The Department of Labor’s breakup with liquidated damages in wage and hour investigations lasted only four years.
Late last week, the agency announced that it would again seek liquidated damages (an amount equal to the unpaid wages themselves) in investigations, undoing a policy change made by the Trump administration.
According to the DOL, it will “return to pursuing liquidated damages from employers … in its pre-litigation investigations provided that the Regional Solicitor of Labor or their designee concurs with the liquidated damages request. … Liquidated damages shall not be assessed by WHD where the employer has set forth credible evidence of a good faith defense or the where the RSOL deems the matter inappropriate for litigation.”
What does this mean for your business? You have twice the financial stake in getting your wage and hour house in order as soon as possible.
If the DOL investigates, you should expect to pay double what you would have in the past four years. Your $X in unpaid wages will take $X*2 to settle with the DOL.
If your only defense to these liquidated damages is “credible evidence of good faith,” you better take steps to create that good faith now, such as by having your employment lawyer sign off on how you classify and pay your employees.
I haven’t taken a proper vacation in 25 months. We were supposed to go to Portugal last March, but then COVID-19 happened. In the 13 months since, there’s been little point in taking off from work for any length of time because I haven’t been able to go anywhere. “I can’t go anywhere, so I might as well work,” has been a popular pandemic refrain (me included).
Americans were bad at vacations before COVID. The pandemic certainly hasn’t helped our PTO hesitancy.
Americans are good at lots of different things, but going on vacation is not one of them.… Guess which industrialized country is the only one that doesn’t guarantee time off to its workers? Guess which country left 768 million vacation days on the table in 2018?
The pandemic has not been great for America’s vacation malaise. When there are few new places to go and few new things to do, what’s the point of asking for time off? Yes, many Americans who have made it through without losing their jobs have taken a break to discover nature or their apartment balconies, but largely, we do not seem to be PTO-ing our way through this god-awful year. In February, time-off requests on the HR platform Zenefits were down 26 percent from the year before, a spokesperson told me, in line with what the company has seen since July.
I’m ending my vacation moratorium this summer with a week in a cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains. I suggest that you strongly encourage your employees to do the same, lest you risk the burnout I warned about last week.
1. Teach your employees the benefits of taking a vacation. Make it a part of your wellness education. Communicate the health and wellness benefits of taking a vacation. If employees understand that vacations lead to improvements in performance productivity, they will be more likely to leave work behind for a few days.
2. Take your own time off. If the boss never takes a vacation, employees won’t either. If you want your employees to take time away from work, do so yourself. Leadership and messaging start at the top. If you make vacations a priority, your employees will, too.
3. Ease employee back to work. When asked why they don’t take time off, most employees historically cite the fear of returning to a backlog of work and thousands of emails to which to respond. COVID hasn’t helped, as fewer are away from work. Plan for coverage when employees are out, and provide a day upon their return for them to catch-up, so that they won’t fear the return-to-work ambush or avalanche.
4. Prohibit vacation shaming. No one should be permitted to discourage or tease employees who take a vacation. If you send or permit negative messages about vacations, your employees won’t take them. They will fear letting the team down, or the time-off impacting their employment. This form of bullying cannot and should not be tolerated.
According to the Wall Street Journal, COVID-19 vaccination cards are our only proof of vaccination status and will soon be as essential as a drivers’ license or passport. With no national or statewide centralized databases of vaccination records, the piece of paper you receive with your vaccine dose is your only proof of vaccination.
The article suggests that we’ll need this record to do lots of things moving forward, such as travel. What about returning to in-person work? Can employers ask for or require that employees provide proof of vaccination?
According to the EEOC, the answer is yes as to the ask.
Is asking or requiring an employee to show proof of receipt of a COVID-19 vaccination a disability-related inquiry?
No. There are many reasons that may explain why an employee has not been vaccinated, which may or may not be disability-related. Simply requesting proof of receipt of a COVID-19 vaccination is not likely to elicit information about a disability and, therefore, is not a disability-related inquiry. However, subsequent employer questions, such as asking why an individual did not receive a vaccination, may elicit information about a disability and would be subject to the pertinent ADA standard that they be “job-related and consistent with business necessity.” If an employer requires employees to provide proof that they have received a COVID-19 vaccination from a pharmacy or their own health care provider, the employer may want to warn the employee not to provide any medical information as part of the proof in order to avoid implicating the ADA.
The question then becomes what does an employer do if an employee cannot provide proof of vaccination? If the vaccine is mandatory and a condition of employment, it can deny access to the workplace or even terminate, provided that it is considering exceptions for employees’ disabilities and sincerely held religious beliefs, practices and observances. If the vaccine is not mandatory, why ask for the vaccine record in the first place?
We are entering a very interesting era of privacy, including employee privacy. If you are not mandating the vaccine, while you are within your legal right to ask about vaccination status, why would you? Do you really want to catalogue your employees’ vaccination status and for what purpose?
Recently confirmed Labor Secretary Marty Walsh will be the first union member to head the U.S. Department of Labor in half a century.
Given Walsh’s extensive union background, labor-management issues such as the unionization push among employees at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama will be front and center during his tenure as the Labor Department’s new leader. It’s also expected that Walsh’s leadership of the agency will prompt a crackdown in the enforcement of wage-and-hour laws and workplace safety regulations, among other worker-friendly policies.
Kevin M. Young, a partner in labor and employment in Seyfarth’s Atlanta office,Jason E. Reisman, co-chair, Labor and Employment Practice Group, for Blank Rome in Philadelphia, andChristopher D. Durham, partner in Duane Morris’ Employment, Labor, Benefits and Immigration Practice in Philadelphia, offered their thoughts on what employers should expect as Walsh begins his tenure as the new Labor secretary.
Aggressive enforcement
Durham said employers can expect the Labor Department to more vigorously enforce employment laws through audits, investigations and court actions against employers, contrasting with the Trump administration’s focus on securing employer compliance through education, outreach and other less adversarial means.
“These shifting enforcement priorities will be supported by regulations and sub-regulatory guidance that is more protective of employee rights than the generally business-friendly interpretations of the prior administration,” Durham said. “We have already seen examples of this regulatory shift in the DOL’s moves to undo the prior administration’s regulations on joint employer status and tipped-employee wages.”
Young pointed out that while the Labor Department under Trump was not as light on employers as some might assume — the Wage & Hour Division set a new record for back wages recovered in 2019 — it took a softer approach than previous administrations on the topic of damage enhancements. Liquidated damages, which is a penalty in an amount equal to back wages owed, were taken off the table in all but the rarest cases, he said.
“The new administration has reversed course on that issue, and it’s likely that other enforcement measures will reenter the picture, too,” Young said. “It’s not clear yet whether the number of investigations will increase — that depends on the budget as much as anything else — but employers should certainly be preparing for more aggressive investigations than in past years.”
Reisman said that although Walsh was confirmed with strong bipartisan support, employers should expect his reputation as someone who is a consensus-builder to be tested early with so many critical items on his agenda, including the pandemic response and some critical Trump-era regulatory initiatives.
Employers also should expect there to be an ongoing clash between the age-old tensions that exist between the Labor Department when operated under a Republican administration and under a Democratic administration.
“There is no question, given Walsh’s labor background and leadership of the building trades, that he will be a staunch supporter of workers’ and unions’ rights,” Reisman said. “He will not want to alienate his base of union support, or that of President Biden, especially in light of Biden’s promises to empower workers and unions.”
Employers can expect a return to a Labor Department that resembles and likely surpasses the enforcement efforts of the Obama administration, Reisman said. The DOL will be back on the trail of finding violations and holding employers accountable.
“The focus will be less on assisting with compliance and educating employers and more on the gotcha game of penalizing employers who — knowingly or unknowingly — are not in compliance with the laws the DOL enforces,” he said.
Enforcing wage-and-hour and overtime violations
Nowhere will the shift in Labor Department enforcement priorities and positions be felt more by employers than enforcement of the Fair Labor Standards Act’s overtime and minimum wage requirements, Durham said.
“I expect the number and scope of audits conducted by the DOL’s Wage & Hour Division to increase substantially, and that the DOL will not be as willing to settle violations for less than ‘make-whole’ relief for affected employees,” he said. “In addition to back wages, the DOL is more likely to insist that employers pay liquidated damages when settling a wage-and-hour investigation, and the DOL likely will increase the use of civil monetary penalties as a potent deterrent to send a message to employers.”
Employers should expect a return of the enforcement tools of the past, liquidated damages being almost automatic as penalties in wage-and-hour investigations, Reisman added. “We expect more willfulness assertions by the DOL, which allow a back wage look-back period of three years, rather than two. And, yes, the use of civil money penalties will be used more broadly as a tool than in the last four years.”
Minimum wage and the tip credit
Young said that the new administration clearly supports increasing the federal minimum wage. And there’s also little doubt that the benefit of any increase will apply for tipped workers.
“The question here is whether the FLSA will continue to allow a portion of a tipped employee’s minimum wage to come in the form of tips,” he said. “A recent federal legislative proposal would remove this so-called tip credit, requiring restaurants to directly pay the full minimum wage to each tipped employee, without credit or concern for the amount of tips they earn on the job. If passed, this could have a seismic impact on a restaurant industry that operates on thin margins and has spent most of the last year on life support.”
Supporting fair workweek and predictive scheduling
Fair workweek laws have swept the nation and in particular theretail, fast food and hospitality industries over the past decade or so, Young said. These laws are likely on the radar of Biden and Walsh.
One recently took effect in the president’s back yard (Philadelphia), and another has been the focus of lobbying efforts in Walsh’s home state of Massachusetts, Young noted.
“Instituting this sort of reform at the federal level would require an act of Congress,” Young said. “After all, the DOL can’t make new law, only interpret and enforce what’s on the books, and I don’t get the sense that this sort of measure is among Democratic lawmakers’ core labor priorities.”
In the past couple of years multiple local jurisdictions including Chicago, Seattle and San Francisco passed predictive scheduling laws, with more such laws likely to hit the books in the coming years, Durham said.
Absent new legislation at the federal level, it is highly unlikely the Labor Department will impose requirements similar to these laws because the FLSA generally does not impose requirements on employers related to scheduling employees, he added.
“However, one way in which the DOL could enhance the financial benefit to employees of such laws would be to take the position that certain penalties under predictive scheduling laws, such as penalties for shift cancellations or other scheduling changes with insufficient notice to employees, need to be included in the regular rate of pay for purposes of calculating overtime under the FLSA,” Durham said. “The DOL’s current position, set forth in a Fact Sheet published in December 2019, is that most such penalty payments do not need to be included in the regular rate of pay.”
Reisman also questioned whether the Labor Department will have the time or resources to make its way far enough down its priority list tofair workweek/predictive scheduling regulations, or what its authority would be in seeking an impact in that realm.
Still, he added, “Anything that would entail a nationwide policy or regulation such as paid leave could be well-received by many employers if it serves to preempt state and local laws and regulations that have created an almost unmanageable web of compliance pitfalls for multi-state employers.”
Labor law enforcement can strike your business at any time. Ensure simplified and automated compliance to federal, state and local labor regulations and avoid costly penalties. Book ademoand see Workforce.com’s powerfulcompliance toolsin action.
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, I asked this question: “Are employers legally responsible for paying workers for the time it takes to record their body temperatures before entering the workplace?”
My answer was a legal, “Probably,” and a moral, “Definitely.”
This isn’t a “what does the law allow” issue; this is a “what’s right is right” issue. If you’re requiring your employees to queue in a line to take their temperature before you’ll let them enter the workplace, pay them. Don’t be cheap and don’t count pennies.
Your employees are scared. They are risking their own personal health and safety, and that of everyone who lives in their homes, to keep your essential business up and running. They could just as easily stay home, limit their exposure, and collect unemployment. What they need is your compassion, not your penny-pinching. Times are tough for everyone. I get it. But your business shouldn’t go belly up if you pay each employee for a few extra minutes of time each day.
But since this is a legal blog, we might as well take a fresh look at the legal issue, courtesy of a recently filed lawsuit against The Merchant of Tennis Inc., a San Bernardino, California, racquet sports retailer. According to Law360, among other wage and hour violations, José Hernandez Solis claimed that his former employer illegally failed to pay employees for their time spent undergoing
COVID-19 temperature checks at the beginning of the shifts.
Law360 points out that Walmart faces similar allegations in another recently filed California lawsuit. According to that lawsuit, Walmart failed to pay its employees for the 30-45 minutes spent each workday for COVID-19 temperature screening and questioning.
Legally, the standard, per SCOTUS’s decision in Integrity Staffing Solutions v. Busk, asks whether the pre-shift activities are “integral and indispensable” to an employee’s principal activities (“necessary to the principal work performed” and “done for the benefit of the employer”). It’s hard to fathom a situation during a pandemic in which pre-shift health screenings don’t meet this standard.
I think employers getting sued over this issue have real (and expensive) exposure. Don’t join them. Do the legal thing. Do the right thing. Pay your employees for this time.
The CDC released guidance permitting large employers to establish temporary sites to vaccinate employees.
The CDC on March 16 said that employers should consider opting for an on-site vaccination program if they have a large number of employees with predictable schedules and enough space to set up a pop-up clinic while still allowing for COVID-appropriate social distancing.
Employers should consider pushing employees to off-site vaccination clinics if they have a smaller number of employees, employees with flexible or non-predictable schedules, mobile employees who don’t have one worksite, or employees who’d prefer not to have their employer administer their vaccine.
Employers who choose to set up a vaccination site still must follow the EEOC’s guidelines on managing vaccines under the ADA, Title VII, and GINA (which I summarized here).
Bravo to the CDC for implementing policies to encourage as many employees to get shots in their arms as quickly as possible. It’s the only way we are going to stay ahead of the more contagious (and perhaps more deadly) variants and beat this pandemic. To this end, I highly recommend that you check out the CDC’s COVID-19 Vaccine Communication Toolkit for Essential Workers, in addition to these 5 tips on building vaccine confidence in your workplace:
Encourage your leaders to be vaccine champions. These leaders should reflect the diversity of the workforce. Invite them to share with staff their personal reasons for getting vaccinated and remind staff why it’s important to be vaccinated.
Create a communication plan. Share key messages with staff through breakroom posters, emails, and other channels. Emphasize the benefits of protecting themselves, their families, co-workers, and community. This fact sheet is available in numerous languages.
Make visible the decision to get vaccinated and celebrate it! Provide stickers for workers to wear after vaccination and encourage them to post selfies on social media.
Now please do your family, friends, coworkers, me, and society in general a huge favor and get vaccinated as soon as your state allows you to do so. We are all counting on you.
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. AKorn 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, thereare 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.
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.”
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.
The promise of algorithms completely taking over scheduling and eliminating all human input seems too good to be true — and it is.
Take Starbucks’ scheduling challenges in 2014, which was the focus of a 2015 investigation by the New York attorney general’s office that also looked into the scheduling practices of 12 other retailers. Starbucks was criticized for its use of their legacy software to algorithmically generate schedules, which many claimed caused chaos and uncertainty in employees’ lives. When they didn’t know when their next shift would be or whether their shifts would get canceled at the last minute, it became increasingly more challenging for many employees to find child care, take classes, hold a second job or plan for the future.
Algorithms optimize efficiency and are part of the equation for creating the best schedules, but organizations can’t forget about the other key factor: employee input and flexibility. Without the human factor, the employer benefits while the employee must suffer through potentially chaotic and unreliable schedules. While solely focusing on employee input, the workers benefit while the employer loses the efficiency that scheduling algorithms carry. Luckily, a win-win is possible when combining these strategies.
The role of technology in auto-scheduling
People have been trying to create shifts with algorithms and machine learning without ideal results for a long time, as far back as 20 years ago, said Josh Cameron, Chief Strategy Officer at Workforce.com, citing a paper that explored the academic literature on personnel scheduling problems as far back as 2004. One issue that has arisen with this is that the quality of a schedule is dependent on the type of data and amount of data that managers input. Quality data will help produce a better schedule, but, conversely, “rubbish in, rubbish out,” Cameron said.
Further, when managers create a schedule by hand, they’re considering many factors, not all of which can be quantifiable as data or easy to capture as data, he added. For example, employee shift preferences are not easy to capture because individuals have their own preferences that are constantly changing.
“When we use machine learning algorithms, that’s only about half the equation, and there’s a limit to how well we can do it,” Cameron said. “Regardless of how good algorithms get, there will always be limits on how much information we can reasonably collect from employees on their preferences.”
The approach Workforce.com is taking is completely novel to what other companies are trying to do, he added. Rather than solely investing in making the algorithm better, the company is going a step further, he said.
“We’re some of the first people to realize how potentially limited the approach is,” he added. “We stepped back and asked, ‘How can we also let employees get the most value from their schedule, in an equal win-win way?’ Because happy workers are productive workers.”
Relying solely on algorithms sets scheduling as a zero-sum game where employees have to lose out in order for the business to gain or vice-versa. Auto-scheduling is a harder solution to build, but at Workforce.com we treat this as our core belief that employee-employer relationships should be built on win-win.
The key steps to auto-scheduling
To create the best, most accurate schedule, managers need to be able to accurately predict demand, create the right shift pattern and fill that shift panel with the right employees. Each of these individual steps poses its own pain points for managers, but by investing in the right scheduling technology, organizational leadership can make this process smoother and more accurate.
Demand prediction is the first key step in scheduling. The more applicable information a manager can collect, the more accurate and confident they can be with demand prediction. The right software will take into consideration factors such as weather or time of year, but managers also have a human role in this. They can identify demand predictors that are unique to that location.
Once managers have confidence in their demand prediction, shift building is the next step. Software like Workforce.com can help managers create shift patterns for the amount of work that needs to be done while keeping in mind regulations that set limits on how few or many people can be working at a given time. Still, managers need to ascertain certain information from employees to help make this possible, such as by approaching employees and getting hard numbers on how long it takes to complete basic tasks within their shifts.
Shift filling is where the most innovation comes in, especially with the recent development of shift auctioning, a mechanism that allows staff to indicate their preference for shifts. An idea that initially came from University of Chicago researchers and built by Workforce.com, shift auctioning is what allows flexibility to truly shine through in the algorithm plus scheduling process.
Benefits of scheduling flexibility
Factors such as autonomy, task variety and level of flexibility help workers feel more satisfied with their jobs, according to the 2020 University of Chicago paper “Reservation Wages and Workers’ Valuation of Job Flexibility: Evidence from a Natural Field Experiment.” The paper looked at Uber drivers — gig economy workers who have control over when and how much they work. A major finding here was how much workers value job flexibility, so much so that Uber drivers needed a wage increase to take undesirable shifts. A step further, “drivers would demand much higher wages if they had to commit to pre-set work schedules.”
The appeal of flexibility for hourly, shift and contract workers is something also supported by other research. The 2013 University of Chicago paper “Work Schedule Happiness: A Contributor to Employee Happiness?” found that varying start and end times depending on the day was associated with greater employee happiness. And this association was generally stronger among hourly employees than salaried employees. Meanwhile, the 2015 paper “Why Schedule Control May Pay Off at Work and at Home” found that “having discretion as to when, where, and how much one works is an important remedy to both chronic and acute time pressures and work–life conflicts, with potential health, well-being, and productivity benefits.”
This connection is also pretty instinctual. Ultimately, using an algorithm-only method strategy of scheduling ignores the profound impact employee preferences and flexibility can have.
The reality for shift workers is that scheduling has a considerable impact on employee’s job satisfaction and quality of life — a fact that most people in an operations role are aware of. And currently, the way schedules are generally created is not the most beneficial for employees. What may help organizations with this transition is to try a trial run on a smaller group of employees and work out any kinks in the implementation process, Cameron suggested.
Putting employees first
Happy and efficient workers make for a competitive business. And smart scheduling especially matters for the happiness of hourly shift workers. While it’s tempting to invest in solutions that are totally dependent on technology, the truth is that no matter how sharp this technology gets and no matter how efficient it is, it won’t be enough to fully satisfy workers and thus maximize productivity. That requires the human touch to be factored along with the algorithm.
“Algorithms can be limited,” said Tasmin Trezise, president at Workforce.com. “What’s hard is balancing that with the demand drivers of business, their labor requirements, the employee input and the overall culture of the company.”
Being smart at demand prediction, shift building and shift filling will ultimately both make employees more satisfied and help control budget efficiency. Managers can accomplish this with the right tools — tools that give them the best potential technology and algorithms while also giving them the opportunity to put the employee in the process.
This auto-scheduling method is the future of scheduling, especially for hourly shift workers. Workforce.com’s platform was created with a win-win philosophy in mind and we understand that employers and workers don’t need to be at odds over schedules. Technology built on this win-win philosophy is the future of automated employee scheduling with both parties getting what they want with forward-thinking solutions like Workforce.com.
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.
OSHA has cited a Missouri auto parts manufacturer for failing to implement and enforce coronavirus protections, which ultimately lead to an employee’s death. The details, from OSHA’s news release.
Two machine operators … who jointly operated a press tested positive for the coronavirus just two days apart, in late August 2020. The two workers typically labored for hours at a time less than two feet apart; neither wore a protective facial mask consistently. Ten days later, two more workers operating similar presses together tested positive. On Sept. 19, 2020, one of the press operators fell victim to the virus and died.
The total penalty was $15,604. For someone who died during a global pandemic because of his employer’s irresponsibility.
While I understand that OSHA lacks a specific standard covering most COVID-19 issues, these numbers seem awfully low. Look, I’ll be the first one to tell you that more government regulation and control is a bad thing.
But, if employers aren’t motivated by the carrot to take COVID-19 seriously (that being, having a healthy and safe workplace with employees who believe you care about their welfare), then perhaps they need the stick. Some $13,000, or $15,600 when someone dies, however, seems like a pretty small stick.
The appeal of flexibility for hourly, shift and contract workers is something also supported by other research. The 2013 University of Chicago paper “Work Schedule Happiness: A Contributor to Employee Happiness?” found that varying start and end times depending on the day was associated with greater employee happiness. And this association was generally stronger among hourly employees than salaried employees. Meanwhile, the 2015 paper “Why Schedule Control May Pay Off at Work and at Home” found that “having discretion as to when, where, and how much one works is an important remedy to both chronic and acute time pressures and work–life conflicts, with potential health, well-being, and productivity benefits.” 
