employee engagement – Page 4

September 16, 2020June 29, 2023

305 Fitness works out pandemic woes while pumping up employee health

New York-based 305 Fitness bills itself as “a dance cardio workout with a live DJ. It’s fun, wild, and hard AF.”

As COVID-19 took hold earlier this year, leaders of 305 Fitness faced a workout of their own that was hard AF — and gravely serious. With indoor dance studios featuring black lights, lots of neon and Miami club scene-inspired music, 305 Fitness was forced to close its brick-and-mortar locations in New York, Washington, D.C., and Boston, as well as pop-up studios in Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Revenues immediately plummeted by 90 percent, said 305 Fitness Chief Operating Officer Sam Karshenboym.

There were difficult conversations with landlords regarding rent abatement in the short term. They also made as many cuts as possible to keep the business afloat, Karshenboym said.

“The bulk of the cuts came down to really, really difficult decisions we had to make in HR and staffing,” he said. “We reduced our full-time team from 28 to 10. And we had to furlough all of our 250 part-time employees across six cities. All remaining full-timers on the team took a very significant pay cut.”

Health care for fitness staff

Stories of such drastic cuts sadly are all too frequent in a pandemic-ravaged business world. Like other fitness centers and health clubs nationwide, remaining open to the public as the pandemic set in was not an option. But in a business climate where every dollar counts, 305 Fitness executives opted to retain its health coverage for remaining employees.

Also read: View your schedule at a glance and make changes as needed.

“We wanted to offer access to health care,” Karshenboym said. “It’s one way that we can support our team in a way that made it easy for them and also works for us financially.”

305 Fitness retained its partnership with concierge health provider Eden Health. Concierge health — a subscription-based, membership medicine business model — is one health care alternative that’s become more attractive for smaller companies wanting to provide employees with 24-hour digital care, same-day in-person primary care, and behavioral health services.

The fitness company initially contracted three years ago with Eden Health, which in August announced an infusion of $25 million in Series B funding, bringing its total to $39 million in venture capital raised. Eden Health is known for its direct-to-employer health care delivery model, “bringing in-person and virtual health care together to deliver an exceptional patient experience to the employees of mid-market companies,” according to an August press statement announcing the funding.

Also read: Decentralized scheduling in nursing helps care for health care professionals

“We received a lot of feedback from our team about how grateful they were that they got to use Eden Health during quarantine,” Karshenboym said. The 305 Fitness staff is primarily in their 20s and 30s, he added, and depending on the role, they are paid hourly or per class.

“It’s great during the pandemic for obvious reasons. It’s virtual care in a time when all you can do are virtual things. I worked closely with our director of HR to unveil it some time ago, and it’s been a really great experience.”

Protecting employee safety

Karshenboym said some staff members have used the pop-up clinics, and in October they will provide flu shots to 305 Fitness staff at an Eden Health clinic.

305 Fitness, health — 305 Fitness COO Sam Karshenboym.

“While we weren’t able to offer health insurance for our part-timers, we were excited to offer Eden Health as a great health-related perk,” he said.

As fitness studios nationwide were shut down in March, 305 Fitness faced many unknowns at the time, primarily around asymptomatic carriers potentially spreading COVID-19. There also was the daunting task of transitioning to a virtual working world with a pared down staff.

“The bulk of what we’re doing is still virtual,” he said. “What is in person is our outdoor classes, where we are requiring 6 feet social distancing before and after class; 15 feet during class; and masks before and after class.”

Transparency and supporting the team

To help supplement its revenues 305 Fitness offers digital certification for instructors living outside its studio markets to teach 305 techniques locally. They have certified over 300 people since March who are teaching either virtually or outdoors in their communities, Karshenboym said.

“It’s been a challenging year for all of us, at 305 and outside of 305,” he said. “I know we’re not unique in that way. It’s really just about how we as a company support our team members and our community as best as we can. The free daily workouts offered on YouTube have been a primary way we’ve been able to stay connected to our community on a daily basis. We really try to have them be fun and carefree and high energy and silly and a sort of momentary outlet to de-stress and disconnect from reality.”

Case study: With safety a top priority, Easy Ice slipping past COVID-19 challenges

Despite the cutbacks Karshenboym said they aren’t hiding anything from their staff. Transparency has been key to engaging their employees, he said.

The fitness company hosts free daily morning meditations for employees and its client base, as well as free workshops around self-care, resilience, confidence, and staying productive through Eden Health. Earlier this summer, 305 Fitness offered over $40,000 in creative grants to furloughed staff to support them in their creative pursuits and projects, he said.

“We’ve been offering as much transparency as we can as a leadership team through town halls, regular emails, check-ins, whatever we can do to offer the team more information into what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, how we plan to get through the pandemic and survive this,” he said. “There’s so much unknown in the world, and if we can make things known, at least within the world of 305, that makes it a little bit easier for our team to navigate this time.”

See wage costs in real-time and adjust staffing levels and assignments to drive profitability with Workforce.com’s Live Wage Tracker.

September 10, 2020June 29, 2023

PFS dials up a rapid work from home solution for its call center staff

Call centers typically are staffed by dozens, if not hundreds of employees during any given shift.

Most employees sit at workstations in relatively tight quarters in large, open rooms as they assist customers tracking an order or seeking to initiate a return. Such work environments, however, had to undergo an immediate makeover in March as the COVID-19 pandemic set in. By June, a remarkable 42 percent of the U.S. labor force was working from home full time, according to Stanford University research.

Dallas-based PFS, a global ecommerce call center provider for high-profile consumer brands including Yves Saint Laurent, L’Oreal and Asics running shoes, was well aware of the pivot it needed to make. Immediate, wholesale changes in where and how its call center employees worked was imperative given safety and social distancing regulations.

With an accelerated shift to online shopping, it was crucial for PFS employees to provide uninterrupted service to customers as company executives sought solutions to keep its employees healthy and productive, said Dawn Brewster, vice president of PFS global customer care.

Some employers had difficulty implementing a productive work-from-home model. Companies with large hourly employee bases faced time and attendance concerns as well as legal hurdles. But PFS, whose hourly workers account for about 90 percent of its employee base across its four contact centers, was ahead of the curve, Brewster said.

Also read: Shift scheduling strategies can be improved through technology

“Creating a work-from-home model in such short notice amid a pandemic was a challenge at first,” Brewster said. “We needed to prioritize our employees’ safety and ensure our clients received the same level of customer experience, regardless of where agents were operating from.”

PFS quickly built a model that helped employees emotionally and physically, Brewster said, adding that they conceived and implemented a work-from-home plan in just two weeks.

“The urgency to shift our call centers remotely without any lag in output for our clients was a challenge that our team was able to rise above,” she said. “We designed a solution that translated our typical processes and technology to a remote solution, ensuring that any operational shifts were designed with the employee in mind first.”

Case study: Safety as a top priority helps Easy Ice slip past COVID-19 challenges

PFS employees remain 100 percent remote through the company’s work-from-home model, which allows employees to avoid the complications COVID-19 presents for normal in-office experiences, Brewster said.

“We have made our employees’ mental and physical health our top priority,” she said. “Through Communities in Microsoft Teams, employees can interact with other employees to ask questions or share best practices for how to respond to various customer requests, much like they would on-site at the contact center. We have done everything possible to simulate an on-site environment to support our agents through this difficult time.”

PFS continues to operate multiple shifts through its work-from-home model, Brewster said. Employees clock in remotely using various time-and-attendance platforms, she added.

“Multiple shifts are standard practice for us,” she said. “We typically have six to seven shifts running between 7 a.m. to 11 p.m., depending on client’s requirements. We can support as many shifts required, up to and including 24/7 support.”

To date PFS has not reopened its centers. Yet PFS executives have been pleasantly surprised at the results of implementing a work-from-home policy, said Brewster, who has been at the forefront of making sure PFS’ remote work model was a success.

Also read: Workforce tracking solutions do not always track with company culture

What began as a response to an immediate need to prioritize employee safety actually resulted in improved contact center metrics, she said. Employees are happy to be working from home and it shows. Quality assurance review rates have improved as supervisors and managers maintain employee engagement through increased team and individual meetings, she said.

“PFS has seen a drop in attendance issues and we’re experiencing lower attrition rates across clients,” Brewster said. “We helped our employees transition to working from home, giving them all of the necessary tools to be successful. This has led to an overwhelmingly positive response from both clients and employees. We have increased our quality-assurance review rates, and supervisors and managers are maintaining employee engagement through increased team and individual meetings.”

Given the immediacy of such a drastic shift in its workforce, PFS executives adhered to patience and adaptability to shift employees to remote work environments. Brewster suggests other organizations should consider breaking up shifts to offer flexible scheduling, adopting new technologies and increasing communications and training with its employees.

“Embracing these shifts offers an immense upside for organizations,” she said. “We’ve seen increased performance and happier employees since the shift to work from home. Additionally, we have been able to expand our recruiting capabilities now that we are no longer tied to a physical location.”

Do time logs right and let everything follow by integrating it with other vital parts of managing your staff. From ensuring the right person clocks in for the shift to paying staff correctly, it all starts with the Workforce.com Time Clock App.

September 7, 2020June 29, 2023

How to cultivate innovation in the workforce

Innovation is key to an organization’s success, but what is it really? Workforce.com recently caught up with Victor Assad, managing partner of InnovationOne, LLC and author of “Hack Recruiting: The Best of Empirical Research, Method and Process and Digitization,” to discuss how companies can foster innovation and see actual results from doing so.

DEFINING INNOVATION IN THE WORKFORCE

Workforce: We always hear that innovation is key to success in an organization. But what does it really mean?

Victor Assad: It means that an organization is churning out innovations that drive financial value in products, services, or new business models for its customers in a manner where it leads its peers. Typically, for companies to do that, they have to know what their customers need, and secondly, they need to have great cultures of innovation that are very transparent and very agile.

WF: How can companies start innovating and see actual returns or impact from these activities?

Assad: Organizations need to first think through where they need to innovate. What is their desired end state, and how quickly do they need to get there? Is it new products? Is it new services? Is it a new business model? Is it digitizing their processes to move more quickly? Or a combination thereof?

To get that vision, they need to reach an agreement among the executive staff and articulate it to their workforce and external partners. It’s important to articulate it so often and so fervently that executives feel nauseated by talking about it. And when you’re nauseated talking about it, then they have made a good first step.

The next thing is to share data on new technologies, social-economic trends, and marketing trends with the workforce and external partners, who can also be customers. Invite employees and partners to get involved. Executives have to make sure that their middle management is on board with this and that they will be leaders who will entertain questioning and allow people to collaborate, go off on their own, come up with something and experiment. They need to have a well-known process to move ideas forward. Everyone has to know that process, and it has to be credible. Meaning, everybody that makes a suggestion is going to get a response. It might be yes, It might be no and here’s why.

Finally, organizations have to overcome what I like to call, the graveyard of innovation. And that is to get your organization’s attention to commercialize your innovation. Different functions like marketing, sales, manufacturing, service centers, and quality assurance are all focused on making the numbers for this quarter. You have to work very hard to get their attention to produce this new innovative product and develop a market for it.. That’s very different from what all those functions do for a mature, profitable product.

WF: Innovation takes time and resources. What return or value can organizations gain with innovation activities?

Assad: At Innovation One, we have an index that measures innovation. And organizations that score on the top quartile have 22 percent higher financial measures like profit.

In addition, they attract the best talent. They lead in the market. And when they keep these cultures going, they have all sorts of significant financial returns and other good things that happen to them.

TECHNOLOGY AND INNOVATION

WF: Are there certain types of technology that can help with innovation?

Assad: Every company these days needs to be a digital company. Helpful technologies include big data analysis, (true) artificial intelligence, digital project management software, and chatbots to accelerate communications. Coronavirus, the digital era, our politics have exposed every organization’s weak points. And the first ones to figure out the new normal are going to be the winners as we re-emerge.

Remote work and the pandemic uncovered that there’s a false narrative about innovation — which is you have to work together, face to face, to be innovative and collaborative. While there are advantages to that, you can also do it digitally. There are tools for whiteboarding, internal crowdsourcing, and project management. I’ve been to virtual meetings where you have 60 people, and you can all go into digital breakrooms and come back as if you’ve had a day at a conference.

According to a study from McKinsey, companies that lead in adapting these digitization tools, not just in R&D, but in sales, marketing, supply chain and across the HR platform — the early movers get the best returns.

WF: How can organizations find the right type of technology to invest in?

Assad: Artificial intelligence and digital technology are tools, not a strategy. What’s important for the chief people officer and the executive team is to determine what’s important for talent strategy in the workforce. Do you want to get rid of all the paperwork and have more digital streams of information? Terrific. Prioritize that.

The advice that I would give is to only buy digital tools that are 80 percent out of the box. Don’t buy something that they say would be under development and given to you in three months by the time they will launch it for you. Buy 80 percent out of the box and go in there knowing the criteria for your needs, whether it be to improve your recruiting, talent management, driving out bias, or improving diversity and inclusion.

Companies need to be very good at using an approach to involve the workers to put in place new technology. Digitization efforts may fail, and technology may not be used broadly when there’s a lack of worker involvement and collaborative culture.

INNOVATION IN HIRING TO RETENTION

WF: Is there a connection with HR or workforce management tools and how innovative an organization is?

Assad: Yes, there is. HR has the same tools that have been available to different functions like sales and marketing and R&D. It’s time HR use those same tools to build an employee brand for new employees and current employees. These tools are data analysis, artificial intelligence and chatbots.

Technology now can help in finding, tracking, and screening the best talent without bias.

So what’s the leading cause of bias in the hiring process? The human being. So human beings have an incredible amount of unconscious bias that is there to protect us. It may be something we experienced. It may be something that we have been taught as children or culturally taught.

But research shows that we make decisions in five minutes about somebody, and we spend the rest of the interview trying to verify that decision we made. And you need to break that. A great way to break that is through a structured interview where you’re going to see if somebody has the competencies you need on the job. You need to be trained to interview this way.

Another way is to use artificial intelligence before the interview. There are tools that go on the internet, and they take the competencies that you need and find those who exhibited those competencies by where they worked or what they put on their online resume. This is very different technology than a LinkedIn or an Indeed search.

The artificial intelligence technology ranks results from top to bottom candidates. It gives you the ranking, but you don’t see a job candidate picture. You don’t see a name until you’ve picked a group of candidates based on the competency and experience matching. And then, you can unblind it, learn more about the job candidates, and reach out to them.

It’s not going to protect unconscious bias in the interview. Hopefully, structured interviews will. It’s also actually fantastic for matching people who are already in your applicant tracking system but haven’t applied for a job opening. It can find that talent in an instant where a recruiter would be hunting for many hours inside their applicant tracking system.

Another area where technology can help is by quickly providing information to staff. Most HR (and IT) organizations get the same 20 questions regardless of the company. A chatbot can answer these common questions, like when does open enrollment begin? How do I get into a VPN when I have lost my code? Where do I get information about onboarding? Chatbots or intelligent digital assistants curate these data and enable employees to find answers quickly in Teams or Slack, allowing HR staff to focus on other matters.

These technologies can foster innovation from the get-go by helping find the right talent. While others equip them to have easy access to information, allowing them more time to focus on activities for innovation.

FOSTERING A CULTURE OF INNOVATION

WF: Culture is an essential element in innovation. Why is it necessary, and how can companies foster that?

Assad: Without innovation companies will fall behind the competition in our fast changing, digital world. Protecting the status quo is a sure bet for failure. The empirical evidence shows that companies seldom become innovative from one great idea or technology. It takes a culture of innovation. Innovation requires an evolution of ideas that are continually developed by their workforces and external partners, aligned to common goals. Executives foster this by continually articulating their strategies for innovation, deploying innovation goals, sharing competitive information, promoting real time learning, inviting employees to suggest ideas and collaborate, and providing an easy and well known process to advance ideas, prototype, collect data, and make decisions rapidly.

A lot of organizations these days have only a compliance culture. Do what I tell you to do and don’t ask questions. Companies employ this to assure goal attainment, quality and reliability because nobody wants a pacemaker that won’t work. No one wants to fly on a jet where the engine is going to conk out. We need to have good reliability.

Companies can have both predictable quarterly results and innovation. It is a matter of focus. HR has a big role in this culture change by realigning the goal setting and performance management systems to motivate and reward innovation and quarterly goal achievement. When executives prioritize excellence for this quarter’s goals and their best innovation projects, great business outcomes are achieved.

August 26, 2020August 27, 2020

Incentive plan gives EMTs a new reason to ride with Ambulnz

A career as an emergency medical technician can be a demanding grind.

While there are clear rewards in such a compassionate, public-facing job, an EMT typically works long shifts, juggles hectic schedules and gets mediocre pay. Median compensation for EMTs and paramedics was $17.02 in 2019, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

A 2018 survey from the American Ambulance Association found that poor pay leads to high turnover among those working in the emergency medical services industry, which sees an annual turnover rate of 25 percent among full-time EMTs.

Facing turnover and retention concerns like much of the rest of the EMS industry, executives at Ambulnz sought solutions to retain its EMTs. The New York-based non-emergency, on-demand ambulance service sought to improve medical transportation through innovative technology, a higher level of care and better compensation for EMTs.

Retaining employees through incentives

In order to get the most qualified first responders, Ambulnz designed a novel benefit for its 1,200 hourly employees. The Equity Incentive Plan was created to encourage, recognize and reward exceptional performance for its employees, said Ambulnz President Anthony Capone.

Also read: Automate how your staff clocks in and out while cutting hours of admin work each week.

“We have been speaking about creating the Equity Incentive Plan for a couple of years and fully put it into effect for 2019,” Capone said. “It’s a path to entrepreneurship and the ability to build meaningful careers in the ambulance service.”

Capone pointed out that Ambulnz, which operates in eight states including New York, New Jersey, California, Texas and Illinois as well as the United Kingdom, distinguishes itself from the typical on-demand company such as Uber and Lyft through its business model.

“On-demand ride share companies have a business-to-consumer model, provide point-to-point transportation as an alternative to a taxi service and use independent contractors to provide their service,” Capone said.

“Ambulnz has a business-to-business model, provides medical transportation and we own our fleet of ambulance vehicles and employ full-time EMTs and paramedics.”

Ambulnz offers different levels of services ranging from a wheelchair-bound patient transport to a critical care transport, he said. When a patient needs to be moved to a new facility for treatment out of a hospital, outpatient treatment clinic, doctor, dialysis or chemo center, a pickup can be scheduled through the Ambulnz app, Capone added.

Case Study: Hoffer Plastics’ ‘family first’ philosophy puts people over profits

The vast majority of Ambulnz’s 1,300 employees are W-2, and only full-time employees are eligible for the incentive plan, he said. It differs from a startup’s typical equity compensation plan, he added.

“Usually startup companies provide equity compensation to new hires to entice them to bet on a relatively unknown company,” he said. “We are an established, growing company with over 1,000 employees. While it is not uncommon for tech startups to offer equity compensation for employees, Ambulnz is the only company in the medical transportation industry that offers this benefit to frontline employees.”

The incentive program was created to reward employees for their exceptional performance, he said. With that in mind, they decided to provide 2,000 equity units for each 500 trips eligible employees take in the previous year.

“This is based on volume, but performance is taken into account when employees become eligible for the program,” Capone said.

Besides the incentive plan, Ambulnz offers a base salary, medical benefits, bonuses and an optional “model program” for EMTs that offers them the ability to earn more than the national average for their profession, Capone said.

“EMTs who enroll are paid in part based on the number of calls they respond to,” he said. “In addition, EMTs are encouraged to stop by different outpatient centers, such as nursing homes, to introduce themselves, explain Ambulnz, and drop off a business card.”

Capone said the incentive program helps employees feel like they are part of the Ambulnz team and inspires them to do their best. They officially launched the program by issuing awards for employees 2019 trips, so there aren’t metrics to share yet, he said.

“The announcement has certainly energized our workforce, and numerous employees are inquiring about their 2020 trip counts to see how they’re tracking for this year,” Capone said. “Since its rollout, the plan has been a successful way to attract, retain and motivate our employees.”

There’s no need to wait until it’s too late to adjust the flow of work. You can see wage costs in real time and adjust staffing levels and assignments to maximize profitability with Workforce.com’s Live Wage Tracker.

August 24, 2020July 24, 2024

Coronavirus update: Back to school

Today is my kids’ first day of school. Not virtual school. Not distanced learning. Not a hybrid model. In-person school. I just returned home from dropping them off for their respective first day of high school and middle school.

We are blessed to have the resources to send our kids to small, independent private school that is uniquely positioned to open for full-time in person learning in the midst of a pandemic. With approximately 400 students in the entire school across grades K-12, class sizes are already naturally small. With a 93-acre campus, many classes will be held outside. With no cafeteria, lunch time is greatly simplified. It’s the perfect school to educate in-person while we live with COVID-19. And it has a great plan to keep my kids, the rest of the students, and its faculty and staff as healthy and safe as reasonably possible.

But this will be a different school year. Everyone will be masked. There will be no interscholastic sports. Certain classes have to be modified. For example, my daughter was accepted into its School of Fine Arts as musical theater major, yet there won’t be any group singing for the foreseeable future. And for the school year, my wife and I will be the bus (something made easier by the fact that we are both working from home, as the school is 25 minutes from home in the opposite direction of both of our workplaces).

Which brings me to the point for today’s post. This school year will require all employers to be flexible, understanding, and empathetic. Gone are the days when parents will be able to send kids who wake up with a cough to school. Employees will have children at home with them, who will need varying degrees of support and hand holding through the work/school day. Employees will serve as transportation to and from school. Employees will have to drop everything when the school calls to let them know that a child is ill, or when a sick child is at home or, worse, hospitalized. Many schools that are open close during the school year.

Those employers who provide nimbleness and compassion will have an engaged and thankful workforce. Those who only offer rigidity and animosity will foster resentment and lose employees. I know which type of employer I want to be and for which I’d want to work. Be that employer.

As for me, I hope this is the only first-day-of-school when my kids’ smiling faces are hidden behind COVID masks.

Finally, today I was going to write a treatise of the legal issues back-to-school raise in a COVID world, but my friend Jeff Nowak beat me to it at his FMLA Insights blog. I cannot more highly recommend his thoroughly excellent post on this topic.

August 23, 2020November 7, 2022

Growing Workforce Success with Palumbo Foods

Workforce.com sat down to talk growth with local champignons, the owners and staff of Palumbo Foods in Avondale, Pennsylvania.

Founder Tony Palumbo, having grown up in the mushroom industry, invested in his own company in 2008. A decade later, Palumbo is joined by several members of his family in overseeing more than 40 staff members. They sell over 350,000 pounds of mushrooms each week. Together, they supply mushrooms and seasonal produce to customers not just in Pennsylvania, but also in Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, Ohio, Virginia, Georgia, and Texas.

Vice President Shawn Palumbo is Tony’s son and talks about running this successful food business and their partnership with workforce.com

Talented people behind a family business

“We have a lot of talented people on the staff who really go above and beyond,” Palumbo said. “And that goes from our office team to our dock employees who are building orders day and night to our over the road truck drivers. We have a lot of dedicated people and that’s really what makes it work.”

Besides providing fresh, locally grown produce, the Palumbo Foods team also emphasizes customer service. Indeed, the family business has thrived through the tight-knit relationship of the staff, not just with each other, but also with their customers. Shawn Palumbo said, “A bunch of loyal customers believed in what Tony was looking to do and stuck with us to help us get started. Years later, most of those customers still work with us.” Today, from locally grown mushrooms, they’ve branched out into seasonal produce like garlic, ginger, peppers, onions, cucumbers and microgreens.

Data-led improvements that matter

Time is of the essence, especially in the food business. That’s where Shawn Palumbo’s team encountered their biggest challenge. They thought they could make headway by keeping most of their staff in the first shift. “We always only operated with a first shift team, but we realized we were overloading them. There just was too much work for anyone to get done,” he said. Enter the Workforce.com platform, a workforce management software with tracking and reporting capabilities.

“The biggest key is visibility. Workforce.com gave us visibility to see where our hours were being spent and where we could place them,” he said.

From just having a first shift and seeing what needed to be done during the day, using the Workforce.com platform allowed Palumbo Foods to see that they actually needed a third shift. “Looking at the numbers and seeing the physical data on paper and on the computer allowed us to make a decision that we wouldn’t have been able to make without the platform so to speak,” he said. The team in charge of carrying out improvements relied on the Workforce.com platform to make the decision to add a third shift.

The results were astounding.

“They’re coming in at night getting a third of the work done, so the team during the morning shift does not have as much pressure to get everything completed,” Shawn Palumbo said. The simple change decreased production errors and increased employee morale. “They’re less stressed and they’re more efficient. The quality has gone up to our customers as well. We’ve seen our returns decreased,” he said. The addition of the third shift even allowed their trucks to leave earlier, which assists in completing their deliveries within service rule hours.

Also read: Labor analytics: A how-to guide for company leadership

Team visibility despite the miles

“When I was younger, I worked at places and you grabbed the card, you put it in the machine, you put it back. What visibility does that give anybody?” Shawn Palumbo said, recalling the punch clocks that most businesses used decades ago, and which some still use today. For him, Workforce.com’s Time Clock App increased visibility and engagement with their teams who are working 2,000 miles away. “As management is in Pennsylvania, we have cameras at our Texas facility, but no one is sitting here watching the cameras all day. With Workforce.com, we can see what time they’re punching in, and coming and going,” he said.

For Palumbo Foods, the increased visibility has allowed them to operate better. It linked them to a critical part of their operation without actually being there. “We could remotely monitor and verify the hours being worked and make the appropriate decisions based on that data,” he said,” It has also increased trust among team members. Before switching to Workforce.com, employee attendance caused some friction. “The staff is now operating 24/7 so staff can come and go, and sometimes it was not being noticed. It was causing issues between team members as some were showing up later and leaving earlier than others,” he said. Now, they can look at the timesheets and resolve these conflicts easily.

Growing with workforce technology

In 2017, Palumbo Foods opened a facility in San Antonio, Texas, with seven employees. They also service Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Georgia and Florida. The business is still slated for more growth and success, and Workforce.com is with them as they continue to optimize and improve their operations. “Knowing that, at any time, we can look at these reports, from anywhere has been a big, big help for us,” Shawn Palumbo said.

Pennsylvania continues to lead the mushroom production industry in the United States. Contributing to this boom is Palumbo Foods, a company that continues to flourish through its talented staff and loyal customers. “It kind of really grew this into something that no one ever expected it could be,” he said.

And with their investment in workforce technology that lets them track employees and operations accurately, they’re all set to keep providing quality produce to more customers in the years to come.

August 12, 2020August 12, 2020

Elevator anxiety may be a rising concern among workers returning to the office

Has COVID-19 caused you to have elevator anxiety, as in a fear of being inside of a 7′ x 5′ box with other people? According to a not-quite scientific Twitter poll with over 4,000 responses, more than six in 10 workers will not use an elevator to get to their office.

These results beg the question, are elevators safe despite our apparent (and in my mind perceived justified) reluctance to use them

Believe it or not, the answer is that despite their small size and cramped quarters, given what we currently know about COVID-19 and its transmission, elevators should be safe in most instances.

According to Axios, most elevators are well ventilated, and we’re not inside of them long enough to worry about viral exposure.

Still, if you want employees to feel safe and comfortable riding in an elevator to travel to and from work, you should (or your landlord should) implement some basic coronavirus protocols:

Limit capacity based on the size of the elevator car.
Mark designated and distanced standing spaces on the floor.
Require masks or facial coverings inside the elevator car.
Encourage standing with one’s face to the walls and not the door (or the other passengers).
Discourage speaking.
Install hand sanitizer dispensers outside and inside elevator cars, make sure they stay filled, and encourage their use before pressing buttons.
Stagger shift, break, and lunch times to avoid long elevator queues or crowded cars.

My current office (i.e., home) lacks an elevator. But, if I had to go back to my office office, I’m “Team Stairs” all the way until the pandemic ends.

August 7, 2020August 4, 2020

Time is money, but not all time is created equal

time clock, workforce management, scheduling, time and attendance

We’ve all heard the saying time is money, but as many employers and HR directors have witnessed, an employee’s time can be used in vastly different ways.

One hour of work for employee A could equate to three hours of work for employee B for the same project, even when employee A turns out better quality work in less time.

As roughly 51 percent of employees report being disengaged or actively disengaged at work, workforce absenteeism is costing U.S. companies around $550 billion a year in lost revenue.

In the 21st century, we live in a world full of distractions, stressors and vastly changing technology that has never existed before, placing our 40,000-year-old brain into new and unforeseen territory. Are we surprised that employee engagement has decreased as a result of this change?

The standard eight-hour workday resulted from Henry Ford’s efforts to attract better workers to his Ford Motor Co., eventually paving the way for unions to demand changes in how business was conducted during the Industrial Revolution. While the eight-hour day has been the set standard over the last century, the workplace has vastly changed since those times.

Is it possible for an employee to put in an eight-hour workday by working fewer hours with greater prioritization of time and focused effort?

After looking at the data, all signs point to a resounding yes.

According to McKinsey and Co., the average business professional spends 28 percent of their workday checking e-mail and answering messages, which can amount to nearly 2.6 hours per day, and roughly 120 messages exchanged between correspondents. Since email is the lifeblood of communication between businesses and their customers, these statistics may seem difficult to change, but they aren’t.

The average employee checks their email 15 times a day, which is alarming, considering it takes an estimated 23 minutes and 15 seconds to reach the appropriate level of resumed concentration to return to the previous state of work. Taking these statistics into consideration, it makes sense why some people struggle to put in an eight- to 10-hour day with few results to show.

Even more alarming is the fact that the average amount of time someone spends on a given task without being interrupted is about 3 minutes and 5 seconds, which decreases to 2 minutes and 11 seconds when using an electronic device such as a computer or phone. Interruptions are bound to happen at work, especially for those stuck in a managerial position, yet 44 percent of the interruptions that occur throughout the day are self-induced.

In the 2020 workplace, we must minimize distractions to maximize our time and overall productivity. And what if we don’t need a 40-hour workweek to achieve maximal results?

In 2019, Microsoft Japan implemented a four-day workweek “Work-Life Choice Challenge” to test a new model of workplace efficiency, which showed some very promising preliminary findings. Their data showed a 40 percent increase in workers’ productivity, with a 23 percent drop in electricity costs and a 60 percent drop in the amount of paper being printed, all while providing a three-day weekend.

Although these outcomes are still in the early stages of adoption, they show promising results and further support the notion that time is relative to the focused efforts placed onto it. And as Parkinson’s Law states, work expands to fill the time allotted.

Limiting the amount of time spent on a project may have the potential to increase performance and productivity vastly, pending that the work performed isn’t truly constricted based on time (i.e., baking goods, laboratory testing, etc.).

These factors are vitally important because they all support many underlying principles held in cognitive neuropsychology and behavioral economics. The recurring trait that all of these statistics hold in common is that they all deal with people.

In order to truly maximize our business outcomes, we must help our employees maximize their brainpower and subsequent use of time. Working smarter doesn’t mean we have to work harder. We merely need to utilize the power of time management to minimize distractions and help our employees optimize their brain to maximize their results.

August 4, 2020June 29, 2023

Knock out the practice of buddy punching for good

Clocking in for a colleague may come as a wink and a nod between coworkers. But the practice of buddy punching is time theft, plain and simple, and it can land a gut punch to managers trying to ring in their scheduling problems and labor costs.

However, advances in workforce management technology and mobile solutions are pulling no punches against those clocking in for a colleague who is running late or worse, randomly decides to take an unauthorized day off.

What constitutes time theft

It may start innocently enough. The train is stuck. The babysitter arrived late. But without a manager’s approval, time theft is easily defined.

Employees start shifts late.
An employee leaves shifts early.
They take breaks that are longer than scheduled.
They work overtime that wasn’t authorized
An employee engages in personal or non-work-related activities while on the job.

And then there is buddy punching.

The financial sting of buddy punching

Time theft puts an alarming drain on an organization’s finances. One 2018 estimate pegs the cost of buddy punching at over $370 million in payroll costs annually, and according to research by the American Payroll Association, buddy punching affects about 75 percent of U.S. small businesses.

Also read: Make managers more successful with the tools to retain and engage their employees

Additionally, businesses lose 5 percent of their annual revenue to employee fraud, and buddy punching is fraud. Businesses with fewer than 150 employees are more likely to take it on the chin due to employee fraud schemes like time theft.

What leads to buddy punching

Some employees simply will take advantage of a situation when they know they can. A lack of adequate technology with proper checks and balances often sets the path to one worker punching in for another. Even implementing a system with RFID cards or passwords can be manipulated.

Lacking proper technology, multiple employees can utilize passwords and credentials to punch in for one another if the system does not detect who uses the password, and employers have a difficult time proving time theft.

Employers also naively foot some of the blame. They can develop a false sense of security since they may have hired and gotten to know the people working for them. And, because they know them, they are confident that none are bad people who would steal from them. Adequate workforce management software creates a more objective, unbiased approach to the time and attendance process.

Counterpunching time theft

There are solutions to sparring with buddy punching. By automating how staff members clock in and out with mobile solutions, not only can time theft be curbed but hours of needless administrative tasks be cut back.

Record when your employees punch in and out with Workforce.com’s time clock. From ensuring the right person clocks in for the shift to paying staff correctly, it starts with the mobile time clock app.

Such a solution assures that the right person clocks in for the right shift through electronic photo verification and unique passcodes. These, along with payroll add-ons, also let employers do away with lengthy steps in computing payroll.

Going mobile

Mobile time and attendance solutions also help manage employees remotely without having to question time and attendance records. Such automated solutions also build trust. By not relying on pen and paper bookkeeping, employees gain the confidence to know they won’t have to follow up or scrutinize recordkeeping to make sure they are being paid fairly for their work.

Why pay for hours that weren’t worked? Make the practice of buddy punching tap out and fight the scourge of time theft with Workforce.com’s time clock app.

August 3, 2020September 8, 2022

Retail workforce management practices that make employees stay longer

Retail workforce management can be difficult for managers in a high turnover industry. Keeping hourly employees interested and engaged in the job can be an ongoing struggle.

But retaining hourly retail employees a little longer can make all the difference in the success of a retailer. And certain workforce management practices can go a long way in making these meaningful improvements.

Also read: Give managers the time they need to sharpen up their all-around skills

Realize the customer isn’t always right, and act on that

Customer-facing jobs, especially retail, are difficult for employees when they’re expected to act like the customer is always right, said Robert Teachout, legal editor at HR compliance resource XpertHR. What can make a difference here is how managers act. One of the cardinal rules of management is, “Always have your employee’s back,” he added.

The key is to forget everything you ever heard about “The customer is always right,” he said. Customers can be stressed, wrong, rude or, at worst, inappropriate and abusive, and employees appreciate when their manager stands up for them.

“Managers need to step up — and in some cases are legally required to step up — if someone is being abusive to an employee. Like if the employee is a minority or LGBTQ and they’re being harassed, that is harassment and discrimination. it is illegal and the employer has a liability if they don’t stop it,” Teachout said.

“The customer is entitled to the best service you can provide within the policies and practices of your establishment. They’re not entitled to yell at your clerks, not entitled to abuse a coupon program [and] not entitled to throw stuff on the floor and make a scene,” he said. “When that happens, take the employee out [of the situation] and you step in.”

This is also where higher level management needs to have their back, he said. Managers feel safer standing up for the people they supervise when their own bosses are going to support their decision and protect them.

Make even the smallest change in turnover rates

The retail industry sees a 60.5 percent turnover rate, but it doesn’t need to stay that high. Even a small improvement in turnover will produce large dividends for a store and much larger competitive benefits compared to other retailers, Teachout said.

The reality in retail is that these hourly positions are many people’s first jobs, and the expectation shouldn’t be that these employees will stay around forever. But that doesn’t mean managers can mistreat them and act like they don’t want these workers to stay longer, Teachout said.

With seasonal positions, this can be especially helpful. “If you know you have 10 spots to fill every year, would you rather have to hire 10 different people or know that you’ve got two or three people that like working with you, want to come back and have already been trained? That right there is a huge advantage,” Teachout said.

Hourly retail jobs often have low pay, little opportunity for advancement and few if any benefits, and stocking shelves isn’t a personally fulfilling job for many people, he said. But if a manager knows this and considers how they can make the workplace a better place for employees, they may see better engagement and therefore better retention.

Also read: Knock out the practice of buddy punching for good

Fostering employee engagement in retail workforce management

Employees are more engaged when they can take ownership of their work, Teachout said. Managers can help here by allowing employees to do tasks that use their strengths. For example, an organized employee may excel in tasks like restocking shelves, and an extroverted employee may excel working at the customer service desk.

Similarly, hourly workers are more engaged when they feel supported by their coworkers and feel a sense of teamwork. From the moment a manager onboards a new hire, they should introduce and emphasize the concept that “you’re part of a team,” Teachout said. They can explain tardiness or absenteeism policies not in a way that focuses on business impact but in a way that focuses on the impact it has on coworkers.

He also said that managers can help employee engagement by building individual connections with employees. This doesn’t mean they have to form a friendship, but they should know each employee’s goals, priorities and strengths. This could be a part of a formal, scheduled review, but even more important is the casual conversations, Teachout said. Questions could be as simple as “How’s school going?”

Create consistent schedules

Inconsistent schedules are one of the major complaints of retail workers, and more stability in this area helps people balance the rest of their life and responsibilities while still getting enough hours, Teachout said. One of the main reasons recent predictive scheduling laws were passed was to reduce the impact of last-minute scheduling changes, he added.

Managers should make sure they’re being fair while scheduling their retail employees, he said. Make sure everyone has the same opportunities to work the best shifts and the same obligations to work the less desirable shifts or do the less desirable tasks. This ultimately comes down to respect, Teachout said. Employees will feel more respected if they’re treated the same as their coworkers.

Also read: Make managers more successful with the tools to retain and engage their employees

While retail workforce management practices like this may not stop or slow all turnover, they can help create meaningful business outcomes.

“Even keeping someone working another two or three months longer than they would have typically, and at that point they’re already trained, that’s all gravy,” Teachout said. “Even making a small improvement in your turnover rate will provide a bottom line benefit.”