strategy – Page 2

September 28, 2020

What one debate question would you ask each candidate?

On Sept. 29, a mere 16 miles from my home, President Trump and Vice President Biden will step in front of the cameras to make their respective cases to America in the first of three debates. Eight years ago, some of my blogging friends and I got together to propose the debate questions we’d ask each of the candidates if we had the power to do so. Given the current state of our Republic and what’s at stake when we vote, we thought it would be a good idea to revisit this collective idea and do it again.

Here are my “one questions” for President Trump and Vice President Biden.

For President Trump

Last week, you said the following during a White House press briefing, about your intent to uphold a peaceful transfer of power following the election: “[G]et rid of the ballots and you’ll have a very … there won’t be a transfer, frankly. There’ll be a continuation.” Our democracy—in fact, any democracy—is premised on the people choosing their elected representatives and the loser of an election ceding and allowing for a peaceful transition of power. On the contrary, a “continuation” of a regime without counting ballots is the hallmark of a dictatorship, not a democracy. Mr. President, this evening will you commit, without exception, that come January 20, 2021, that if Congress declares Joe Biden, and not you, the winner of the 2020 Presidential election, you will step aside and allow for the peaceful transition of power as has occurred every four years since 1793? And if not, why not?

For Vice President Biden

To date, COVID-19 has killed more than 200,000 Americans. If the numbers and trends merey hold steady, by Inauguration Day that number will increase by more than another 100,000. Some models project the death toll will be even higher. We’d be approaching, if not surpassing, the number of U.S. combat casualties in both World Wars combined. Can you please tell the American people the steps you will take from day one in office to contain this deadly virus and decrease the tragic trajectory of death and loss?

For the questions that my employment law/HR blogging friends would ask, head over to the following:

Kate Bischoff — tHRive Law & Consulting Blog

Suzanne Lucas — Evil HR Lady

Jeff Nowak — FMLA Insights

Dan Schwartz — Connecticut Employment Law Blog

August 17, 2020June 29, 2023

Labor analytics add power to workforce management tools

Employing labor data analytics typically leads to more informed business decisions. From labor forecasting to measuring employee morale, data analytics allows for more precise and impactful results.

The advantages of implementing workforce management solutions also are clear. Automating time and pay calculations and empowering employees through mobile apps give managers valuable tools to control scheduling, compensation costs and organizational needs.

Using both resources powers the ability to make even stronger choices for workforce management.

Power tools with the power of analytics

Backing workforce management tools with the power of labor analytics creates a formidable partnership. This can help save money, establish formal business practices and remove the guesswork hindering management and operational issues. Employers can make more informed talent decisions, and:

Predict future hiring requirements.
Calculate current staffing needs.
Analyze compensation and overtime.
Optimize employee engagement.

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

Predict future hiring requirements

The growth of an organization can be hobbled by its ability to find qualified employees. Since there are times when hiring comes in a flurry, recruiting becomes post the position, make the hire and pray they work out. Oftentimes new hires are not as productive as the existing staff and can cut into the team’s productivity. Forecasting labor needs through analytics establishes measured hiring practices. And implementing tools such as Workforce.com’s shift ratings and feedback solution provides managers with the ability to carefully balance veteran staff with new hires.

Calculate current staffing needs

Managers can get burned by being overstaffed and understaffed if they rely on traditional shift patterns and gut instinct. Overstaffing creates disillusioned employees with little to do, a lack of focus and a negative attitude toward co-workers. Productivity suffers and compensation costs needlessly soar. Conversely, understaffing leads to employee stress, burnout, poor performance, rattled customers and high turnover. Shift feedback tools help managers forecast their needs and curb chronic overstaffing and understaffing.

Analyze compensation and overtime

Few things catch an employer’s eye faster than seeing overtime on the compensation ledger. And like melting snow off a mountaintop, their irritation trickles down to frontline managers. Indeed some overtime can be justified, but there are workforce management solutions to adjust scheduling to seasonal or even hourly rushes that will manage compensation costs and limit unneeded overtime.

Optimize employee engagement
An engaged workforce produces a happy workplace. Balancing staffing needs and incorporating flex schedules builds confidence that management is looking out for their interests. Allowing employees to provide feedback also gives them a voice in organizational operations.

The Workforce.com Shift Rating and Feedback mobile app prompts staff once a week to provide their insights on common workplace topics. Their feedback in turn helps managers rate staff and build skill profiles. Those profiles benefit managers by pairing employees with varying skill levels as they build out schedules. Managers making quick, informed decisions gives employees the knowledge that their input has provided valuable guidance.

When workforce analytics and tools are functioning well, it’s not only the business that benefits. Employees want to take more initiative. Empower them with workforce management mobile solutions to solve problems. For example, they can:

Communicate their needs for scheduling and time off.
Quickly swap shifts on their own.
Get and provide feedback that can improve their performance and drive organizational productivity.
Develop their skills and utilize their potential.
Build camaraderie across the team.

Equip executives and managers with the analytics and tools they need to understand labor issues and make more informed decisions. Implement Workforce.com’s shift ratings and feedback solution to quickly and easily bolster your employee and scheduling analytics.

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.

July 24, 2020May 1, 2023

COVID-19 and reassessing workforce management

COVID-19, workforce management WFM 2.0, ethics

Over the past several months workplaces across the globe were forced to embrace the future of work in ways they never considered. COVID-19 may fundamentally change the workplace and in this context, here are three key considerations as employers work through this recovery phase in reaction to the pandemic.

Rethinking workplaces: Ensuring the health and safety of workers will be crucial to reopening plants, offices and stores and determining new team models.
Rethinking workforces: An estimated 2.7 billion people, or more than four out of five global workers, have been affected by stay-at-home measures. In addition to looking at new ways to deploy existing workers across an organization, many organizations are looking to identify opportunities to connect furloughed workers to job openings in areas with growing recovery demands.
Rethinking work: As organizations look toward the realities of a post-pandemic world, it’s likely that new business priorities will need to redesign teams and workforce policies, addressing the benefits and risks of a dispersed workforce while building flexibility.

It has become even more critical to look at the COVID-19 pandemic and how it exposed two key problems in managing the workforce. When cost management is not designed into daily workforce management activities and decisions and when there is no dedicated business unit focused on owning timekeeping and scheduling outcomes, it can be difficult to manage your bottom line or your workforce effectively.

The pandemic created an extreme disruption for workforce management. Many employers are concerned about costs and how to reconstitute their workforce to be optimally productive under different conditions.

If they are operating today, things like store hours and cleaning have changed. If they are planning to reopen, the restart may change when and how much labor is needed and can be afforded. Labor cost and revenue models are under pressure to adapt to such changes.

Unfortunately, workforce management has been mainly focused on efficient, automated, transactional processes such as reporting time and automating staffing interactions such as requesting time off. These activities and decisions aren’t likely designed to act as levers to drive critical outcomes or adapt to disruption in the workplace.

Such processes typically work well for what these standards are designed to do, but not for what functions employers should be doing. Transactional, routine scheduling and timekeeping processes aren’t capable of solving for pandemic-level issues impacting the workforce.

The pandemic created an extreme scenario that laid this fact bare. Employers should be operating differently and doing more. It exposes two everyday problems that have long been overlooked.

Cost and productivity should be treated as dynamic outcomes that are actively influenced by the employer in real-time workforce management activities.
Cost or productivity should be managed and influenced well with a workforce center of excellence and people who specialize in workforce management.

Labor cost and productivity can determine if an organization is competitive, profitable and serving its customers well. However, in too many organizations, it almost feels like workforce management is on auto-pilot … until something goes wrong.

If the employer is already operating with workforce management 2.0 — which we will call WFM 2.0 for brevity’s sake — it likely has the following characteristics allowing them to (a) design and control their labor spending for different workplace conditions and (b) know how to assign the work to the modified workforce for the ideal productivity and outcomes.

Characteristics of WFM 2.0 — managing cost and productivity outcomes.

Ownership — A designated business unit known as the WFM Center of Excellence should be responsible for labor outcomes (cost, compliance, productivity, quality, scheduling experience, etc.) and the enabling tools required to manage (timekeeping, scheduling, absence management, mobile and web-enabled devices, dashboards, etc.). This team knows the current model and is able to design the future state and the strategy to get there.
Capability — Specialized workforce management professionals who plan, design and support the timekeeping, absence management and scheduling practices and platforms. Post-COVID-19 operations will rely on these experts to know what policies, system configuration and scheduling models need to change to optimize cost and utilization.
Access to leadership and support — the WFM Center of Excellence — the CoE — reports directly to executive-level stakeholders who sponsor the function, hold it accountable, prioritize its needs and fund its operations. Post-COVID-19 transformation will require support from finance, HR, IT and operations to execute on planning, retooling systems and testing and monitoring workforce performance.

Signs that WFM 2.0 is operating effectively.

The WFM CoE understands the workload and work priorities:

Secures accurate forecasts. This will be challenging and essential in the post-COVID-19 world to recast the labor supply-demand model.
Defines what good work and workforce look like at a detailed, task and practice level blending in the new protocols such as cleaning and distancing.
Creates solid data from time and schedule data to determine what labor should cost.
Decides what types of workers to engage or what work to automate for the lowest cost and optimal outcome. It may be time to pivot some work to machines, work from home or third parties.

The WFM CoE understands the optimal workforce:

What good work looks like — updating labor standards relative to COVID-19 protocols.
What workforce is available — WFM differs from workforce planning and headcount management. WFM is about knowing the workforce that is available “today, right now” from the active, skilled and healthy workforce.
Who are essential workers.
How much the workforce requires to earn (what compensation is necessary to make work attractive — in other words, hazard pay, shift premium for evening, overtime for excessive hours, on-call pay, paid sick time, etc.).
How to connect to the workforce using up to date, reliable contact mechanisms.

The WFM CoE understands how to put the proper combination of shifts, people and pay practices together to meet the business needs to drive cost and productivity:

Use the right mix of part-time, full-time, contingent or machine workers.
Design optimal shift patterns and rotations for new health protocols and regulations.
Deliver schedule equilibrium (predictable, stable and adequate schedules).
Score schedule quality.
Prevents payroll leakage (avoiding time inflation, overstaffing, gaming the system to inflate pay and benefits).
Turn on self-scheduling, shift swapping and other self-service scheduling processes as needed.
Use float and standby staffing appropriately.
Is up to date on scheduling laws such as the fair workweek, wage and hour rules, and collective bargaining requirements.

The WMO (workforce management office[DM1] ) or WFM CoE understands what tools the business needs and how to use them, such as:

Timekeeping systems and devices will drive cost and payroll.
WFM devices that improve safety so workers can return to work.
Scheduling systems and communication tools to engage with the workforce in real time as situations change.
Ideal absence management systems to easily facilitate planned and unplanned time off.
Dashboards to monitor cost and utilization, react in real time to problems happening on the front line to ensure consistency in how managers operate.
Data-supported insights to inform internal and external stakeholders to show how cost and productivity are being delivered to support and satisfy workers, managers, investors, regulators and the community.

WFM 2.0 was bound to happen. The pandemic is a catalyst for immediate business transformation.

Labor cost and productivity are critical to the financial and competitive viability of employers. Leaving things on auto-pilot isn’t a cure for COVID-19’s impact on any organization’s health.

Businesses that will recover and thrive can start by establishing a permanent workforce management center of excellence acting as the command center for managing labor cost and utilization.

Lisa Disselkamp is the managing director at Deloitte Consulting LLP.

July 24, 2020October 22, 2021

Ethics and the future of workforce management

As the future of work rapidly evolves and organizations integrate people, technology, alternative workforces and new ways of working, leaders are wrestling with an increasing range of ethical challenges.

These challenges are especially pronounced at the intersection between humans and technology, where new questions top the ethics agenda about the impact of emerging technologies on workers and society. How organizations combine people and machines, govern new human-machine work combinations and operationalize the working relationship between humans, teams and machines will be at the center of how ethical concerns can be managed for the broadest range of benefits. Organizations that tackle these issues head-on – changing their perspective to consider not only “could we” but also “how should we” – will be well positioned to make the bold choices that help to build trust among all stakeholders.

Ethical concerns are front and center for today’s organization as the nature of work, the workforce and the workplace rapidly evolve. In Deloitte’s 2020 Global Human Capital Trends report, 85 percent of survey respondents believe that the future of work raises ethical challenges but only 27 percent have clear policies and leaders in place to manage them.

And managing ethics related to the future of work is growing in importance: More than half of the respondents said that it was either the top, or one of the top issues facing organizations today, and 66 percent said it would be in three years.

According to our report, four factors rose to the top of the ethics concerns: legal and regulatory requirements, rapid adoption of AI in the workplace, changes in workforce composition and pressure from external stakeholders.

The leading driver that respondents identified was legal and regulatory requirements. Given that there is often a lag in laws and regulations relating to both technology and workforce issues, this perception is surprising. However, outside of a few moves including fair workweek rules for hourly workers, policy changes have been slow in coming.

The pressure on ethics created by the rapid adoption of AI in the workplace, however, is much more understandable. AI and other technologies make ethics in the future of work, specifically more relevant because the proliferation of technology is driving a redefinition of work. Perhaps the issue that has attracted the most attention is the question of how technology affects the role of humans in work.

While our survey found that only a small percentage of respondents are using robots and AI to replace workers, headlines of the forthcoming “robot apocalypse” continue to capture global attention and raise concern. Organizations that are implementing technologies that drive efficiencies can expect to make decisions whether and how to redeploy people to add strategic value elsewhere, and what, if they decide to eliminate jobs, they will do to support the workers thus displaced. AI will also be a part of scheduling work across a blended workforce of machine and human workers.

As technology becomes more embedded into work, its design and use needs to be assessed for fairness and equity. Organizations should consider questions such as whether their applications of technology decrease or increase discriminatory bias; what procedures they have to protect the privacy of worker data; whether technology-made decisions are transparent and explainable; and what policies they have in place to hold humans responsible for those decisions’ outputs.[1]

Our research found that the third driver of ethics’ importance in the future of work is changing workforce composition, which raises issues about the evolving social contract between the individual and the organization and the organizations and society — the growth of the alternative workforce is one major phenomenon contributing to these concerns.

The number of self-employed workers in the United States is projected to hit 42 million in 2020. “Invisible labor forces” are being exposed in the recent research by Mary Gray and Siddarth Suri’s “Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass,” which talks about the unsavory working conditions of many workers performing the high-tech piecework (labeling data, captioning images and flagging inappropriate content) that powers automation and AI.

The fast growth of this workforce segment is calling to attention related ethical concerns, including alternative workers’ access to fair pay, health care and other potential benefits.

July 21, 2020June 29, 2023

How to effectively use data analytics for workforce success

There’s a lot of emphasis put on data-driven decision making. But how do organizations start that process? Serena Huang, global head of people analytics at the Kraft Heinz Co., shared some helpful insights into how leaders can use data to better understand the workforce and improve overall management and performance.

Workforce recently caught up with her, and she shared her thoughts on how to use data analytics and gather information and employee feedback for better workforce management.

Workforce: What do leaders need to know about the relationship between strategic business planning and data analytics?

Serena Huang: I’d encourage leaders to think of data analytics as a new mindset and a new language rather than a new tool from IT. There are several areas where analytics can improve business planning, such as more accurate demand forecasting and a better understanding of consumer behaviors.

WF: What is the importance of using analytics in managing people? How did the COVID-19 pandemic highlight this?

Huang: It’s always been important to use analytics in managing people. Many companies would say that “people are their most important asset” and even the most technologically advanced companies cannot operate without people. Instead of relying on intuition, analytics can help organizations make more informed decisions faster and at scale.

Employees’ health, safety and engagement have never been more important. The pandemic has provided an opportunity for HR to become heroes by caring for employees and ensuring business continuity. At Kraft Heinz, this is critical because our employees are crucial to making food that everyone needs. We have a responsibility around the world to feed people, and our employees make it happen.

WF: What are the common misconceptions about people analytics and its role in workforce management?

Huang: One of the biggest misconceptions is that data must be perfect before you can do analytics. I always recommend starting with the business problem rather than the data. You’d be surprised how much usable data already exists. Another misconception is that you need data scientists or know how to code to start doing people analytics. It is much more important to focus on the right questions before hiring a data scientist or learning how to model.

Also read: Labor data analytics can inform better talent decisions

WF: How can organizations effectively use and make sense of the data they have?

Huang: Visualizations and dashboards are great ways to turn data into insights. To know where to start, it’s best to align with business leaders on solving problems.

For example, in workforce management, companies often have significant data on time and attendance, so a starting point can be using analytics to optimize labor costs. If there are different systems, it’s helpful to choose a country or location that needs the most help and start with a pilot.

To create the most value, it’s important to monitor data quality on an ongoing basis.

WF: How can organizations track the right type of data for their workforce? How can they identify metrics of success?

Huang: It’s crucial to stay closely connected with the leadership team on strategy and business problems. If you can figure out the top three to five pain points, you can then frame questions to answer and think about what data you’d need.

The metrics of success will vary from one problem to another. I’d recommend thinking in different time frames and ask yourself what success looks like in six months, 12 months, and two to three years.

WF: How can managers use data to improve productivity and boost employee engagement?

Huang: Managers can certainly leverage surveys if they have a large organization. Often organizations conduct engagement surveys on a regular basis, so start with existing surveys for potential areas of improvement.

For managers with smaller teams, it is most beneficial to conduct regular check-ins and one-on-ones. Managers must create an environment where there is psychological safety, so team members feel comfortable sharing concerns openly.

WF: What are different ways companies can collect feedback or listen to their employees, especially in the era of remote work?

Huang: There are several ways companies can listen to employees, including surveys, virtual focus groups, and Q&A during employee town halls. It’s helpful to monitor the participation rates as it could signal overload if participation decreases. It’s also important to encourage managers to connect with their team members directly on a regular basis in addition to this corporate-level feedback.

WF: What are the factors to consider when choosing the right tools, methods or technology to measure and improve employee engagement?

Huang: A good starting point will include an evaluation of how many employees, how many languages, local legal requirements, reporting/analytics for users, text analytics capabilities. In my article published on LinkedIn, I explain why there isn’t the “right” number of times to pulse employees, and it depends on how quickly the business leaders can act on feedback.

WF: What do you think the future of work will look like given current times?

Huang: It’s hard to predict what will be a temporary rather than permanent shift in the future of work, but I see more focus on flexibility, diversity and inclusion, well-being and skills development.

Data from COVID HR-Pulse show that fewer than 50 percent of companies had a remote work program before the pandemic, and now office employees have been working virtually for months. Employees will demand more flexibility, and organizations can use flexibility to attract new hires.

We have seen different businesses get creative during the pandemic. At Kraft Heinz, we’re focused on being agile at scale because we believe that agile and nimble organizations will outperform those that cannot pivot quickly when needed. To be truly agile in workforce planning, an organization should know the skill sets needed to deliver business results and the skills its workforce currently has.

Also read: A midterm outlook on the future of the workplace

The recent tragedies have brought diversity and inclusion front and center for many organizations. Companies that can create an inclusive environment where everyone belongs will continue to be able to attract and retain talent.

While mental health remains a difficult topic to discuss, especially in a corporate setting, the pandemic has made it more critical to talk about this topic. We will likely see a focus on employee well-being extend beyond the pandemic.

July 14, 2020June 29, 2023

Employee growth and team building is no mystery for escape room company

Puzzle Break, escape room, engagement, team building

Escape rooms have grown in popularity as a way for friends and families to collectively crack the code to diffuse an imaginary time bomb or uncover clues to propel their mythical team of adventurers past an evil witch and return home.

Not surprisingly, these live-action games that allow teams to cooperatively explore a physical space and solve mental and physical puzzles to accomplish a goal as time ticks away also have become a popular corporate team-building tool.

team building, employee engagement — Nate Martin

But team building has been a challenge for organizations in recent months. As more employees work remotely and opportunities for workers to congregate in one place for any length of time is often discouraged, dodging mythical trolls and creating a team of elite hackers to foil a mad scientist’s plot to take over the world has not exactly been top of mind for most organizations.

With a recent report by HR consultancy Gartner stating that 74 percent of CFOs intend to shift some employees to remote work permanently, collaboration among workers could continue to deteriorate. According to the Society for Human Resource Management, 19 percent of remote workers say they struggle with loneliness, and 17 percent add that a lack of communication and collaboration also is an issue for them.

Zoom fatigue

While Zoom happy hours and virtual lunch chats bring colleagues together for a more personal experience, they don’t necessarily build and sustain organizational teamwork. Videoconference fatigue, or “Zoom fatigue,” is further exhausting employees, according to experts.

So, enter the virtual escape room, which can provide companies in need of activities fostering communication, collaboration and fun in a game-like environment minus the fatigue associated with a workday videoconference.

CASE STUDY: How LAZ Parking discovered the secret sauce of employee engagement

Seattle-based escape-room company Puzzle Break in March pivoted to a virtual version for remote teams to play online after shutting down all its physical escape room facilities. As of early July, company officials said that more than 400 escape experience groups have included over 3,300 players — many with more than 20 in a group. Participants including companies like Microsoft, Starbucks and Deloitte are using the escape rooms as a remote team-building tool, they add.

But as Puzzle Break helped to facilitate the virtual employee engagement efforts of its clients, it also faced challenges of its own. According to Puzzle Break founder Nate Martin, demand for virtual escape rooms outpaced his staff’s ability to keep up. Unlike many companies that laid off or furloughed their hourly employees, Puzzle Break began searching for talent.

Also read: Boost your managers’ effectiveness with an essential mobile clock-in tool

“We’ve gone to great lengths to bring on and retain long-term employees with pay and benefits well above industry standard,” said Martin, whose staffing has climbed up to 40 employees. “When COVID hit and we pivoted to virtual team building, we became slammed with demand from a newly global customer base. In order to keep up with demand, we’ve been hiring hourly folks as fast as we can to curate Puzzle Break experiences for time zones across the planet.”

Scaling up onboarding

With the new demand for virtual team building, Martin said it is extremely difficult to find time at the company level to get everyone together since all his employees are remote for the time being.

“Fortunately, we have a baked-in solution,” he said. “All our new hires go through multiple Puzzle Break virtual team-building experiences together in a cohort as part of their onboarding. We have deliberately engineered our employee training to be hands-on team building.”

For Puzzle Break, which has physical locations in Seattle, New York and the Boston area, growth is a relief in this era of cutting staff. But it does test the organization’s people practices, Martin said.

“We’ve reached a point where I haven’t met over half our workforce,” Martin said. “It’s great to grow, but it is bringing all sorts of new and exciting challenges.”

Organizations face numerous challenges while onboarding and scheduling employees in an uncertain economic environment. See the big picture and make more accurate, data-driven staffing and scheduling decisions in just a few clicks with our comprehensive scheduling software. Check it out and our Workforce Success team will provide a personal, online walk through of our scheduling platform.

June 19, 2020October 7, 2021

A midterm outlook on the future of the workplace

The COVID-19 pandemic is the first of its kind for virtually everyone living on this planet. We’ve survived SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) in 2003, MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) in 2012, Ebola around 2014, and even AIDS.

We’re still here, and yet this feels different. As of this writing, we still don’t know what we don’t know about this virus’s trajectory, its reinfection rate, or the longer-term ramifications to the health of those infected.

It’s difficult to speculate how and in what ways this health crisis will affect the workplace globally, but in the nearer term, it’s reasonable to predict certain outcomes with a fairly high degree of certainty. The phases of COVID-19 will likely follow a pattern of illness, mitigation, and control (where we are now), economic impact in terms of stock markets and unemployment, and anticipated litigation, especially in the areas of employment, wage and hour, and disability discrimination. Finally, a “new normal” of sorts will establish itself, but things many never be quite the same. We’ve lost a certain innocence about many of the things we take for granted.

For example, there will certainly be a gradual, staged reintegration of workers back into the workplace. Some nations, states and companies may lurch right back in, while others will be more cautious, prudent, and mindful about the upcoming reintegration. What’s for sure, though, is that we’ll gradually move back into a fully operational and integrated workplace.

Working remotely

Two changes, however, are likely: a smaller workforce at each company and a remote approach to working. To that latter point, Gen Z’s desire for more flexibility and greater work-life balance may dovetail nicely into this paradigm of remote telework. Technology creates new opportunities for face-to-face, real-time meetings, even if they aren’t in person. Likewise, a smaller, leaner workforce will likely be the new norm as organizations pare down corporate infrastructure and spans of control and retain only the strongest performers.

A practical impact of more remote work from smaller teams, however, may be the threat to managers’ exemption status. For example, in California, “concurrent duties” are permissible during emergencies. An exempt employee may perform both exempt and nonexempt duties, all the time qualifying as exempt.

However, outside of an emergency, exempt managers must spend 50 percent or more of their time engaging in “exempt” level duties, meaning responsibilities with a high degree of independent judgment, discretion, and decision-making. If remote managers in smaller organizations start doing more of the work their subordinates have typically done, their exemption status could be threatened. And if your managers’ exempt classification is in jeopardy, class action wage and hour lawsuits may result.

HR steps up

How can HR leaders step up? By predicting the natural reintegration curve that’s coming our way. Some workers may truly suffer from anxiety and depression as they return to work. Expect new medical diagnoses of “adjustment disorder with anxiety” and PTSD—pre-traumatic stress disorder—as workers experience a new paranoia about coming to work, their surroundings, and everything they touch and come into contact with.

Think about it: simply using public transportation to get to work may cause some to seek medical treatment for an invisible enemy that surrounds them. Employees may ask about “proximity alarms” and warning devises that trigger when coming within six feet of coworkers and customers. Partitions and barriers like the plexiglass windows seen at the grocery store may be at the top of certain employees’ wish lists, as may be requests for staggering arrival times to avoid overcrowding.

Likewise, as an employer, you may want to implement new rules on PPE (personal protective equipment), hand-washing and other sanitation standards. You may likewise look to introduce attestation language to your electronic timekeeping system when nonexempt workers clock out at the end of the day verifying that they have no COVID-19 symptoms.

Challenges ahead

Whatever this looks like in your particular organization, rest assured that change is coming in the form of predictable and unforeseeable challenges.

Be the wisdom. Lead and welcome the change. When in doubt, err on the side of compassion and leave judgment behind when supporting your workers through this.

There will likely be no greater opportunity for you to exercise selfless leadership than you’re getting right now at this very moment in your career. We’re at a point of pure creation, with few policies, precedents, or practices to fall back on or guide us. See this as an opportunity to excel, shine, and lead.

Teach what you choose to learn. Help your team members and employees know that you’re there for them and you’ve got their backs, no matter what challenges come your way next. This crisis is the making of inspirational leadership that will define you for the rest of your career.

Now, more than ever, you have an opportunity to demonstrate role model leadership and touch and inspire those around you. Never let a crisis go to waste.

June 18, 2020August 8, 2022

Solving the concern over clean time clocks with a mobile solution

There was a time in the very recent past when the biggest worry about a workplace time clock was whether the employee arrived on time to punch in and remembered to clock out when their shift was over.

That has changed in recent months. It is understandable that employees’ anxiety levels are high, and the thought of having to touch an unsanitary time clock adds some unnecessary concern. While the specter of returning to work among customers as well as co-workers frays the nerves of some employees, about the last thing they need on their minds is whether the time clock on the wall was sanitized after the previous employee punched in for their shift.

Ease their fears

There are obvious sanitary solutions for cleaning workstations and countertops. A mobile time clock app is a software solution that allows employees to bypass touching the grimy surface of a physical time clock.

Cleanliness should always be a concern in any workplace. Employers wouldn’t set out boxes of dirty tissues. So why should a time clock that’s constantly being touched be the lone option for employees to start and end their shift?

And don’t be fooled into thinking that a biometric time clock is a cleaner option. That fingerprint left by the previous employee? Do you know where that person’s digit was before tapping the pad?

It just makes sense to offer employees a mobile solution to cleanly and effortlessly clock in, safe in the knowledge that their employer is vigilant in maintaining a healthy workforce and concerned about accurate time management.

Safe, sanitary and simple

Automating how a staff clocks in and out is not only the sanitary option, it also is the simple solution to cutting back hours of burdensome administrative work each week. With such a keen focus on predictive scheduling laws and regulations, an automated time clock system featuring a mobile app can communicate schedules that help companies remain in compliance. Employers can communicate scheduling in advance and explain the flexibility needs of the business at the same time, creating an open line of communication between employer and employee.

Employer advantages

Buddy punching has existed practically since the invention of time clocks. A time-clock mobile app assures that the correct person clocks in for the right shift through electronic photo verification and unique passcodes.

Automation eliminates repetitive processes that can lead to miscalculating payroll, which is among the fastest and easiest ways to get burned by a wage-and-hour lawsuit. According to Internal Revenue Service statistics, about one-third of employers make payroll errors. The American Payroll Association separately reported that such errors range between is up to 8 percent of total payroll.

A mobile clock-in solution also helps assure that staff is paid correctly according to time worked and is in compliance with local, state and federal laws.

Here are some advantages employers will find by using mobile clock-in software:

React immediately to curb or cut overtime.
Automation saves time and effort.
Save money as buddy punching is regulated.
Avoid costly lawsuits by complying with all regulations.

Employee advantages

Eliminating a physical time clock eases in-office cleanliness concerns. Companies with staff located in multiple locations who are working remotely allows them to clock in via a mobile app whenever and wherever they are. A time clock app is GPS-enabled and works everywhere in the world. Employees can:

Easily and simply clock in and out with one swipe on their phone and not touch a time clock.
Request time off remotely.
View current and past timesheets.
Communicate while on the go.

Ask yourself: Do you really want your employees touching the same time clock? It’s a cesspool of germs waiting to pollute your workforce with every touch. Clean up your physical workplace and tidy your workforce management processes by integrating the Workforce.com Time Clock App.