Earlier this week, the House passed an extension of the FFCRA as part of its $1.9 trillion COVID-19 stimulus bill. (I’ll cover its details in a future post, but if you’re curious now, head over to Jeff Nowak’s FMLA Insights.)
One of the new measures in this proposed extension is the inclusion of leave taken by an employee to obtain a COVID-19 vaccine or recover from any injury, disability, illness or condition related to the vaccine.
Bravo! But here’s the thing. Until this passes and becomes law, and even if it doesn’t become law, employers should be paying employees for time off related to the COVID vaccine. At least for now, vaccine appointments are scarce and employees who are eligible to get vaccinated must take appointments when they can get them. Many will need to get their vaccines during the workday. Moreover, post-vaccination, some employees will have a reaction serious enough to keep them house-bound for a day or so.
The way through the end of this pandemic and returning our lives to normal is by getting enough shots in arms as quickly as possible. As employers, want to encourage our employees to get vaccinated.
We don’t want employees to feel like they have to choose between obtaining a vaccine and obtaining a paycheck. Some will choose poorly. By paying employees for time off from work related to COVID-19 vaccinations, we are making the decision that these vaccines are a priority, and that we are not standing in our employees’ way from obtaining them as soon as possible.
Organizations were forced to rethink operations in 2020 and shift their strategies overnight, prompting new investments in workforce management technology. So, what’s to come in 2021?
We’ve compiled a list of the top 5 and specific workforce.com technology features we predict will be key trends this year. These include COVID recovery, labor compliance, automated scheduling, advanced workforce analytics and increased cloud and mobility functionality.
Labor compliance and minimum wage changes
The Biden administration is pushing to raise the federal hourly minimum wage to $15 by 2025. While legislation has yet to be passed, organizations will be preparing for minimum wage changes and complying correctly. Companies that fail to comply are at risk of facing stiff financial penalties and negative public attention.
Staying abreast of these changes will be crucial, and organizations will be looking to have an automated system in place that will make the transition easier. Organizations will require solutions that can simplify and automate labor law compliance. They will need a proactive platform that accounts for all applicable federal, state and local labor regulations from employee scheduling to payroll processing.
Workforce.com continues to invest in our fully automated and user customizable compliance engine, pioneered in Australia to manage the world’s most complicated and expensive wage laws and costs. Instead of manually updating or having to calculate different wages for schedules, overtime and payroll, organizations will be able to have changes automatically forecasted and updated. We predict labor compliance to continue to become increasingly complicated due to political, regional and union influence.
Higher wages will also mean increased labor cost and a need for companies to be smarter around how they schedule, track and spend on wages. Workforce management features that can boost employee productivity while providing wage oversight for owners and front-line teams to proactively manage will be key.
A way to address this will be the Workforce.com Live Wage Tracker, which provides a real-time view of staff count, exact costs and where there may be overspending per shift factored for compliance. It equips frontline managers to make decisions quickly and adjust staffing levels accordingly throughout the day. With this, businesses can be more efficient in controlling their labor costs and optimizing real-time operations.
As the world recovers from COVID-19 and shift work industries return to normal, it will remain paramount for organizations to have a workforce management platform in place for ensuring employee health, safety and feedback.
As workers return to their shifts in numbers, clear communication will be vital to responding to queries and staying agile as a team. Workforce.com innovations this year include the live 360-degree shift feedback and ratings feature so comments can be gathered from employees after each shift and proactively managed. Their responses enable managers to quickly address issues and apply necessary changes to future shifts. This tool promotes transparency and will provide an avenue for employees to speak up and be heard.
Tracking accurate time and attendance but minimizing contact with communal punch clocks will also continue to remain a priority for organizations. Instead of these older physical devices we predict an accelerated rise of next-gen mobile, app, GPS and tablet clocking in solutions that addresses these concerns.
For instance, with workforce.com GPS Clock ins instead of just one device for clocking in, staff will be able to use this feature to clock in on their own mobile device. Employees who are on the go can also use it to accurately log their start and end times, as well as their break and location while on shift. This results in a lower hardware and maintenance cost of ensuring accurate timesheets while reducing multiple touches to a communal device.
Workforce.com has also developed a completely free tool called Reopen to help businesses manage their capacity and social distancing requirements as they open. By allowing customers to make an appointment online, this will assist businesses in managing the number of people within their premises at a particular time. Organizations will be able to set opening hours, and customers can book in a time slot using their phone.
Auto employee scheduling
We predict further advancements in automated employee scheduling in 2021 with an introduction of advanced algorithms and automatic demand prediction, shift building and shift filling. The future of auto-scheduling looks to be creating ‘win-win’ shifts for employees and employers that drive maximum efficiency whilst optimizing for employee choice and flexibility
Demand prediction is considered the first key step in auto-scheduling. The more applicable information that can be collected about how busy it’s forecasted to be, the more accurate and confident the staff coverage. Workforce.com can currently integrate with any existing business system (I.e POS, MES, HMS, ERP’s etc) to capture this demand data and predict staffing requirements. This can then be adjusted for location unique factors such as events, weather, seasonal changes, trends and manager discretion.
I.e., This Super Bowl will be 20 percent busier than last year. Next Tuesday will be as busy as the average of the last three Tuesdays. Next Friday will be 40 percent less busy because it will be raining.
Once managers have confidence in their demand prediction, shift building is the next step. Software like Workforce.com can help managers create shift patterns for the amount of work that needs to be done, while keeping in mind regulations that set limits on how few or many people can be working at a given time. Still, managers need to ascertain certain information from employees to help make this possible, such as by approaching employees and getting hard numbers on how long it takes to complete basic tasks within their shifts.
Shift filling is where the most innovation comes in where managers will be able to effortlessly fill shifts factoring multiple constraints, such as labor costs, qualifications, roles and labor laws. If an employee is unavailable, managers can offer that shift to other available staff. Workforce.com can then show managers how much a potential shift swap costs, enabling them to stay on budget.
Being smart at shift building and shift filling against projected business demand will ultimately both make employees more satisfied and help control budget efficiency. Managers will be able to accomplish this with the right tools that give them the best potential technology and algorithms while also giving them the opportunity to put the employee in the process. Technology built on this win-win philosophy will be the future of automated employee scheduling with both employee and employer achieving desired outcomes.
These advancements in “one-click scheduling” are predicted to drastically save on manager administrative time, optimize labor cost and reduce over/under staffing.
Advanced workforce analytics and open APIs
Increased adoption of the workforce.com open API is expected to bring huge advancements in workforce analytics and promote internal innovation, integration and personalization. By leveraging the power of connectivity, enterprises can quickly eliminate the chaos of using multiple applications leading to rapid innovation and deeper insights into their workforces.
Companies that can efficiently discover patterns, spot potential problems and optimize their workforce quickly will stay ahead in 2021. This is only possible when organizations have access to their data and have the mechanisms to generate reports that are clear, easy to understand and make the most sense for stakeholders such as HR, payroll, managers and employees.
With Workforce.com’s advanced reporting suite and API, organizations will be able create custom reports and workflows for efficient analysis. Companies can choose to use customizable built-in reports or create their own by pulling information from any data point.
2021 will continue the rise of native SaaS cloud applications over clunky enterprise workforce management software with organizations preferring improved frontline manager/employee mobility options and ease of use. Employees should love to use the tools provided or they generally won’t use them at all.
Simple and modern UI has long been missing from workforce management solutions with organizations needing to solve their problems and complete tasks in the easiest and quickest way possible. Workforce.com remains the leader in workforce management design as we continue to invest in simplicity and ease of use to increase employee engagement, usability and lower support and implementation issues.
It’s also becoming paramount for organizations to lead with a mobile first strategy for their workforce management. Workforce.com will continue to expand our employee mobile app that staff and managers can use to clock in, see timesheets, create schedules and communicate with the rest of the team.
Implementation expectations adhere to these ease of use and quick-to-learn principles with organizations expecting higher standards and tighter deadlines when rolling out or switching from a legacy solution. Workforce.com implementation is now easier and faster ensuring that users can start using the platform in no time reaping benefits of upgrading faster.
In 2021 we predict an increased migration to cloud computing services like workforce.com due to increased functionality, reliability, scalability, security, continual R&D and decrease in cost.
There are currently 300,000 users on the Workforce.com platform, with a 4.75 app star-rating average and 99 percent client retention. Find out why and try Workforce.com today.
The headline reads, “Ex-Manager Sues Ample Hills in Lawsuit Alleging Harassment and Unsafe COVID-19 Protocols” (boldface/emphasis mine).
Here’s the lede:
Bryce Mottram, a former general manager at one of quirky ice cream purveyor Ample Hills’ scoop shops, has filed a lawsuit in New York Eastern District Court alleging that he was fired from the company in retaliation for speaking up about instances of sexual harassment and unsafe COVID-19 workplace protocols at the company.
I firmly believe that for the next year-plus, just about every employment-related lawsuit will contain a COVID-19 whistleblower tag-along claim.
In other words, employees will sue for discrimination and safety-related retaliation, or harassment and safety-related retaliation, or breach of contract and safety-related retaliation, or fill-in-the blank and safety-related retaliation. I’ve already seen it happen in cases, and it makes an already complicated employment dispute that much more complicated and dangerous.
This likely reality means that employers must double down on implementing and enforcing COVID-19 safety rules in the workplace. Have a written COVID-19 safety policyand strictly enforce it. If you don’t know what should be in this policy, OSHA recently published a terrific guide.
Separate and send home infected or potentially infected people from the workplace.
Implement physical distancing in all communal work areas, including remote work and telework.
Install barriers where physical distancing cannot be maintained.
Suppress the spread of the hazard using appropriate and properly worn face coverings.
Improve ventilation.
Provide the supplies necessary for good hygiene practices.
Perform routine cleaning and disinfection.
These points are just a start, and I recommend you consult with OSHA counsel or a COVID-19-knowledgable safety consultant to draft and implement your plan (including training your employees).
At some point over the next few months, some (most?) of your employees will receive the COVID-19 vaccine.
Depending on the rules of your state, the nature of your business and the age or medical issues of your employees, some may already have. I’ve previously covered the legal issues surrounding the vaccine, here, here, and here. Today I want to cover a practical issue — time off related to the vaccination.
1. Please offer your employees paid time off to obtain both doses of the vaccine. To reach herd immunity (the only thing that will end this pandemic), we need between 75 and 85 percent of the population to be vaccinated. We want to make it easier for employees to be vaccinated, not more difficult. Please don’t make employees choose between their paychecks and a vaccine. The hour or two you will pay for the amount of time they spend getting vaccinated will pale in comparison to the weeks off they will need if they catch the virus.
2. Understand that a certain percentage of your employees will have a reaction to the virus and be too sick to come to work in its immediate aftermath. The most common side effects, which most commonly follow the second dose, include pain at the site of the injection, painful, swollen lymph nodes in the arm where the vaccine was injected, tiredness, headache, muscle or joint aches, nausea and vomiting, fever or chills. For some, these side effects will mirror the virus itself in causing a high, debilitating fever. These side effects typically last no more than 24 hours. If I’m you, I’m telling employees that if they experience side effects you will provide a paid day off for recuperation. Again, we want to have policies that encourage employees to get shots in arms, not forcing a choice between a paycheck and a vaccine.
This pandemic won’t end until enough people are vaccinated. Employers, do your part by having policies in place that encourage as many vaccinations as possible.
Health care organizations faced numerous challenges when the pandemic hit. Residents in care facilities faced a high risk of contracting the coronavirus as many are between the vulnerable ages of 80 and 90 years old with underlying conditions.
Beyond the physical stress, residents and staff alike experience mental health challenges. Employees are burdened with adapting to new ways of working, such as dealing with absences, implementing new health protocols, and the emotional toll of seeing patients affected by the virus. At the same time, residents can also pick up such cues and feel the burden themselves — restrictions such as limited visits from loved ones added to the toll too.
“Care organizations in particular have been under immense strain. We’ve never asked them to do more to protect the most vulnerable members of our society,” said Bryce Davies, general manager of Workforce.com UK. But there’s another story here, and that’s human ingenuity and creativity can be used to help us all adapt. It’s called resilience.”
The ability of organizations to bounce back from challenges and show resilience is what can help them thrive during a pandemic. Davies identified four core areas of resilience that can help businesses navigate through this time.
Keeping communication lines open
Communication is key for both staff and patients or customers. But with the pandemic, keeping communication lines open tends to become challenging given restrictions and volatile work patterns. This resulted in information getting diluted and not being communicated to the right person at the right time, which prevents teams from adapting quickly to circumstances.
“Identify your mission-critical communication channels and build redundancy into these,” Davies said. The speed of communication channels should also be considered and identify possible causes of delays.
Open and transparent communication lines are vital to empowering staff to step in and take over in case of a teammate’s absence or operational changes. Furthermore, it’s also critical to documenting processes, which lessens onboarding time and equips teams to stay agile.
Ensuring safety on shift
Fatigue is detrimental to the safety of patients and health workers alike. When care facility staff is exhausted, they are more prone to making errors, forgetting things, having difficulty processing information and reacting slowly.
Workforce managers can prevent their staff from experiencing fatigue through efficient scheduling and leave management. However, staff schedules can be difficult to plan and subjects staff to work in shift patterns, which fail to account for other factors such as demand, leave and time for training.
“Try planning your schedule out as far in advance as possible to lock in both the time for leave and training,” Davies explained. Monitoring annual leave balances throughout the year also helps allocate resources accordingly and make sure the staff gets enough time off to curb the effects of stress.
Technology such as Workforce.com provides managers oversight into all the essential factors with staff scheduling. Minus the paperwork, managers can use the platform to make better decisions when creating schedules and ensure that time off, training, and demand are accounted for.
Promoting financial security
Labor costs and demand are difficult to control and forecast. If not managed properly, it can drive up expenses, resulting in the organization becoming less financially agile. This can make team members feel insecure about the company and may cause them to leave.
“Build a mock schedule well in advance and cost it using employees’ base pay and overtime to help predict cost. Test different scenarios,” Davies advised. Identifying key demand trends and indicators can also help in forecasting costs.
It’s also crucial to pay close attention to the variance between schedules and actual timesheets. Investigate probable causes of overspending and optimize your operations to address them.
More importantly, health care organizations should have a way to proactively manage demand and cost rather than acting on issues after the fact. Having access to labor analytics is vital to do that. Workforce.com captures real-time costs and revenue throughout the day, allowing managers to react quickly and make cost-effective decisions on the fly.
Complying with labor laws is a must, but keeping up with changes can be tough.
“Promote compliance as a culture, not as one person’s job,” Davies said. Integrate compliance to every part of workforce management. Ensure that processes and systems are designed to stay at pace and adhere to labor laws.
Companies can start with digitizing their documents so that files can be remotely audited and monitored. Compliance can also be accounted for in creating employee schedules. Workforce.com’s employee scheduling platform factors in labor laws and alerts managers if a schedule is at risk of violating regulations. Legislation that affects payroll is also crucial for companies to pay close attention to as it impacts labor costs and treatment of overtime and holidays.
When systems are integrated for labor compliance, all activities are tracked and fixing potential noncompliance risk would be quicker.
“Resilience is something that we can build into all of our businesses, and it’s never too late to start,” Davies said. Recognizing the gaps is half of the battle. The other half is finding the right solution to address them.
Workforce.com has been partnering with businesses in different industries to help them engage their teams, safeguard their finances and stay compliant. See our solutions in action and book a demo with us today.
“Wear a mask and stay 6 feel apart.” It might sound like Groundhog Day to keep repeating this mantra. It’s also the most basic and most important steps we can take to remain safe, healthy and COVID-free.
Not distinguishing between workers who are vaccinated and those who are not: Workers who are vaccinated must continue to follow protective measures, such as wearing a face covering and remaining physically distant, because at this time, there is not evidence that COVID-19 vaccines prevent transmission of the virus from person-to-person. The CDC explains that experts need to understand more about the protection that COVID-19 vaccines provide before deciding to change recommendations on steps everyone should take to slow the spread of the virus that causes COVID-19.
COVID-19 is strengthening. New variants of the virus are making it more transmissible and potentially more virulent. Now is not the time to loosen COVID safety rules, especially around the most basic of steps we must take to remain safe and healthy—masks and physical distancing. This holds true even if your employees are vaccinated, as science does not yet know if the vaccine prevents the transmission from person-to-person.
The vaccine does offer us a light at the end of the very long and dark COVID tunnel, but we cannot allow it to give us a false sense of security. COVID-19 is fighting back; we must continue to fight back, too.
To a nation waiting for action, let me be clearest on this point: Help is on the way.
Those were the words of President Biden in announcing the ordering of 200 million additional COVID-19 vaccine doses, a hike in the distribution of doses to states, and a promise that there will be enough doses to fully vaccinate 300 million Americans by the end of summer.
It’s an ambitious plan, but it’s what we need to end a pandemic that has already claimed the lives of more than 425,000 Americans and will claim hundreds of thousands more before we close the book on COVID-19.
Vaccines, however, only work if people actually accept syringes in their arms. Too many of us say that they won’t.
According to one recent survey, 39 percent of Americans say that they either probably or definitely will not get the COVID-19 vaccine when it becomes available to them. Another survey pegs the number at 37 percent. While these percentages are trending down, and more of us say that we trust the vaccine and will get it, the needle on this issue isn’t moving quickly enough. According to Dr. Fauci, to reach herd immunity (the only thing that will end this pandemic), we need between 75 and 85 percent of the population to be vaccinated.
To overcome this vaccine hesitancy, some employers are offering their employees a financial incentive to obtain the COVID-19 vaccine when it becomes available. Retailers such as Trader Joe’s, Dollar General, and Instacart are offering small incentives such as a couple of hours of additional paid time off, or nominal (e.g., $25) stipends. Nursing homes, whose employees come in contact with our most vulnerable population, are offering similar incentives to their workers. Others are offering free marijuana (full disclosure: they are marijuana dispensaries).
If you are considering offering a financial incentive to entice your employees to obtain the vaccine when it’s available to them, I caution you to tread carefully to make sure that you do it within the bounds of our equal employment opportunity laws.
1. Vaccination rules must have exceptions for employees’ disabilities under the ADA and employees’ sincerely held religious beliefs under Title VII. For this reason, if you are offering employees a financial incentive to get vaccinated, you better be prepared to offer the same exact incentive to those who cannot get vaccinated because of one of these legally protected reasons.
2. Incentive programs must comply with the EEOC’s wellness program regulations. Admittedly, these regulations will not be final until March 8.
Given that COVID-19 vaccinations will stretch for months beyond that date, however, employers should be aware of these rules and the risks they pose. Under these proposed and soon to be final rules, employers may not offer any more than a “de minimis incentive” to encourage employees to participate in a wellness program such as one that incentivizes the receipt of the COVID-19 vaccine.
The EEOC does not define “de minimus,” but uses the example of a water bottle or a gift card of modest value as “de minimus” and a $50 per month reduction in annual health care costs, paying for an annual gym membership, or an airline ticket as “not de minimus.”
Employers are considering bribes because they work. We just need to make sure that we are doing so within the confines of the law. We don’t want to solve one problem only to create another.
Specifically, the president is “asking the U.S. Department of Labor to consider clarifying that workers who refuse unsafe working conditions can still receive unemployment insurance.”
Allowing employees who quit in the name of “safety” to receive unemployment benefits presents a potential staffing nightmare for employers, especially considering that the America Rescue Plan (Biden’s the $1.9 trillion stimulus package being debated on Capitol Hill) proposes an additional $400 per week unemployment payments through the end of September. In Ohio, for example, that payment would increase the maximum weekly unemployment benefit to $1,072 (equivalent to an hourly wage of $26.80 or an annual salary of $55,744). At those numbers, lots of employees might opt to leave their jobs and take an extended, well-compensated vacation until the pandemic ends.
Allowing employees to qualify for unemployment merely by “refusing unsafe working conditions, which would make the employees the masters of whether or not they qualify, I proposed that the DOL instead limit qualification to employees who have tangible evidence of a health or safety violation by the employer that does not allow the employee to practice social distancing, hygiene, wear protective equipment, or otherwise unreasonably exposes the employee to a greater risk of contracting COVID-19.” A great starting point is the new COVID guidance President Biden has ordered OSHA to draft and emergency temporary standards Biden has ordered it to consider.
We need to make sure that we have rules that strike the proper balance between employees who have a legitimate reason not to work because of COVID-19, and employees who simply don’t want to work. Merely allowing employees to make that decision in their own exercise of discretion, and paying them a substantial benefit as a result, does not strike any balance at all.
Today marks the one-year anniversary of the identification of the first COVID-19 case in the United States.
On Jan. 20, 2020, the state of Washington and the CDC confirmed that someone in Washington State had contracted the virus. Since then, 24,809,840 additional Americans have contracted COVID, and 411,520 have died from it.
All the while, OSHA, the federal agency charged with protecting health and safety in the workplace, has done very little to address the pandemic, and we still lack a national safety standard on keeping COVID-safe at work.
President Biden’s OSHA will fix this glaring omission. He has called on Congress “to authorize the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to issue a COVID-19 Protection Standard that covers a broad set of workers.”
What issues should we expect this OSHA standard to address?
Mandatory masking.
Mandatory physical distancing.
Required sanitization and housekeeping.
Standards for engineering and airflow.
Required employee training.
Increased reporting requirements.
Some of these, like masking and distancing, should be second-nature at this point, but sadly have become overly politicized and ignored by too many. I applaud anything President Biden does in an attempt to get his pandemic under control and save lives so that we all can get back to living ours.
As you should hopefully be aware, the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA), the federal law that provided paid leave to employees for COVID-related absences, expired on Dec. 31, 2020, with an option for employers to voluntarily expand leave through March 31, 2021. The problem, however, is that while this leave has expired or will soon expire, COVID-19 is not expiring any time soon.
Help, however, may soon be on the way, as part of President-elect Biden’s America Rescue Plan. A key part of that plan is a significant expansion of the FFCRA.
What would change?
The FFCRA would be reinstated and extended through Sept. 30, 2021.
The 500-employee cap on coverage would be lifted and all employers, regardless of size, would be required to provide paid leave for covered COVID-related absences.
The exemptions for health care workers, first responders and small employers would be eliminated.
The total leave entitlement would be expanded to 14 weeks.
Employers with less than 500 employees would be reimbursed for this paid leave through an extension of the already existing payroll tax credit. Employers with 500 or more employees would not receive the tax credit.
I applaud this expansion, which is sorely needed as we navigate this virus until we reach a vaccination critical mass. I also hope it is a step toward more broad-based paid sick and family leave for employees, an issue on which this country sadly lags behind every other industrialized nation in the world.
