On Sept. 18, the CDC yet again updated its guidance for COVID-19 testing. If you’re keeping count, this is the CDC’s fifth set of testing rules.
What’s changed?
Due to the significance of asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic transmission, this guidance further reinforces the need to test asymptomatic persons, including close contacts of a person with documented SARS-CoV-2 infection.
This change is huge. Just four weeks ago, the CDC had updated the same guidance to state: “If you have been in close contact (within 6 feet) of a person with a COVID-19 infection for at least 15 minutes but do not have symptoms, you do not necessarily need a test unless you are a vulnerable individual or your health care provider or State or local public health officials recommend you take one.” Now, the agency says the exact opposite.
If you have been in close contact, such as within 6 feet of a person with documented SARS-CoV-2 infection for at least 15 minutes and do not have symptoms.
You need a test. Please consult with your healthcare provider or public health official. Testing is recommended for all close contacts of persons with SARS-CoV-2 infection. Because of the potential for asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic transmission, it is important that contacts of individuals with SARS-CoV-2 infection be quickly identified and tested. Pending test results, you should self-quarantine/isolate at home and stay separated from household members to the extent possible and use a separate bedroom and bathroom, if available.
Make no mistake, this change was absolutely necessary and should have been the default all along. Because of the prevalence of asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic carrying of the virus, many do not know that they even have COVID-19, and therefore we can’t isolate to prevent further community spread without testing. It just would have been nice, however, if the CDC came to this realization sooner than six months into the pandemic.
As a result, you may have more employees missing work, and more employees seeking paid leave under the FFCRA. But that’s okay because the only way we can defeat this virus until we have a safe and reliable vaccine is to stop it from spreading in the first place.
I’d be remiss if I did not say a word or two about the passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Friday felt like an absolute gut punch. A good friend said it best on Twitter, in the hours after RBG’s passing:
God bless her for her steadfast service to the ideals of America and especially for the idea that little girls can do and aspire to whatever a little boy can. You lived your truths, exceptionally. Love you RBG.
RBG was the most significant jurist for women’s rights in the history of our nation. She is and will continue to be a hero to many, and she will surely and sorely be missed both for who she was and for what she stood and will continue to stand.
Rest in peace Justice Ginsburg. You held on as long as you could. You are now heaven’s great dissenter.
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.
“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 Augustannounced 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.
“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 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.”
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 withWorkforce.com’s Live Wage Tracker.
In early August, a New York federal district court judge issued an order invaliding several key provisions in the DOL’s FFCRA regulations. Last Friday evening, the DOL responded with revised regulations that left most of its prior regulations intact, while also make a few common-sense amendments.Here’s what the DOL did, and did not, change in response to the court’s order, and why.
1. The DOL reaffirmed that an employee may only take paid sick leave and expanded family and medical leave under the FFCRA if the employee has work from which to take leave, and if there is no work available, no leave may be taken.According to the DOL, this interpretation is entirely consistent with the statute’s requirement that an employer must provide its employees FFCRA leave to the extent that an employee is unable to work (or telework) due to a need for leave “because” of or “due to” a qualifying reason for leave. As summarized by the DOL, “[I]f there is no work for an individual to perform due to circumstances other than a qualifying reason for leave—perhaps the employer closed the worksite (temporarily or permanently)—that qualifying reason could not be a but-for cause of the employee’s inability to work. Instead, the individual would have no work from which to take leave.” Thus, “an employee may take paid sick leave or expanded family and medical leave only to the extent that any qualifying reason is a but-for cause of his or her inability to work.” This interpretation avoids the perverse result of an employee being on furlough and not receiving a paycheck, but still qualifying for paid leave.
2. The DOL reaffirmed that where intermittent FFCRA leave is permitted (i.e., for leave taken to care for a son or daughter because their school or place of care is closed, or their child care provider is unavailable, because of COVID-19), an employee may only take such leave intermittently upon the approval of his or her employer.The DOL left these regulations untouched for two reasons. First, limiting intermittent leave to child-care-related absences furthers the policy of limiting employees who have potentially been exposed to COVID-19 from entering the workplace. Secondly, requiring employer approval is consistent with similar leave available under the FMLA, which should “avoid unduly disrupting the employer’s operation.
3. The DOL revised its overly broad definition of “health care provider” for purposes of the statutory exemption.This change is the most significant one in the revised regulations. The original regulations permitted an employer to exempt anyone who worked in healthcare or related to healthcare, whether or not they were an actual health care provider. Thus, maintenance workers, or workers for medical device or pharmaceutical companies, could be deemed “exempt” from the FFCRA. The DOL has now tightened the definition to mirror the definition of “health care provider” in the FMLA, and now covers only physicians and others who make medical diagnoses, and those capable of and employed to provide diagnostic services, preventive services, treatment services, or other services that are integrated with and necessary to the provision of patient care.
4. The DOL corrected an inconsistency about when an employee may be required to give notice to his or her employer of the need for expanded family and medical leave.The DOL amended the FFCRA’s regulations so that they are consistent with the FMLA’s requirements for advance notice. Now, notice of the need for expanded family and medical leave is required “as soon as practicable.” (The regulations previously prohibited advance notice for any leave under the FFCRA.)
5. The DOL clarified that the information the statute requires an employee to provide his or her employer to support a request for FFCRA leave must be given as soon as practicable.The regulations now provide that an employee is required to give the required documentation for FFCRA leave “as soon as practicable,” and not prior to taking the FFCRA leave.
These are common sense, business-friendly changes to the FFCRA’s regulations. Moreover, given that the Act sunsets on Dec. 31, 2020, it’s unlikely (but not impossible) that New York or another state will take another crack at striking down the revised regulations before the Act’s expiration.
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?
Victor Assad
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.
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 atAmbulnz 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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
Expanding from a domestic business to a global entity is an exciting prospect. Yet tapping into new worldwide markets brings a unique set of workforce management challenges.
Success depends on a variety of factors but it ultimately comes down to building a consistent, equitable plan to manage employees at home and abroad. Implementing a workforce management software solution that cantrack and facilitate the needs of a global workforce is crucial to successfully developing an organization’s worldwide ambitions.
A global workforce balancing act
How executives supervise their workforce in one country may vastly differ in another nation for many reasons. What motivates an employee in Argentina will likely vary from a worker with the same title and responsibilities in Belarus or Pakistan.
Studies also have shown that while a population in one country prefers a particular management style, that same approach probably is not as effective in another country. Other differences can include:
Holiday celebrations.
Social attitudes.
Cultural backgrounds.
Language and currency.
Unifying global employees
Despite the myriad differences that come with managing a global workforce, there are common bonds and responsibilities all employees share.
They all work for the same organization. As such, human resources leaders should work with heads of other departments and regional managers to create uniform workforce management precedents, policies and standards that cross all borders and incorporate relevant and useful tools for all employees to use no matter where they are located.
Technology and a global workforce management system
When choosing an automated workforce management solution for a global company, organizations should seek ease of use through mobility tools that can quickly show a return on investment. Workforce management software enables savings by:
Controlling labor costs — Workforce management software cuts costs beginning with the initial clock in byeliminating time theft due to employee fraud. Automating payroll processes also minimizes the need for supervisors to make interpretations and ensures strict compliance with corporate policies.
Boosting employee productivity — Managers can monitor when their employees punch in and when they actually begin work. A mobile solution can help spot an excessive time lag and can immediately investigate the causes no matter where the employee is located.
Minimizing risk — Implementing a global workforce management system can provide key regulatory requirements up front and provide alerts to ensure organizations can comply with regional regulations consistently and with confidence.
Mobile solutions ease the burden
Managers need to know where global staff is at any given moment. Whether it’s due to crisis communications during a natural disaster or monitoring employee safety through their whereabouts on a particular job site, mobile workforce management solutions allow managers to quickly identify and assess staff safety and location through a platform’s photo-verified clock in system.
GPS also plays a key role in global workforce management. Timesheets can automatically sync GPS locations of all employees when they clock in and clock out, so there’s no need to worry about an employee’s whereabouts.
For a number of organizations operating in industries that function globally, pay rates also can get complicated. By implementing the Workforce.com platform, employees’ GPS clock in data automatically assigns pay rates depending on registered location, saving employers valuable time and payroll administrators the headache and complexities of computing pay.
IntegrateWorkforce.com’s time clock app with payroll and POS systems already in use and have those far-away employees available in an instant via your mobile device.
The Cleveland Indians have sent pitcher Zach Plesac back to Cleveland from their current run of road games for breaking the team’s COVID-19 protocols.
According to Cleveland.com, MLB security personnel caught the pitcher returning to the team’s hotel early Sunday morning after he had gone out with friends. The team has its own coronavirus code of conduct, which in part required Plesac to obtain permission before leaving the hotel. According to ESPN, the Indians hired a car service to return Plesac to Cleveland so that he would not share an airplane with his teammates and potentially place them at risk. The team’s management has said that he will remain quarantined until he receives two negative tests.
Bravo to the Indians for doing what they feel they have to do to keep their employees safe and the team playing games.
Your business may not be able to dictate how your employees spend their free time, but you can hold them to consequences if they choose to act irresponsibly when “off the clock.”
We are living through a pandemic. Every employee has a responsibility to their employer, their co-workers, and the business to make sure that they do what they can to avoid brining COVID-19 into the workplace, and every employer has the same responsibility to take reasonable steps to prevent an at-risk employee from entering the workplace when it’s discovered.
These are strange times for sure, and I will not fault any employer that errs on the side of caution in how it manages its employee respective to mitigating workplace coronavirus exposures. I’m not advocating for, or in favor of, employer monitoring of employee off-duty conduct. If, however, irresponsible, reckless or dangerous behavior comes to an employer’s attention, it shouldn’t ignore it in the name of privacy either.
