employee engagement – Page 3

March 30, 2021

Let’s meet employees where they are on their pronouns

In Meriwether v. Hartop, the 6th Circuit recently decided that a state university cannot force a professor to use students’ preferred gender pronouns, and permitted the prof to proceed with his lawsuit challenging the school’s discipline for his misgendering.

The plaintiff, Nicholas Meriwether, a philosophy professor at Shawnee State University and a devout Christian, challenged the school’s decision to discipline him for violating a policy that instructors were to use a student’s preferred pronouns after a student accused him of refusing to properly identify her as a woman or with she/her pronouns. Meriwether claimed the policy violated his First Amendment free-speech and religious freedoms. The 6th Circuit agreed enough to re-institute his claim.

Traditionally, American universities have been beacons of intellectual diversity and academic freedom. They have prided themselves on being forums where controversial ideas are discussed and debated. And they have tried not to stifle debate by picking sides. But Shawnee State chose a different route: It punished a professor for his speech on a hotly contested issue. And it did so despite the constitutional protections afforded by the First Amendment. The district court dismissed the professor’s free-speech and free-exercise claims. We see things differently and reverse.

Unless you are a public employer governed by the Constitution and the First Amendment protections it guarantees, Meriwether has limited applicability to your workplace, your rules and your employees. Moreover, after Bostock v. Clayton County, it’s likely a Title VII violation to intentionally misgender an employee.

Nevertheless, legal or illegal, Meriwether can teach us some important lessons about meeting employees where they are. Here are some things to think about regarding gender, pronouns, and your employees.

1. Educate yourself about the use of pronouns. When I went to school I learned that “he” refers to a singular male, “she” to a singular female,” and “they” to plural wo/men. That is no longer the case. A man can identify as “she” and a female as “he,” and they/them pronouns are used for individuals who identify as non-binary, gender-fluid, or whoever chooses to use them.

2. Do not assume what pronouns your employees use. Just because someone presents a particular way doesn’t mean they their pronouns fit match that presentation.

3. If you’re unsure, ask. Your employees who use alternate pronouns will be more than happy to help you.

4. Avoid gendered language. For example, use “y’all” instead of “you guys” and “everyone” or “people” instead of “ladies and gentlemen” or “men and women.”

More to the point, if you insist that you must refer to someone born with a Y chromosome as “he” and two X chromosomes as “she,” why do you care? If an employee identifies as female (regardless of whether she was born a male), why do you care what pronoun she uses?

This issue is nothing more than a solution in search of a problem. You are doing way more harm to the mental well-being of your employees if you misgender them than you are doing to other employees by having them rethink how they use pronouns.

Any other answer to this issue is bigotry, period. And, in 2021, we should be well beyond bigotry of any kind.

March 24, 2021

How to choose which remote work employees to bring back

coronavirus, remote work, COVID-19, remote workforce

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

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

Here are four questions to think about.

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

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

2. What is an employee’s preference?

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

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

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

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

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

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

March 11, 2021March 29, 2024

5 retail scheduling best practices – higher sales per labor hour

Effective retail scheduling isn’t easy.

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

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

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

1. Build predictable schedules

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Adhere to predictive scheduling laws

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Allow employees to swap shifts

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

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

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

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

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

4. Improve clarity around retail employees’ schedules

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. Assess staffing needs to avoid overtime

Labor forecasting is a must when scheduling your retail workforce.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

March 1, 2021

Employee grievances including wage theft, COVID-19 concerns come to a head for one brewery

The sign on the door of Platform Beer’s Columbus, Ohio, taproom reads: “The entire Platform Columbus crew has quit. The taproom is closed until further notice. Thank you!”

The employees and their former(?) employer are battling it out on Twitter.

-vs-

Oliver Northern, the employee leading the walkout, told Alive Columbus that “employees started seriously discussing walking out about a week ago, frustrated by a growing list of grievances that he said the company had not taken steps to address.” He added that they initially intended to use the walkout as a bargaining tool with management, but that conditions had gotten so bad that no one had any interest in remaining with the company no matter its response.

What does it all mean?

1. If these employees simply walked off the job in protest instead of quitting their jobs, an alphabet soup of employment laws would have protected their jobs. The NLRA (protected concreted activity), FLSA (wage and hours), and OSHA (safety) are just a few examples of anti-retaliation protections these employees would enjoy. Because, however, these employees quit, these anti-retaliation measures are largely moot (although I could craft an argument that post-employment retaliatory acts such as defamation could still trigger one or more of these statutes).

2. This employer has a massive PR mess. No matter how meritorious or genuine the employees’ claims, the employees thought enough of them to quit their jobs en masse. An employer simply cannot allow these issues to fester until they boil over into a mass protest. If an employer doesn’t know that its employees have these concerns, then that employer’s managers and supervisors aren’t doing their jobs. They are your eyes and ears, and they must understand their role as such.

Moreover, open-door policies and other prophylactic measures aren’t worth their weight if you don’t take them (and the issues employees bring to you) seriously.

February 25, 2021October 31, 2023

5 Options to Track Employee Hours

Summary

Some businesses get away with tracking time manually with pen and paper.
Time clock machines with biometrics, card swipes, or punch-in codes are worth considering in most cases.
Automated time and attendance software is the easiest and most comprehensive way to track employee hours.

Without a time tracking program in place, it’s easy to lose track of which hourly employees did what and for how long, leading to mistakes in payroll.

Inaccurately tracking hours also creates compliance issue landmines. There are stiff penalties and fines for organizations that ignore local, state and federal wage-and-hour and overtime laws.

It’s a mistake to maintain relaxed standards or have no policy at all to track employee hours.

Time tracking allows you to accurately see how long any given task takes to complete, and who on your team works most efficiently whether they are hourly or salaried employees. Knowing how much time is spent on certain tasks helps employers to efficiently select how their workers should be using their time.

Still, there are some employers who don’t track employee time because they don’t want to offend employees. Introducing time tracking can be seen as micromanaging or an intrusion on employees’ privacy and shows “a lack of faith” in your own employees.

Instead, they rely on an employee monitoring their own time. Showing trust can build commitment to the company but it can open the door to fraud.

Before implementing an employee hour tracking solution, answer all questions your employees may have about the process. If employees don’t see the value of time tracking or it is not accurately communicated, your team may not buy in. A key component of streamlining the process of tracking employee hours begins with your honest, transparent communication.

Not tracking employee hours can result in thousands of dollars in lost revenue and invite expensive wage-and-hour violations. Following are five ways that you can track employee hours.

Whether you need to clean up your compensation and compliance practices, track employee activity on a job site, or gauge exempt employees’ time on a project, there are several ways to track employee hours.

Manual timekeeping — pen and paper.
Time clocks or punch-in tools.
Automated time-and-attendance solutions.
Mobile apps.
GPS clock-ins.

1. Manual timekeeping

If your company is small, using a pen and paper to track employee hours may be a workable option. A manual pen-and-paper system or an Excel spreadsheet at least offers a minimal way to track employees’ time at work. But its limitations quickly become evident as a company grows.

Manual timekeeping can lead to many difficulties for employers who want to accurately track employees’ time.

Managers face reams of paperwork on a regular basis, and it’s easy to misplace or lose timesheets. Employee paperwork also is cumbersome to store, and accessing the documents for recordkeeping or auditing is a challenge.

Manual timekeeping can also make calculating payroll seems like an endless task. If a manager’s time is spent sorting through messy, handwritten employee timesheets and contacting them with questions, they have less time to build the organization through more strategic tasks.

Correcting mistakes also could hold up the payroll process, which affects all employees.

Accurately tracking employee time becomes an issue. Employees and employers can only add or delete time manually, so they depend on memory to recall who came in when and at what time they took a break or went home.

Wage-and-hour fraud becomes a real possibility. Time theft practices like buddy punching are difficult to detect. Even if several employees falsely change their clock-in time by just five minutes every day, employers can unwittingly pay dozens of unworked hours over the course of a month.

Of course, the pendulum can swing the other way. Manual timekeeping opens the door to employer fraud. Unsuspecting employees can be cheated out of thousands of dollars in working hours. If and when the fraud is uncovered, wage-and-hour or overtime violations will lead to substantial penalties and potentially steep fines.

When payrolls are prepared manually, the process is not only time-consuming, mistakes are inevitable and payroll errors are costly. With the trend toward automation, more and more companies are incorporating advanced technology into the workplace to accurately track employee hours, among other functions.

Pen-and-paper timekeeping simply doesn’t offer the accuracy, versatility and security a digital time and attendance solution will provide. By leaving so much room for error, you risk losing big money for your company.

2. Time clocks

Time clocks were introduced to track employee time in the late 1800s. While typically more accurate than pen-and-paper timekeeping, time clocks have flaws.

Time clocks vary widely in levels of sophistication. And as with manual timekeeping, time clocks leave plenty of opportunity for time theft and abuse. There is no guarantee that your employees are on the job when they say they are.

Time clocks also are expensive. They require specialized equipment that is subject to malfunctions and require ongoing maintenance.

Though card swipes or fingerprint biometrics will provide more accuracy, they are particularly costly, especially when a business owner has multiple locations.

However advanced the time clock may be, they’re an impractical choice for a mobile workforce that will routinely work hours at different job sites.

Cleanliness should always be a concern in any workplace. You wouldn’t set out boxes of dirty tissues. Why should a time clock that’s not sanitized after constantly being touched be the lone option for employees starting and ending their working hours?

The functionality of a time clock is limited and typically cannot integrate with your other workforce management solutions.

3. Automated employee time tracking solutions

Automated workforce management systems aren’t just for the Fortune 1000 anymore. Solutions exist that are built to support behemoth enterprise organizations yet are flexible and customizable enough to solve a small business’s need to track employee hours.

Companies quickly realize the ways they save time and money once they start using an automated time tracking solution to track employee hours. Timekeeping software becomes your online paper trail that produces accurate, objective accounts of employees’ time and prevents dishonest employees from inflating their hours.

Besides being a strong deterrent to costly time theft, quickly and easily accessing timesheets through an automated solution dramatically improves the accurate calculation of payroll. Time theft is easy to trace and can be quickly solved after you’ve begun to track employees’ hours. You will notice patterns of behavior and can act accordingly.

Implementing Workforce.com’s time tracking solution provides your managers with an effortless time-and-attendance system that stays on top of employee productivity, eases administrative tasks and requires minimal training. Managers don’t have to send countless emails or wait for employees to turn in their timecards. The approval workflow handles it, with timesheets attached for easy review and simple approval.

Managers receive notifications when employees clock in and out, when they are running late or must call off at the last minute and when they’re about to incur overtime costs.

Tracking time with Workforce.com’s automated solution also boosts compliance with regulatory laws. Wage-and-hour and overtime laws vary by state and locality, which makes payroll a calculation and compliance headache.

Workforce.com’s proactive compliance tools, which were pioneered in Australia to manage the world’s most complicated wage laws, ensure simplified and automated adherence with U.S. federal FLSA, state and local labor regulations. It also includes built-in overtime pay calculations for all 50 states and territories to keep your numbers in compliance.

Integration with all workforce management systems becomes simple and easy. You control wage costs even further by integrating Workforce.com’s software with your current payroll, POS and HR tools via the cloud for faster, more efficient workforce management operations.

Verifying and exporting timesheets to your payroll system software is straightforward and fast thanks to the available integrations. Timesheets that have been verified and match scheduling are auto-approved, saving your managers time.

Ultimately, if your employees don’t feel comfortable using your time tracking solution, it will affect their productivity. Since they will use it every day, get them to experience a trial run with you. Building trust early on will amplify buy-in and confidence in your hourly time tracking strategy, making implementation and use simple and error-free.

4. Tracking employee hours with a mobile app

A huge advantage of an automated, cloud-based time-and-attendance system is the capability a mobile employee time tracking app or timesheet app provides to track employee hours. Mobile time tracking makes clocking in and out and sharing schedules easier for all employees, no matter their location.

With a time tracker app you can watch who is coming in that day, what time they’re scheduled to start, which location they’ll be working at and their hours on the clock straight from your phone.

There’s no need to camp behind a desktop computer in an office anymore. Your managers get a powerful mobile tool that boosts their ability to track employee hours any time, anywhere.

A mobile tracker app also empowers managers to follow employees in real time from anywhere and assure that all shifts are covered, update scheduling for any shift and continue tracking when an employee clocks in. Workforce.com’s mobile time clock app helps manage employees’ time and administer digital timesheets, payroll, budgeting and labor compliance reporting.

Communications become immediately simpler and faster, allowing them to call in someone for an unexpected absence, approve leave requests, and receive automatic notifications on the go.

5. GPS clock-in

While a time tracking app could be enough for your employees or those who travel between different job sites, you may need pinpoint accuracy to track employee locations. Some time tracker apps include location tracking, providing you with the ability to track enabled devices.

GPS tracking capabilities help everyone stay in the loop regarding an employee’s clock in and clock out when they arrive at their remote work location.

Workforce.com’s GPS clock-in takes your time tracking capabilities global. Timesheets automatically sync GPS locations of all clock-ins and outs. Some industries have varying pay rates depending on the job, location and employee’s position. Clock-in data intuitively assigns pay rates depending on the location, saving time and administrative work computing pay.

The time clock app with GPS also includes geofences. Geofencing creates a radius for a location and then it starts flagging shifts in the timesheet approval system, making it easy to track employee hours and identify shifts where someone has clocked in offsite.

The GPS clock-in app lets everyone clock in from their mobile device and gives managers an edge to track employee hours with the platform’s photo-verified clock-in system.

Tracking employee hours is crucial to your organization’s operations and profitability. It provides key labor cost data, accurate payroll information and a boost in productivity. Regardless of what process you select to track employee hours, use the function that fits your company. But an automated system is scalable to your company’s size and shifting needs and offers the flexibility to stay local or go global.

Payroll is tired of translating messy, handwritten timecards submitted by employees and managers, and a time clock is an impractical choice for your highly mobile workforce. An automated solution to track employee hours keeps you in compliance and builds your business success.

Workforce.com’s time clock app automates how your staff clocks in and out. Ask for a free demo today.

January 31, 2021October 18, 2024

6 best practices for creating a restaurant employee schedule

scheduling software, restaurant employees

The restaurant business runs on a careful balance of the right number of employees doing the right work at the right time.

But the first and most important step — putting together an effective schedule — is anything but simple.

Understaffing means restaurant workers will be busier than necessary and not have as much time for excellent customer service. Meanwhile, overstaffing means restaurant servers make less in tips, and the restaurant itself will overpay on labor costs.

You can avoid both of these wasteful work situations.

With the right processes, workplace culture, and restaurant shift scheduling software, you and your managers can avoid scheduling conflicts and create the most accurate schedule possible. Here are six best practices for creating an effective restaurant employee schedule.

1. Ask candidates about their scheduling preferences and constraints

The restaurant industry has one of the highest turnover rates — 81.9 percent as of 2019. Turnover has many negative downstream effects on a food service business, including an increase in the time and money needed to find, hire, and train new employees.

And your restaurant scheduling process could be contributing to employees’ dissatisfaction. Consider the length of a shift when you schedule hourly employees.

Unless a restaurant employee specifically requests it, scheduling short shifts are a quick route to a disengaged workforce. A shift of four hours or less can have financial consequences. An employee may actually lose money working a short shift thanks to commuting costs and potential additional costs like elder care and/or child care.

Avoid creating schedules with too-short shifts by asking employees for shift feedback. Do they think the restaurant is adequately staffed for rushes? Or are they chronically understaffed at critical points in the day?

Keeping shifts in the 6- to 8-hour range will help employees stay fresh and engaged and give them plenty of time to earn tips.

Be proactive in the interview process and ask your potential hires about their scheduling preferences. Perhaps they prefer evenings since they are in school during the day? Or want to be scheduled on weekends because they enjoy busier shifts? Some will ask you to split up their off days when you build out a schedule while others like consecutive days off.

You may not be able to accommodate every schedule request or preference. But by asking, you can improve employee engagement and reduce turnover in restaurants. You’re showing your team that you care about them as people, not just as employees.

2. Build flexibility into your scheduling

As a manager, your flexibility when building a schedule counts, too. While many on your team are fine with a schedule that varies days and hours, some hourly employees need stability because of other responsibilities that limit when they can work at the restaurant. Honoring those requests will make those employees more loyal, productive, satisfied and less likely to leave.

You also can add more flexibility to your restaurant scheduling with shift swapping capabilities. Shift swapping software is like a scheduling assistant that gives managers the peace of mind that all shifts will be covered. They can rely on employees to find their own work replacements through the scheduling app, provided that the switch is in compliance with labor laws and not threatening the restaurant with unnecessary overtime pay.

3. Provide the schedule as far in advance as possible

Last-minute and unclear schedules can have negative consequences on hourly employees, making it more difficult for them to plan their lives outside their jobs.

Finding child care, holding a second job (which many restaurant workers need to do to afford basic necessities), or taking continuing education classes all become more difficult when shift workers don’t know what their hours will be.

A wave of predictive scheduling laws in the 2010s required that organizations with shift workers provide employees with their schedules up to two weeks in advance, giving employees more stability and flexibility.

This type of law only exists in certain cities and states, but the reality is that any hourly restaurant employee would benefit from predictive scheduling policies.

Look at the calendar; don’t make employees wait until the last day of the month to see the schedule. Be transparent and consistent since staff schedule changes can be disruptive for employees. Building and posting the work schedule ahead of time relieves some of the stress that can accompany a flexible schedule.

One way to start scheduling in advance without the hassle of paperwork is with a schedule spreadsheet.

While this is a good start, the more data you have available, the more options you can access, the more accurately you and your managers can create shift schedules with the right number of employees at work at the right times.

Consider a more comprehensive solution like Workforce.com’s online scheduling software.

The software analyzes operational data about the specific restaurant, outside forces like the time of the year and weather, and even how long it takes employees to complete specific tasks.

So, it can predict how busy your restaurant will be at any given time, thereby helping you and your restaurant managers accurately forecast labor needs.

When you plan well-informed, data-driven schedules, you can plan for optimally-efficient labor costs.

4. Hire the right employees

Some 36 percent of restaurateurs say that hiring, training, and retaining staff are their biggest challenges. Building a restaurant schedule that reflects properly staffing a restaurant goes a long way to easing those challenges.

With over 660,000 restaurants in the United States, pay and the right employee work schedule are big differentiators when people choose a job. Your ability to balance the proper number of employees with their schedule requests will determine their level of job satisfaction and your ability to make payroll.

Fewer employees means your restaurant staff is more likely to feel overworked and burned out. With too many employees, they may not get as many hours as they need in a job. This is especially true for smaller restaurants, which must carefully manage their labor costs.

As Lil Roberts, CEO and founder of fintech company Xendoo, has suggested, you can use behavioral-based questions in the interview process to assess potential candidates.

These behavioral questions shouldn’t be binary, which might yield a yes-or-no answer that isn’t helpful. The question, “Are you organized?” would give a more generic answer versus something like “If I opened your closet, what would I see?” Roberts said. A more organized candidate might end up being a phenomenal host or hostess, she added, while someone with different strengths may be a better server.

If you’ve had many employees who don’t consistently show up to work on time, you and your managers can reconsider the questions you ask candidates. Vet candidates for vital qualities like culture fit and job expectations.

“If you’re a business owner and you’ve got a revolving door [of employees leaving], you need to not say, ‘Oh, the workforce is bad.’ You need to look internally and say, ‘What process can I change?’ ” Roberts said in an August 2020 Workforce.com interview.

Given that restaurant turnover is chronically high, reliable workforce scheduling is a proven way to attract and retain quality employees.

With an overwhelming 95 percent of restaurant owners agreeing that technology improves the efficiency of their establishments, as managers go to hire new employees, having Workforce.com’s scheduling platform is particularly effective for restaurant operations. The simple, paperless onboarding feature sets the right tone for new staff once they are hired.

5. Don’t forget about time off, sick days, and holiday schedules

In spite of your best efforts, you’ll have last-minute changes when scheduling employees. Employees get sick and have personal emergencies.

Be clear with your staff that it’s OK for them to take sick days off of work. Some organizations have cultures where employees feel shamed or discouraged for taking time off to take care of themselves, and that’s a health hazard in a place of business where people are preparing, cooking, serving and eating food.

6. Manage scheduling in real time based on changing conditions

The unexpected does happen occasionally, meaning that restaurant managers must be able to change their employee shifts at a moment’s notice. Managers need a scheduling tool that allows them to react quickly and confidently.

The Workforce.com Live Wage Tracker allows managers to adjust staffing levels in real time. Both overstaffing and understaffing can be dangerous for a restaurant, which generally runs on small profit margins. Any staffing decision that can cut labor costs will help.

With the Live Wage Tracker, making operational decisions on the fly to tweak your restaurant employee schedule is as seamless as possible.

Meanwhile, for those food service businesses with multiple locations, you can get complete oversight of staff numbers in all teams and at all locations. You can see how many employees are currently working and which teams or locations have the largest variance from your shift schedules.

See how to build your restaurant’s employee work schedule with ease and accuracy. Sign up for a free trial of Workforce.com’s restaurant employee scheduling software today.

December 21, 2020November 15, 2022

How leaders can boost employee retention by respecting work-life balance of hourly workers

Employee retention is a continually evolving metric for businesses and HR departments worldwide, set as a central guiding principle for maximizing profitability while simultaneously decreasing the expensive means of employee turnover and new hire training.

You could even argue that employee retention statistics are among the top markers any business could use to project its growth and overall health. So why is employee turnover such a big problem for companies?

Employers don’t always set proper expectations

One of the most common problems employers run into with high employee turnover is the simple fact that they don’t set appropriate expectations for their hourly employees. While many have focused conversations about the expected number of hours worked, uniform policies and job duties, unanswered questions left on the table can be the dividing factor between employees going or staying for the long haul.

Setting the precedent of days worked is a significant factor for many individuals, as most have outside priorities that can tie them down and change their availability. Effective communication is the lifeblood of any organization.

Having conversations about upcoming work events, potential scheduling conflicts, and holiday expectations is a simple way to ensure streamlined problem solving and proactive decision making. While unexpected situations are inevitable, stressors will always exist where systems do not.

Placing greater emphasis on employee expectations and companywide strategies can facilitate greater teamwork and minimize stress for all parties involved.

Build trust to improve productivity

Assumptions can crush employee morale, workplace productivity, and trust. When employers can set clear expectations, they can eliminate many of the common false beliefs created due to starting a new position at a new company. Leaders must be on high alert to ensure this has no place in their new hire’s thought process.

Prioritizing continuous and straightforward conversations with employees will cost you nothing on the front end and save you much more on the back end. Employee feedback is crucial for success, but if leaders and managers aren’t asking for that feedback, they may never get it.

The first step of giving feedback is asking for feedback, as this opens up the door for effective communication and will build trust with your employees. Plus, employees who can provide their input will feel a part of the company’s decision-making process and perceive it as an individual investment in the company’s future.

When leaders don’t ask the questions to get the answers they’re looking for, trouble starts to brew and may not show its ugly head for days, weeks, or even months down the road when an employee begins to act out of the norm.

Flexible leadership

The last piece of the puzzle involves company leadership, as this is a continually evolving role with its fair share of highs and lows. Being a flexible leader is crucial for maintaining integrity and high employee retention outcomes, as it facilitates high-level thinking and empathy towards your employees.

No one could have foreseen the unpredictability and chaos that 2020 has placed us in, so having a flexible approach to scheduling hours may be the deciding factor for workers who have children at home to take care of or another job to get to. Simple things like allowing someone to be flexible with their structured hours to enable them to pick their children up from the babysitter may be the reason why they decide to stay around for the long term.

Hours can always get made up, but personal responsibilities will always weigh heavier than a previously desired set number of hours to work.

Retaining employees versus hiring new ones

As with nearly everything in life, it will always be your responsibility as a leader to implement these strategies. Knowledge is useless without application. Keeping your existing employees happy through consistent communication is the fastest way to company growth and prosperity.

Technology can also be a great way to streamline scheduling changes and unexpected work events, as workforce management applications can make a big difference in eliminating unnecessary costs and time. Implementing these steps will lead you down a prosperous path of success and a fruitful career in leadership.

December 16, 2020

My one work rule to rule them all

Unify those far away workplaces with global mobility tools

George Carlin was a genius.

He just had a way of breaking down language into its most simple parts. Whether it was The 7 Dirty Words or The 10 Commandments, Carlin was just brilliant with language. For example, he dismantled each of the 10 Commandments into just two:

First:

Thou shalt always be honest and faithful, especially to the provider of thy nookie.

And second:

Thou shalt try real hard not to kill anyone, unless, of course, they pray to a different invisible man than the one you pray to.

I thought of this yesterday after stumbling upon a tweetstorm authored by Kate Bischoff reacting to the New York Times article suggesting that Jeffrey Toobin’s long and esteemed career justifies that he should get his job back despite his Zoom full monty faux pas.

After asking, “Is this even open to debate,” I settled on my one work rule to rule them all. Here it is:

Don’t be the asshole!

Don’t believe me?

Don’t cheat or steal = Don’t be the asshole.
Don’t sexually harass = Don’t be the asshole.
Don’t refuse to wear a mask or follow other safety rules = Don’t be the asshole.
Don’t no-call/no-show = Don’t be the asshole.
Don’t fight = Don’t be the asshole.
Don’t be insubordinate = Don’t be the asshole.
Don’t whip it out at work, or a Zoom call = Don’t be the asshole.
Don’t use the n-word = Don’t be the asshole.

If you don’t want to lose your job for something you do or say, don’t be the asshole. Employees, it’s really that simple.

December 14, 2020December 14, 2020

If you’re tired of reading about the Worst Employer voting, you can now hear me talk about it

Marc Alifanz and Kate Bischoff are two of my favorite people. They also happen to host one of my favorite podcasts, Hostile Work Environment. I promise that I’m not just dishing out these high praises because Marc and Kate invited me to guest on this week’s episode to discuss the 10 nominees for this year’s Worst Employer poll.

You can listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you choose to get your podcasts. (And while you’re there do us all a favor and click that subscribe button if you already haven’t.)

This post also serves as your final warning to get in your vote for this year’s nominees. Polls close at 11:59 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 16. Over 1,000 of you have already voted (thank you!), and the margins (at least in the COVID-19 category) are razor-thin. A few votes either way could literally decide this year’s winner. Make sure your voice is heard. No whining about the results if you don’t vote.

Voting is available at this link. Remember that this year’s vote is different than years past in that we have two categories — Worst Employer and Worst Employer COVID-19 Edition. In each category, you rank each of the five nominees from 1 (worst) to 5 (least worst). Ranking all five is important because the relative rankings count in the final tally.

The polls are open until 11:59 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 16, and I’ll announce the winners (err … losers) early next week. Continued bad luck to all of this year’s very worthy nominees.

October 21, 2020June 29, 2023

Progressive Insurance gives interns an entry-level lesson in the new reality of office work

interns, internship, Progressive Insurance, remote work, remote workforce

A well-run internship program often enables college students to gain skills they wouldn’t otherwise attain in a university classroom.

Typically interns draw a new perspective on work while in a structured corporate environment, learning the processes, strategies and plans that lead to organizational and personal success. If properly executed, an internship can provide experience, inspiration and potentially an entry-level job as they embark on their budding career.

Perhaps the most valuable aspect of an internship is building relationships with mentors and executives while observing an organization first-hand from the inside. But since the pandemic took hold, many internship programs have been suspended or even eliminated.

Rather than abolish its internship program, Progressive Insurance Co. gave its interns a dose of corporate reality in a pandemic-stricken global workplace. Rather than intern inside its corporate offices, the insurance giant quickly created a program of remote out-of-office-terns.

Going to a virtual platform

Mayfield, Ohio-based Progressive employs some 40,000 people and like many organizations immediately pivoted to a largely remote workforce in mid-March. Gabe De Leon, Progressive’s program manager for collegiate and MBA recruiting, said that their approximately 100 hourly interns were among those suddenly cast into a remote-work environment.

Also read: Enrich your employee onboarding experience and say goodbye to paperwork

“We needed to spend extra time ensuring our interns felt like they were a part of the Progressive family given these circumstances,” De Leon said.

Time was actually an advantage since the new round of summer interns hadn’t yet come onboard. Executives made the remote work call with interns in mind, De Leon said. “Our interns were thrilled to know that we were going to honor our commitment to their internships,” he said, “albeit, 100 percent virtual.”

Progressive’s summer internships run from May through August to mirror university schedules with roles in data and analytics, IT and accounting business groups, De Leon said. Progressive interns are there to do more than just get someone’s coffee or stuff envelopes, he added.

“Our interns are assigned unique and necessary problem-solving projects that allow them to work closely with company leaders and foster their professional development.”

Learning to use remote technology

Emily Holroyd, who studies actuarial science at Ohio State University, recalled the uncertainty as she transitioned to being a remote student at Ohio State University and simultaneously finding out her summer 2020 internship in Progressive’s claims department would be fully virtual as well.

“Going into the summer it was very clear that my internship was going to be virtual, but I do remember being a little nervous about what this was going to look like,” recalled Holroyd, a data analyst intern. “I was hearing stories left and right from my peers about losing their internships or even just having weeklong programs as a substitute. I knew how important to my career this experience was going to be, so I was relieved to hear that Progressive was going to allow us to partake in the full 12-week program virtually.”

Case study: COVID-19 causes Radial’s 25,000 seasonal hires to practice safe shipping

De Leon said that interns typically get the opportunity to work alongside industry professionals, receive career advice and mentorship, and attend educational, networking and social events. They also incorporated virtual events including a roundtable with Progressive President and CEO Tricia Griffith.

Interns received a working experience as if they were on site, De Leon said. Besides one-to-one mentorships and networking with peers as if they were in an office, they learned the new realities of working during a pandemic.

“Our interns learned new virtual technology to accomplish their job responsibilities,” he said. “Learning how to navigate a large remote conference call is also a valuable skill.”

Remaining in a remote environment

The vast majority of Progressive employees will remain remote until 2021, De Leon said. Still, the internship program’s future is bright. The fact that they bring in qualified candidates through their recruiting process even in the middle of a pandemic is reassuring, he said, adding that they have made some adjustments and created a robust virtual college strategy for the fall recruiting season.

And some interns, like Holroyd, who never set foot inside Progressive’s offices, are offered full-time positions as their internship ends. Holroyd is set to begin a full-time position in the analyst development program beginning in June 2021.

“I quickly learned that I was only going to get out as much as I was willing to put in, and this motivated me to try and talk with as many other analysts as possible,” Holroyd said. “I think the fact that I was able to submerge myself into the Progressive culture, even remotely, speaks volumes about the people that work for this company. This year has thrown a lot of curveballs with school and work, but I hope to look back on 2020 warmly as I remember my internship at Progressive.”

What will Holroyd’s “I remember when …” recollections be decades from now about her pandemic-influenced internship?

“My story will definitely be, ‘I remember when I spent an entire summer working for a Fortune 100 company from the basement of my parents’ house.’ ”

Whether you have a staff of 10 or 10,000, Workforce.com offers the leading scheduling app to optimize staffing levels, forecast wages and manage shifts with ease.