Author: tasmin

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Human Performance Experience at Work: The New Normal for Workers

Work has long been associated with toil, drudgery and a history of egregious working conditions, catastrophic disasters, physical injury and mental anguish. The last milestone in terms of universal experience advancement for working people was the introduction of the 8-hour workday, 40-hour workweek and the limitations placed on child labor. In the 80 years since, generations of workers have experienced organizations making advancements across the physical, technical and cultural aspects of their working environments. However, most advancements targeted improving employee productivity and not specifically improving the worker experience.

Rewind the last 18 months and it’s clear that COVID-19 required organizations to challenge dated assumptions about employees and work. Lockdown conditions also forced employees to experience constraints from a shared perspective and rethink their personal and professional lives. As both industry and workers form their collective responses to the effects of COVID-19, the result cannot be anything other than exponential human growth, which propels the world to gain fundamentally more than it lost.     

The pandemic continues to prove that social learning and collective behavior change are best achieved through shared experiences. Responding to the crisis presented the world with a contextualized experience on a grand and unprecedented scale in that it enabled humans to experience constraints within the context of 21st-century expectations. Context-relevant experiences, especially when shared, provide a richer opportunity for humans to construct and adopt new values as they collectively reconsider social, economic and health-related expectations and priorities most relevant to their work/life experiences.

The true meaning of experiential moments

Society has witnessed new behavioral norms emerge as people observed and identified with one another on universally shared work and life challenges. The struggles to balance constraints across work and personal lives created a pent-up appreciation for “experiential moments”. People reflected on the importance of time and gained a higher consciousness of what experience should mean for them. Viewing the world with a more primal lens presented employees with a new mandate relative to their wants and expectations around work-life balance and quality working conditions.  At the same time, a compelling body of research had revealed that employees are more fatigued and stressed than ever before and the vast majority report feeling disengaged in their work.

Prior to the pandemic, the arrival of millennials in the early 21st century showed that this new generation of workers was drawn to organizations that embraced social responsibility and showed purpose in delivering cause-based products and services. While this trend remains, COVID-19 has refined employee expectations across generational lines. The idea of socially responsible employers has expanded to include the desire to work with organizations that show purpose in enriching the employee experience. Employees want workplaces that meet their intrinsic needs in ways that positively impact engagement, cognitive development, happiness and well-being. The recent withdrawal of defending Olympic gold medalist Simone Biles from individual all-around competition to focus on her mental health will serve as the high watermark for society in addressing the impact of work stress on mental and physical health. 

A more human-centric approach to enabling the workforce

The trend to create a reshaped version of the healthier organization is fueled by growing research in Human Experience Management (HXM). This field evolved from the idea of Human Capital Management (HCM) and will continue to expand at a record pace. HXM, with its more human-centric approach to managing the workforce experience, is a stark improvement from simply managing humans as capital. As the HXM movement has taken shape across organizations, it has focused on what HR departments can do to improve single-factor HR transactional experiences—factors that are common to every employee’s overall job satisfaction and journey within the organization. Focusing on common employee experiences is a start, but it’s not enough. Employees increasingly expect their daily work processes and activities to be on par with the commercial consumer-grade processes that they experience in their personal lives.

To satisfy evolving experience expectations, organizations must evolve to embrace a more job task-based category of HXM referred to as Human Performance Experience (HPX). As work continues to become more complex, connected and driven by automation, organizations need to improve the flow of work experience for the connected worker. HPX is about supporting those in the trenches where work gets done. This means providing individualized support for workers that positively shape the work experience and address how they behave, how they work and how they want to interact to feel connected with their teams. From a fundamental design and usability perspective, employees want helpful, useable, desirable, valuable, accessible and credible solutions. Embedding the principles of high concept, high touch experiences into the heart of today’s connected worker solutions will only happen by design and not default. It involves providing smarter experiences that directly support job and task-related processes and adapt to employee actions, decisions and preferences.

Integrating connected technologies with human-centric design principles

HPX centric solutions represent new opportunities for those striving for connected worker solutions that couple Industry 4.0 connected technologies with Industry 5.0 human-centric design principles. HPX solutions create integrated performance environments where job task experiences are more adaptive and personalized based on worker preferences and personas. Most importantly, solutions that embed HPX centric design leverage theories that drive worker engagement and experience enablement. Incorporating design theories such as the Expectancy-Value Theory support an employee’s expectations and beliefs about job tasks. For example, the Expectancy-Value Theory highlights factors that dictate an employee’s engagement and how to optimize the employee work experience. The first factor relates to attaining value where the employee is motivated by their expectation of performing the job task successfully. The second is the intrinsic value or enjoyment the employee gets from performing the job task. The third is utility value, where the employee believes that performing the job task will be useful in achieving future goals. The final component is in the perceived cost of performing the job task in relation to competing goals.

Cyber-physical connectivity and advanced people analytics enable a new generation of connected worker solutions that drive HPX practices. Advancements allow for more intuitive people analytics and integrated data collection, which equip solutions to deliver worker-centric experiences that improve as more data is collected. For example, people analytics embedded in connected systems can connect “stress moments” to actual work experiences. The key to developing HPX solutions is understanding that job task values are strongly tied to self-efficacy beliefs and achievement-related choices.

Experience-centric solutions can ensure the work experience is documented by incorporating feedback loops and people analytics for every step within the chain of job task procedures. Digital connectivity also enables access to multi-directional feedback channels. These channels can ensure the employee’s voice is more easily heard and that actions are taken based on their feedback. They can provide employees timely guidance and give them an immediate view of the impact of their efforts. Connected capabilities that capture and aggregate employee feedback and operational data can provide insights on what employees, teams and business units think, feel, and believe about work processes compared to what happened. The digital shadowing of employee actions and flow of work data provides organizations the insights they need to change how work, technology and data are designed, offered and implemented to keep employees safe and happy as they work to meet productivity goals.

Various categories of connected worker technologies are now emerging and improving deployment approaches that better engage employees. For example, one trend in employee enablement capabilities is citizen development, aka do-it-yourself (DIY), solutions enabled by tools like Microsoft’s Power BI Apps. Such human-centric approaches are rapidly changing the traditional views of how work can evolve. The beauty of human-centric performance experience solutions is that they enable organizations to put work in the hands of the actual experts. DIY solutions put the worker at the heart of empowering work design considerations and innovation opportunities. The DIY movement is a “hands-on” employee engagement and experience category that puts problem-solving and innovation capabilities into the hands of workforce experts who are frontline and best positioned to identify and resolve problems more rapidly regardless of their hierarchical rank. Enablement provides employees with a greater voice in the execution and ownership of their work and contribution to their teams.

HPX solutions like DIY are early examples of how connected worker advances are helping to digitally embed foundational principles of high-reliability organization management and management theories that accelerate continuous improvement. For instance, DIY solutions play well into social learning theory as they reinforce and support employees in both being an agent for change as well as a responder to change. This is exactly the idea behind equipping employees with the tools to change their environment, act as role models and reinforce behaviors that promote healthier work cultures. Great design in HPX solutions can also improve the cognitive abilities of their users while they work. This means using HPX solutions to leverage the work experience to improve an individual’s perception, attention, memory, and higher function skills while working. Most importantly, HPX solutions play an influential role in driving collaboration, innovation and workforce engagement.

Connected solutions promote both the individual and social dimensions of work by enhancing experiences in interacting with others and sharing information and work experience outcomes across teams and groups. Humans are social beings and as more work is automated, employees must be actively engaged and interconnected to their wider work environments. Experiences are rooted in people’s identity, connection and social behavior, and they are becoming more cognizant about their needs and what they want out of their experiences. They want work experiences that support and develop their self-awareness, respond to what drives and motivates them and put them in control of their space to pursue what they want to become and see the impact they have. Solutions like DIY enable opportunities for social proofing as employees see coworkers tackling challenges, driving innovation and sharing success through documented learnings.

As the relationship between automation and human skills advances, talent deployment will become the highest priority and single most important factor to ensure business resilience and reliability in the face of unforeseen demands and change. COVID-19 proved that businesses need an increasingly more versatile workforce—whether working in traditional, virtual or hybrid working environments. We are now in a gig economy where the employer-employee balance is changing. The assumption that organizations can hold employees as captives will fade as employees continue to use their growing voices and employee experience scores hold organizations measurably accountable. Versatility will go to organizations that are the healthiest in terms of their ability to deliver a human-centric employee performance experience. In doing so, organizations will attract the best talent, enjoy lower staff turnover rates, and realize higher productivity.

HPX represents the next disruptive dimension of human experience and organizational development by providing a deeper, richer and more profound level of human support that leverages the digital economy. When organizations can align and integrate the physical, cultural and technical related dimensions of work, the result will be a new bar regarding experience congruency for the workforce. When employees enjoy a positive work experience, they are engaged, enriched by automation and want to succeed. HXP is not just about making your people feel better; it’s about enabling them to bring the very best of who they are to their work and grow in the process.

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Shift bids vs shift swaps – which is right for your business?

Being flexible with shift work is good for business. Even before the pandemic created a nationwide staffing shortage, employees were making it clear that a better work/life balance was becoming a top priority.

A 2019 survey (https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-research-shows-that-flexible-working-is-now-a-top-consideration-in-the-war-for-talent-300818790.html) by IWG found that 80% of workers would choose a job with a flexible schedule over one that did not, and more than 30% considered flexibility more important than extra vacation days or a prestigious job title. In addition, a different survey (https://www.flexjobs.com/blog/post/survey-flexible-work-job-choices/) in the same year found 80% of workers would be more loyal to their employer if they had more flexibility over when they worked, with over half trying to negotiate adding this perk with their current manager.

There are two popular ways to inject flexibility into your shift scheduling: shift bids and shift swaps. While they appear similar, they differ in subtle but important ways, and the right one for you will depend on the specifics of your business.

Shift bids and shift swaps – what’s the difference?

Put simply, shift bids are when the manager invites workers to put themselves forward for open shifts. Shift swaps allow workers to arrange to take each other’s shifts directly.

Shift bid example: A retail worker informs the manager that they can’t come in as scheduled on Friday because of a medical appointment. The manager chooses which staff members are best suited to fill that shift and lets them know an extra shift is up for grabs. The manager then chooses who will take the shift from those that express an interest.

Shift swap example: A restaurant worker has a childcare emergency and can’t come in for their scheduled afternoon shift, so they ask their colleague to swap shifts. The colleague agrees, and they present the solution to their manager, who approves it.

Each approach has the desired result: the empty shift is filled. Both are also easily implemented with the right scheduling software, but which method works best for your business depends on several factors.

 

Shift bids keep the manager in control

There are benefits and limitations to shift bids that you should be aware of before considering using them.

Benefits of shift bids

  • The manager gets a choice of different staff members to fill a shift and can pick the best suited. This helps maintain a well-rounded shift with employees who possess all the required skills and experience and work well together.
  • Managers using shift bids may also keep an eye on who is close to working overtime and favor those with fewer hours on the clock, thus controlling costs and spreading available work more evenly.
  • A shift bids system can expand to fill all shifts, not just absences. Workers can rank all available shifts according to their preference, and the manager can use that data to put together a schedule that accommodates as many people as possible.
  • Staff using shift bids have more control over when they work by only putting themselves forward for shifts that fit around their life.

Limitations of shift bids

  • The shift bids approach won’t suit every worker, and some can find the need to bid for their shifts to be stressful.
  • Shift bids can be prone to favoritism and need to be carefully monitored to ensure bids are being handled fairly. This is an area where scheduling software can help, as you can easily check your shift data over time and identify patterns where certain staff members are scheduled – or not – more than others.

Shift swaps can be quick and painless

Shift swaps are simpler to manage than shift bids, but have other pros and cons worth considering.

Benefits of shift swaps

  • By having staff arrange coverage between themselves, shift swaps save the manager’s time.
  • With reliable staff, shift swaps can solve many scheduling issues before they even become a problem.
  • Shift swaps are better suited to solving urgent staffing needs, such as last-minute absences, as they don’t require employees to go through the bidding process.

Limitations of shift swaps

  • The manager has less control over who takes a shift, so unbalanced staff rosters are a risk.
  • Unregulated shift swaps can be prone to over-use by employees and require a robust company policy to clarify the conditions under which shift swaps will be approved.

Choosing the right approach for your company

The scheduling method best suited to your company will depends on several factors.

Company culture

In environments where top-down management is the norm, shift bids are likely to be a better fit. But in businesses where employees are used to having greater autonomy, they’ll likely prefer to arrange shift swaps themselves.

Company size

The larger the company, the more effective shift bidding becomes, as having more staff available to bid on shifts means more choice for managers. And vice versa; the fewer staff members there are, the fewer variables the manager has to keep track of when shifts are swapped.

Worker and managerial experience

A shift swap system works well for companies or locations with reliable long-term staff. For that reason, shift swaps can also benefit new managers or managers who are unfamiliar with all the employees, as it means there is less need to match workers to shifts personally.

All these factors are prone to change over time, but resist the temptation to mix and match shift bids and shift swaps at the same time. Instead, it is better to pick one flexible scheduling system and stick with it for clarity for staff and simplicity for managers.

Flexible shifts help attract and retain staff, and whichever way you approach them will require well-thought-out processes. However, if the practical complexities still seem intimidating, remember that scheduling solutions such as Workforce.com can help automate and track shift bids and shift swaps, freeing up valuable time and headspace for managers.

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The 10-minute guide to 2021 labor law compliance

Labor laws are a potentially lethal minefield for companies, particularly in today’s turbulent labor market, as the cost of labor law compliance failures can be enormous.

Labor law fines tend to stack per infraction so with large employee numbers the financial risk can grow exponentially, as with the recent high profile example of New York City suing Chipotle (https://edition.cnn.com/2021/04/29/business/chipotle-nyc-lawsuit-labor-law/index.html) for $151 million over 600,000 labor law violations accumulated within the city. In Tennessee, a home health care provider misclassified fifty workers as independent contractors rather than employees and was hit with a $358k penalty (https://www.workforce.com/news/worker-misclassification)by the Department of Labor to make up back wages and overtime.

Ignorance of the law is no defense, so even in situations where labor law compliance is complicated by different federal, state, and city rulings, it’s up to companies to stay on top of what is required. In situations where federal and local laws differ (i.e., the state minimum wage is higher than the federal), companies are expected to adhere to whichever is most stringent (i.e., they would have to pay the higher state minimum wage, not the federal).

It’s all too easy to make labor law compliance mistakes, but awareness of your responsibilities and impeccable record keeping will help to protect your company. Here are the key areas to keep in mind.

Minimum wage

Minimum wage laws are getting a lot of attention at the moment, with President Biden’s executive order raising the salary for federal workers to at least $15 per hour being seen by many as a prelude to a nationwide rise in minimum wage levels. Compliance with these laws can seem cut and dried, but there are aspects unique to some industries that you should be aware of if they affect you.

For example, industries where workers earn tips have a unique minimum wage law to follow, called Minimum Tipped Wage. “Minimum tipped wage makes it quite a bit more complicated,” says Workforce’s chief strategy officer Josh Cameron. “In hospitality or anything where you earn tips, you can pay the staff a minimum wage much lower than the normal one. So it would be $7.50 an hour if they’re not tipped, but it’s $2.50 if it’s tipped. As long as they get enough tips to get them over that—it’s called the tip credit—then they can receive the lower $2.50 per hour from their employer.”

There are reasons to keep on top of minimum wage laws beyond the threat of fines. For example, 29 states currently require a minimum wage higher than the federal standard, and you are obliged to pay the higher sum. Underpaid workers are unlikely to show any loyalty to a company, and underpayment can cause PR problems as well. “An underpayment scandal can bring companies to their knees,” says Andrew Stirling, head of product compliance at Workforce.com. “Customers can decide to take their business elsewhere. People are less likely to visit a restaurant or shop that has been reported for underpaying their people.”

Paid and unpaid breaks

One of the areas of labor law compliance with the least clarity is breaks for workers, making it especially important for companies to err on the side of caution. The legal requirements can be found on the Department of Labor website, but there are significant areas of ambiguity to watch for:

  • Federal law does not require companies to offer lunch or coffee breaks.
  • Where short breaks are allowed by a company, short breaks (i.e., toilet use) of up to 20 minutes should be paid.
  • Breaks of 30 minutes or longer (i.e., lunch) are considered outside of workable hours and do not need to be paid.
  • Waiting time or on-call time does not count as a break and should be paid.

“There’s this gray area,” says Josh Cameron. “Say you take a break for 21 minutes, is that paid or unpaid? Is it okay to make that unpaid? If you’re a lawyer looking at this, it’s really an opportunity because you can say, ‘This employee always had a 23-minute break, always had an 18-minute break, and they never got paid for it. Maybe they should have been.’ That’s something that employers should really be aware of and keep an eye on.”

This is an area where accurate and exhaustive employee data can really help, and if your company still relies on timecards and manual spreadsheets or pen and paper logs to track breaks, you could be leaving yourself open to big problems in the future.

Paid and unpaid leave

Thirteen states, plus Washington DC, currently require private companies to offer paid sick leave. The Families First Coronavirus Response Act added an additional responsibility for companies with less than 500 employees to allow workers to take paid time off if infected with COVID-19, to isolate following contact with an infected person, or to care for a family member. The same act also introduced a tax credit to offset the loss for affected companies.

California, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Washington have all passed laws that also require paid family leave, and President Biden’s administration has set its sights on a federally mandated period of 12-weeks paid leave that would allow, for example, parents to take time off to care for newborn babies or other family needs.

For now, the only federal law involving medical and family leave is the Family and Medical Leave Act, which requires employers with more than 50 staff to offer 12 workweeks of unpaid, job-protected leave in a 12-month period for:

  • The birth of a child, adoption, or fostering of a child
  • A seriously ill spouse, child, or parent
  • A serious health condition that makes the employee unable to perform the essential functions of his or her job
  • Any qualifying exigency arising out of the fact that the employee’s spouse, son, daughter, or parent is a covered military member on “covered active duty;” or Military Caregiver Leave—26 weeks in a 12-month period to care for an injured or seriously ill spouse, son or daughter, parent, or other next of kin who is a covered service member

This is an area of labor law compliance that is only going to become more prominent in the coming years, so shrewd managers should ensure they are on top of current requirements, which are largely dependent on where you operate and how many staff you have, and be prepared for change.

Healthcare

Another area of labor law that has been fraught with political debate, the Affordable Care Act requires that if an employee works more than 30 hours a week over any single year look-back period, then the employer must provide health insurance. While the ACA is a federal law, the portion of the medical insurance that the employer has to pay is determined by the state. In New York, for example, the employer must pay 80%.

The 30 hours a week cut-off requires particularly careful management where shift workers are concerned, as their hours may fluctuate over time. “This whole area is a big pain point,” explains Josh Cameron. “It’s a very difficult conversation to have with an employee that has become eligible for healthcare, then loses that eligibility the next year. Taking it away from someone feels very harsh to the employee.”

Keeping track of employee hours and keeping accurate records is yet again a vital part of compliance for companies here. Qualifying for healthcare is a strong motivator for retaining staff, but for those companies that are concerned about shouldering the additional costs, Workforce.com can be calibrated to warn managers when employees reach the 30 hours threshold and can even prevent managers from publishing schedules that extend past 30 hours.

Predictive scheduling

A recent addition to the labor law conversation, predictive scheduling laws – also sometimes known as “fair workweek” – place restrictions on how shifts are assigned and require companies to give advance notice of new schedules.

Two states – Vermont and Oregon – and eight municipalities – San Francisco, Berkeley, Emeryville, San Jose, Seattle, New York City, Chicago, and Philadelphia – have passed such laws, and more states and cities are considering legislation in this area. The specifics of the laws vary from region to region, but the core principles are:

  • A minimum notice period for upcoming schedules (usually two weeks) with compensation for workers who are not given enough notice of their schedule or changes to that schedule
  • A ban on “clopening,” meaning that a staff member working the closing shift cannot be scheduled to work the opening shift the next day
  • Mandatory rest periods that vary from between 9 to 11 hours between shifts

Failing to maintain compliance with these laws is expensive. The Chipotle example mentioned earlier, in which NYC sued the fast-food chain for $151 million, was caused by hundreds of thousands of predictive scheduling infractions across its many locations in the city.

Even if your business is not based in a state or city with predictive scheduling laws, it is still worth adopting the principles behind them. Partly because these laws may yet impact your business, but also because they have had a notable improvement on staff retention and job satisfaction.

Discrimination laws

There are thankfully few employers looking to openly discriminate in their hiring processes these days, but you should still be aware of which groups the law applies to when hiring and firing, as well as setting the terms of employment and how much people are paid.

  • The Equal Opportunity in Employment Act covers all the areas of discrimination that are forbidden. This concise PDF from the Department of Labor spells out everything employers should know.
  • The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) applies to companies with 15 or more employees and makes it illegal to discriminate in employment on the basis of a person’s disability. This also requires companies to make “reasonable accommodation” to allow a disabled person to work there, including making modifications to the working environment to not only allow disabled people to work there but also participate in the application process.
  • Ever since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, there have been several laws and amendments which make it illegal to discriminate against anyone because of their Ethnicity, Gender, Race, or Religion. Nationality is also a protected category, so, for example, it would be illegal not to hire someone because they were from Poland, regardless of their race or ethnicity.
  • The Age Discrimination in Employment Act offers protection to employees and applicants on the basis of their age. This law applies to anyone aged 40 or older, a far younger cut-off than many companies realize.

Labor law compliance is easier with good record keeping

If this all seems like a lot to keep track of, you’re not alone. The USA has relatively light-touch regulations for businesses compared to Europe, for example, but that doesn’t mean the task of staying compliant with labor laws can’t feel overwhelming—especially if you’re new to management and dealing with all of this legislation for the first time.

Regardless of which law is involved, one of the recurring causes of labor law breaches is poor record keeping. There’s one surefire way to ensure that your labor law compliance is rock solid, and that’s to keep excellent data. While it’s possible to maintain your records the old-fashioned way, with paper and pen or spreadsheets, the potential for human error is high.

When the cost of non-compliance can be so steep, using dedicated staff management software like Workforce.com to track staff hours and automatically flag labor law compliance issues offers much-needed peace of mind.

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How to reduce labor costs and attract quality staff in a post-Covid market

The challenge of attracting quality staff while trying to reduce labor costs is one that has taken on fresh urgency in the post-Covid labor market. This is particularly true where hourly shift work is concerned, as staff question their priorities after a year in lockdown.

Thankfully, there are several ways to find – and retain – good workers while still controlling your labor costs. It just requires a little recalibration of how you think about incentives and staff management.

Use flexible working rather than salary incentives

One myth that we can dispel quickly is that the only way to attract quality staff is by offering larger salaries. That’s been the assumed wisdom for decades but is now an outdated view of what people want from a job.

Increasingly workers are saying that flexible working hours are now their priority, with multiple studies showing that the ability to fit work around other areas of their life is a key consideration when job hunting. One pre-pandemic study found that if given the option of a job with flexible hours and one without, 80% of workers would choose the job with flexible hours. The same study found that 30% considered flexible working more attractive than extra vacation days or a prestigious job title.

Offering flexible hours not makes your company more attractive to workers, but it makes staff more likely to stay with you for the long term. A survey for FlexJobs found that 80% of workers would be more loyal to their current job if it gave them more flexibility.

The reason for this is that the way we perceive value in work has changed. “If you’re a parent and you have three kids to pick up from school every day at 3:30, then flexible working actually adds a lot of value to you”, explains Josh Cameron, Workforce’s Chief Strategy Officer. “If you can pick or swap out of the shifts, that’s more important to you than getting an extra $2 an hour, because you have to pay someone to pick up and look after your kids. The extra dollars are not adding value.”

Systems such as shift bidding are an excellent way to incorporate flexibility into a business, help reduce labor costs by not adding additional expense on your payroll, and are easily managed using staff management software such as Workforce.com.

You don’t need to cut wages to reduce labor costs

It’s a mistake to think that the only way to reduce labor costs is to cut staff or lower wages. One of the best ways to save money is by getting more value for what you already spend, and one of the most common ways that businesses fail to do this is by losing track of productivity against wages.

You can save money in real terms by ensuring that hours worked and hours scheduled match up, cross-referencing with hourly income using workforce analytics to check you are getting the productivity you’re paying for. It may sound basic, but you’d be surprised how many companies still have their data spread across multiple files or systems and simply assume the numbers match at the end of each day.

“Most people never check the schedule matches what people actually work,” says Josh Cameron. “They might have a really good shift plan, and that’s in one system, but then the attendance data is in another system, and people are clocking in and clocking out of that. And the manager is basically just blindly ticking things because that’s what was clocked. If they even wanted to cross-check that, it would be a big exercise. People don’t do it. What’s much better is to have the schedule and the attendance in one system, so you can tick these things off throughout the day or at the end of the shift and if there are differences, you can go see why that happens.”

Listen to feedback to stop staff churn

Once you’ve attracted good workers with flexible hours and made sure you’re getting full value for those hours worked, it’s important to remember that you can help to reduce labor costs by keeping those staff in your business. Replacing employees costs money in advertising the vacant roles, onboarding and training, and lost productivity as working routines are disrupted. Gallup found in 2019 that US businesses lose a trillion dollars every year simply from the cost of replacing staff.

How do you stop staff from leaving? Listen to what’s bugging them about their job, and fix problems wherever possible. The idea of employers giving performance feedback to employees is widely accepted, but it’s also important for employees to be able to give feedback on the company.

“If you’re asking why people quit, by allowing people a way of giving feedback on their shifts, they feel ‘Hey, I have a way of being heard in this job, I actually am important,’” says Josh Cameron. “Managers can look at that feedback and analyze it and be like, ‘This is what’s causing problems. We’ve got these structural things that make it hard to work in this shift and that’s making it hard for people.’”

This is why Workforce.com allows staff to give feedback not just in general, but on the specific shifts they work. This allows managers to identify the pain points that cause staff to leave, and make changes. It may be something as common as a particular manager being hard to work with. It may be that a certain location gets uncomfortably hot on summer afternoons. Whether the answer means shuffling the staff roster, or something as easy as investing in an aircon unit, you’re empowered to spot the leaks in your staffing and plug them before they cost you any more revenue.

Think beyond the hiring process

There will always be sledgehammer approaches to reducing labor costs, but the current labor market conditions where potential employees are empowered to say “no” to jobs that don’t work for them, require a more nuanced approach. Companies save money when they hire the right people and get the best out of those people, and that means making sure they want to stay with you for the long term. From offering more flexible working arrangements to identifying the problems that drive staff away, Workforce.com can help at every stage.

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Systems integrations: A crucial factor in choosing a WFM platform

To make work easier — this is the main reason why companies look for workforce management systems, and they typically gravitate towards providers that claim to be automated, simple, and cloud-based.  

With different WFM platforms available in the market, it’s easy for organizations to get lost in all the sales and marketing talk, demo calls, and claims of why a particular product is better than the others. But if there’s one thing that organizations should focus on, that would be how the solutions they’re looking at will fare in terms of integrating with the current systems and software they use. 

“A workforce management system can only be truly efficient if it can integrate with systems or platforms in place in an organization. It is the only way to ensure accurate forecasts, break silos, and make workflows more efficient, especially for companies operating in different locations,” Travis Kohlmeyer, vice president of sales at Workforce.com said.

Beyond common software integrations

Software as a service, like WFM platforms, is expected to integrate with other relevant software. In WFM’s case, this includes software for payroll, PoS, and HR systems. While these integrations are helpful, there are cases when an organization’s needs go beyond that.

“Big companies typically use different software and systems, and some of these are built internally. A WFM platform can only be of value when it can integrate to custom systems and make sure that you have the right staff on for appointments, reservations, events, and sale volumes and much more,” Kohlmeyer explained.

The power of a fully integrated WFM system

Cost savings and higher productivity happen when WFM systems are fully integrated. A truly robust WFM system can do that despite the unique needs and processes of a business. 

When a WFM seamlessly syncs with other systems and software, it’s able to deliver the following:

  • Accurate labor forecasts – An integrated WFM platform can predict labor demand which can aid managers to create more efficient and accurate schedules. When it’s synced with systems that involve appointments, reservations, room occupancies, and even historical sales information, it’s able to create an algorithm that will inform managers how many employees they need at a given time.
  • Labor compliance – When a WFM platform is fully integrated, crucial information and data are accounted for, especially on the compliance side of things. For example, it ensures that labor rules apply to scheduling and payroll. It also keeps track of training and certifications that are required to perform certain tasks.
  • Timely and actionable reports – Decision-makers and managers can easily spot trends and nip problems in the bud when data and reports are readily available to them. Integrated WFM platforms can generate reports gathered from various data points and do so in a few clicks. This is especially helpful for providing relevant and valuable reports for different roles in the company.

“A fully integrated WFM offers a high level of customizability. Businesses have varying needs, and a WFM platform that can seamlessly sync with other systems can deliver results.” Kohlmeyer explained.

Tips when searching for a WFM platform

Finding the WFM platform for your business requires due diligence. As you look through different options, here are factors that you need to consider:

  • Integrations – While it’s essential to look at the features of a product, it’s equally crucial to see if a WFM can sync with the systems you currently have. Remember that ‘powerful’ features will be for nothing if it doesn’t integrate well with the current systems.“It’s also crucial to figure out how the integrations will be done. Organizations usually seek to make their work easier, so it’s best to go for a solution provider that will take care of the integrations for you.” Kohlmeyer said.
  • Nature of business operations – A WFM platform may claim to be the best, but does it have any experience working with an organization similar to yours? It pays to ask if they have worked with companies in the same industry or at least with an organization that has a similar operational model as what you have. If not, determine if they have the capability to address your specific needs or business model.
  • Reviews – Client feedback is another way to gauge whether a WFM vendor is worth your time and money. Checking reviews can give you an idea of the possible pros and cons of working with certain providers.
  • Required functionality – Discuss with potential vendors your required functionality. See if they can offer it out of the box or if they need to build it for you. If they need to build it for you, ask about the timeline, requirements needed from your side, and possible roadblocks to implementation. 

“Aside from meeting your requirements, it is also vital to discern whether a WFM provider is willing to really help you out and not just close a deal. Normally, you’ll see it in how they steer the conversation when certain functionalities are not available in their product yet.” Kohlmeyer added. 

Workforce.com makes integration easy for companies worldwide

Workforce.com has an open API, which means that it can easily integrate with other software and systems, even internally-developed platforms. It is through this technology that algorithms out of different variables are built, which aids our customers to get accurate demand and forecasts, generate custom reports, optimize operations quickly, and automate processes such as employee scheduling.

Companies need something to simplify workforce management with, and it takes a genuinely robust system to do that. “Taking the complexities out of scheduling, time and attendance, compliance, and reporting has a lot to do with integrations,” Kohlmeyer explained. “Workforce.com is a highly customizable and easy-to-integrate system that helps companies around the world do exactly that.”

See Workforce.com in action. Book a call or try it for free.

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How to Calculate Time Cards Manually: Foolproof Step-by-Step Instructions

Calculating your employees’ time cards accurately is crucial to your business. Not only does it ensure you’re paying your employees the right amount, but it also helps you make sure you’re not scheduling anyone for too many or too few hours, and it allows you to understand what staffing levels your business needs to function at its best.

New small business owners may find that calculating time cards manually works well for them initially, especially if they have a small number of hourly employees and few work hours to track. Even more established businesses that are using Excel spreadsheets, timesheet calculators, or other time tracking methods for calculating hours should know how the math works. That way, even with a computer, you’ll be able to spot and correct any inevitable errors.

Once you understand how to do manual time card calculations, it’s also important to know what problems you may face with that method, such as how much time it takes and how easy it can be for employees to commit time theft. Then we’ll show you how time and attendance software can address those issues and make the entire process a breeze.

How to do the math for time cards by hand

Manually tracking employee hours by hand is an old method, but it works. Here’s how to do it.

Step 1

Convert an employee’s start and end hours for the day, as well as any unpaid break time, to 24-hour time, also known as military time.

For example, your employee began working at 9:22 a.m., took a lunch break from 12:30-1:15 p.m., and ended their day at 5:08 p.m. In a 24-hour time span, the hours past 12 p.m. must be converted, so 1:15 p.m. becomes 13:15, and 5:08 p.m. becomes 17:08.

Step 2

Convert the minutes into decimal format—instead of minutes out of 60, make them percentages of 100. To do this, you can either use a chart or simply divide the minutes by 60.

In our example, this means your employee’s clock-in and clock-out times become 09.37 and 12.50 for the first half of their shift and 13.25 and 17.13 for the second half of their shift.

Step 3

Subtract the employee’s shift start times from the end times.

12.50 – 09.37 = 03.13 and 17.13 – 13.25 = 03.88

Step 4

Add the working hours from step three together to get the total for the day.

03.13 + 03.88 = 07.01

So your employee worked a little over seven hours total.

Step 5

Repeat these steps for each day worked within the pay period, and add all the days together for the total hours the employee worked within the workweek. Multiply the total by their hourly rate to determine their gross pay before deductions.

Bonus Step

If an employee works overtime and is paid an overtime rate, you’ll want to calculate and note it separately to make sure they receive the correct overtime pay.

 

 

The issues with calculating time cards manually

While doing the math by hand works when calculating employee hours, there are also plenty of reasons to be wary of it, from the amount of time it takes to the ways it makes your business vulnerable to theft.

Storing physical time cards and keeping them secure

Calculating manual time cards requires either the manager or employees to keep accurate physical time cards, which can be damaged or destroyed. The time cards and the documents you use to calculate them must be stored securely, taking up office or storage space. Accessing these documents for auditing or other reasons can be difficult and time-consuming, particularly if the records aren’t kept in an organized manner.

Spending time doing calculations and Chasing information

You may not mind having to take the time to calculate time cards manually, but if you have more than a few employees, it’s going to take a while to do the calculations and complete your payroll duties.

If employee time cards are handwritten or if your time clock runs out of ink, there may be times recorded that are illegible, which means you need to spend time contacting employees or managers to figure out what the times are supposed to be. Correcting mistakes also takes extra time since you have to track down the physical timesheets and redo the math.

Risking the possibility of employee time theft

Time theft is easy for employees to commit when you use paper time cards or calculate time by hand, and it’s difficult for employers to track. Employees can commit time theft in a number of ways, such as by saying they worked more regular hours than they actually did, by clocking in and then not starting work for 20 minutes, or by having a friend at work clock them in when they aren’t there, so people don’t know they’re late.

This could also happen unintentionally. If an employee forgets their clock-in or clock-out times, you have to rely on their memory or on their manager or co-workers remembering the number of hours the employee worked, which could easily lead to inaccuracies that result in employees being overpaid or underpaid.

Leaving the door open for potential fraud

When you calculate your employees’ time cards manually, there’s more wiggle room for employers to commit fraud. This can happen accidentally, for example, if an employer loses track of the number of hours an employee worked or intentionally if a manager is skimming time off employees’ hours to stay in budget. Either way, shorting employees on their hours worked or overtime pay is wrong, and for companies, it can result in overtime rule violations, penalties, and fines.

Difficulty understanding the big picture

A general lack of oversight and control is another negative. When you need to check all your employees’ hours by hand, it’s hard to know who’s about to hit the max number of hours they can work, if you’re staying within your budget for staffing costs, or what the optimal staffing levels are. These are things you want to be able to know with a quick look.

How time and attendance software can solve the issues

By using a digital time and attendance solution, you can improve your business by ensuring employee time cards are accurate, secure, and easy.

electronically track and store time card information

With Workforce.com’s time and attendance software, there are no physical time cards or recordkeeping to track. Everything is done through the app, making accessing time card records simple. Because all the information is kept in a secure online system, you don’t have to worry about maintaining organized files in an office or fear they’ll get damaged.

Automate calculations and Clock-in/Clock-Out notifications

When your employees clock in with Workforce.com, they do so either on an app on their mobile device or on a tablet kept at their workplace. Notifications can prompt them when it’s time to clock in or clock out, and their hours are calculated automatically, so you never have to concern yourself with illegible handwritten time cards, employees forgetting to clock in or out, or having to calculate time cards by hand.

Protect against employee time theft and fraud

Workforce.com’s software’s electronic photo verification controls make it next to impossible for employees to have their co-workers punch in for them, and system controls can prevent employees from clocking in early themselves, reducing the possibility of employee time theft. Labor compliance reporting helps make sure employers are following labor laws, such as the Fair Labor Standards Act, to prevent fraud and protect your business.

The flexibility of Workforce.com’s software and mobile app helps you track your employees’ time easily from wherever you—or they—are. If your employees aren’t tied to a retail location, you can use GPS to track their location remotely, see if they’re on the job or somewhere they aren’t supposed to be, and set restrictions for clocking in or out on the job site.

Easy oversight from a computer or mobile device

With these tools, you can have detailed oversight of your employees’ digital time cards, whether you’re at your desk or on the move. Workforce.com’s platform allows you to easily see who’s nearing their maximum working hours for the week, who is nearing overtime hours, easily swap employee shifts should the need arise, and know at a glance what staffing levels are optimal.

Make tracking and calculating employee time cards easy

Time and attendance software takes the headache out of calculating time cards for your employees, resulting in more accurate payroll spending while making employee scheduling easier. Workforce.com has automatic systems in place to help you streamline your processes, save time, and protect your bottom line. Book your demo today.

Workforce.com is a leader in Employee Scheduling on G2

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Rococo Chocolates makes day to day operations more efficient with Workforce.com

“I could create a schedule for a month in less than an hour, which is something that will take me a whole afternoon in my past jobs,” said Stephen Jaundrill, Manager at Rococo Chocolates, about using Workforce.com. 

Rococo Chocolates is a shop of fine and luxury chocolates in London. They are known for employing only the highest standards of chocolate craftsmanship. To sustain their growth and quality of product and customer service, they need to have an effective workforce management solution to manage their five stores in London. 

Easiest scheduling system to work with

Employee schedules are the core of any operation, but it can be tedious and prone to error when done manually or on an insufficient system. But it’s not an issue for Rococo Chocolates when they started using Workforce.com. 

“The scheduling side of Workforce.com is the easiest system I’ve ever worked with because you can drag and drop shifts. You can create templates for each store,” shared Jaundrill. Scheduling around holidays, leave, and unavailability is also simple as the platform can autofill shifts with available staff. “In effect, it’s doing the work that I should be doing manually. It’s saving me so much time,” he added. 

Working around your labor budget is also simple and intuitive with the platform. Workforce.com enabled the team at Rococo Chocolates to see schedules in monthly and weekly views which greatly helped with managing their costs. “So you can check your total hours each week and how much of your payroll budget is coming out,” Jaundrill added.

Simple and efficient for staff

The success of rolling out a workforce management system is how it is easy for employees to use. The staff at Rococo Chocolates love Workforce.com because it’s simple and provides them transparency about their shifts. “The staff feedback I’ve had regarding the Workforce.com app has been really positive. They find it easy to use. It’s nice that it doesn’t just show their shift, but allows them to see who they’re working with on any particular day,” Jaundrill shared. 

Timely and effective product support

After sales support is also a crucial part of using software solutions for any organization. Implementing a workforce management platform for a business involves getting assistance with using the platform, especially when issues arise and updates are released.

“When we deal with certain issues, we need a response within an hour or so, and when support comes, the staff (at Workforce.com) is really helpful. Generally, any request that I’ve had has never been left unresolved,” said Jaundrill.

Technology is vital for businesses, not just in automating tedious tasks, but also with providing them insights to run their operations better. That’s what Workforce.com does with Rococo Chocolates.

If you want to know more about Workforce.com, book a demo or start a free trial.

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What are workforce.com shift simulations?

Would you still have those times where no one had anything to do because it was dead quiet? Could you avoid negative experiences for customers required to wait due to understaffing?

Instead of throwing 100’s of staffing, shift, and customer demand numbers in front of your managers and expecting them to understand what they mean, The workforce shift simulation plays out their day of operations for them in a way they can see and understand. It’s more like a movie than a spreadsheet. 

Introduction to the research, Multi-Agent Simulation-Based Analysis for Restaurant Service: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212827119301581

In 30 seconds, managers watch how their day will play out in front of them. The consequences of the schedule they build and the anticipated customer demand is spelt out visually, based not on complex equations and quantitative inputs, but by a set of simple rules that anyone can observe in both employees and customers.

Most importantly, they can then adjust the inputs to improve the outcome for things like customer wait time, employee fatigue, and overstaffing leading to substantial results and superior performance.

What impact will the 5% discount will have across the business? If a promotion increases customers by 5%, but gross profit by 1%, will we be better off?

Today, most of these decisions are made using linear models with spreadsheets. However, businesses are complex systems, and every change impacts another. Shift simulation allows businesses to model the impact each strategy will have on each business unit, present it in a simple format for front-line managers and empower better decisions.

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Workforce.com builds on nearly 100 years of HR research

Workforce.com, the world’s oldest organization dedicated to workforce research and product leader in workforce management technology, recently announced its plans to partner with technically ambitious companies to leverage its nearly 100 years of research to build and solve new workforce challenges.

Rachael Keech, Domino’s Head of Operations Innovation, attested to labor management being one of the biggest challenges facing businesses today and Workforce’s track record. “The rate at which Workforce.com has worked to adapt and innovate is outstanding. They think outside the box and provide innovative operational solutions.”

“Our guiding mission is to be the industry powerhouse for workforce management research and development,” said Workforce.com President Tasmin Trezise. “Our company is designed to work closely with future forward organizations to prototype and deploy new and disruptive ways of solving age-old problems.”

Workforce.com will propel groundbreaking research and development around traditional workforce management solutions such as scheduling, staffing, and time and attendance. Understanding the numerous HR problems that exist, Workforce.com will ambitiously undertake such challenges as accurately optimizing staffing levels and enhancing the employee experience. Auto scheduling, shift ratings and feedback are among the innovations that Workforce.com’s development team has already brought to market.

Workforce.com research previously has focused on general trends and topics. Further to conducting surveys and polls to establish challenges, Workforce.com seeks to be results-driven, adding a development perspective to that as well. Results won’t just be whitepapers created by the research lab, but viable products that can be deployed into a company for managers and frontline staff to help solve those challenges.

“We don’t grow as organizations unless we are solving new challenges in new ways,” Trezise said. “We’re wanting to put together a more formal way of distinguishing the challenges and rapidly prototype and solve those problems. The philosophy here is to work closely with industry to imagine and build better solutions to solve the workforce problems of the future. That’s the heart of research and development.”

If you’re looking to innovate in your people practices but not sure how we’d love to talk. Sign up for a free account or schedule a demo to see the exciting lineup of solutions to help your organization succeed and grow.

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Workforce.com Awarded Domino’s Operations Partner of the Year

Workforce.com is excited to announce that it has been awarded Business Partner of the Year (Operational Support) by Domino’s Pizza Enterprises Limited (DPE) at its annual Business Partner Awards.

Rachael Keech, DPE’s Head of Operations Innovation, said labor management is one of the biggest challenges facing businesses today.

“The rate at which Workforce.com has worked to adapt and innovate is outstanding. They think outside the box and provide innovative operational solutions.”

This award recognizes Workforce.com’s commitment to developing a world-first workforce management platform that continues to meet the evolving requirements of smarter labor planning, analytics, and the employee experience.

Rory Broadbridge, Strategic Account Manager at Workforce, said solving any workforce management problem requires an operational-first approach.

“At Workforce.com we value feedback from the frontline and build solutions that are compliant but also operationally innovative.

“Whether it’s scheduling the right employees to meet customer demand or compliantly employing part time employees, our partnership with Domino’s has always focused on providing technical solutions that empower franchisees and employees.”

Also read: How Domino’s Israel saved 25,000 hours and increased employee productivity by 11%

Workforce.com was implemented across DPE’s Australian and New Zealand markets in 2016, providing scheduling, wage compliance as well as time and attendance for over 800 stores.

Today, DPE’s stores across Europe, in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Israel and Belgium also leverage the workforce management platform to drive smarter scheduling and labor management decisions.