminated for performance reasons during the period reviewed, over 90 percent had received fully satisfactory or better ratings on their most recent — sometimes within weeks of their termination — performance review.
I agree that improperly documented and presented evaluations are worse than none at all. No, or poorly done, performance evaluations are one of the major causes of avoidable performance-based terminations, less than optimal performance and a raft of other deleterious issues for businesses today. It is very difficult for an employee to get better if he or she doesn’t have a clear idea of what to work on.
I don’t, however, see any of the above as viable excuses for failing to do good performance reviews; it is just a convenient truth to camouflage a lack of management vigor and discipline.
Good performance reviews offer outstanding value. Fact-based performance reviews, properly documented and presented, improve communication and alignment between employee and supervisor, help improve personnel and organizational performance, assist in the intelligent allocation of scarce financial, training and other resources, reduce legal exposure and build organizational trust. Put together a good performance management process, train managers and employees on it, do the work required and reap these benefits for your employees and organization.
SOURCE: Rick Galbreath, SPHR, Performance Growth Partners Inc., Bloomington, Illinois, Sept. 6, 2015.
Nicole Kahny
Airgas Inc. named Nicole Kahny senior vice president of human resources. Kahny joins the company’s management committee and succeeds Pamela Claypool, who was recently named division president of the north division. Kahny previously served as the company’s vice president of talent management.
Deirdre Evens
Storage and information management company Iron Mountain Inc. named Deirdre Evens as chief people officer. Evens will oversee global human resources, leading operations and strategy to support the company’s growth through recruitment, talent development, and compensation and benefits. Evens comes to Iron Mountain from environmental, energy, and industrial services company Clean Harbors, where she was executive vice president of human resources since 2011.
Jamie Ohl
Lincoln Financial Group named Jamie Ohl as president of Retirement Plan Services. Before joining Lincoln, Ohl served as a principal at Edward Jones, responsible for leading the broker-dealer’s strategic direction and product management for its retirement business.
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