Category: Staffing Management

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The Essential Guide to Shift Planning

A few too many under or overstaffed shifts. Angry team members who feel they’ve worked more night shifts in the past week than their colleagues. Labor costs through the roof to cover a high amount of overtime. No call, no show absences.

These issues, and more, are all byproducts of ineffective or broken shift planning procedures. To add insult to injury, your HR team probably spends way too much time every month navigating Excel spreadsheets and shift templates to get it right. 

It doesn’t have to be this way. Employee management tools like Workforce.com are specifically designed to help guide you through the employee shift planning maze with your sanity intact. 

In this guide, we’ll run you through some of the important steps to adopt that will make shedding blood, sweat, and tears on shift planning a thing of the past.  

Planning a shift schedule

The best preparation you can do for shift planning is to know your business inside and out. Filling all your shifts is meaningless if done randomly. Here are the basics you should cover before assigning employees anywhere.

  • Monitor demand: The most efficient work schedules take into account and even forecast the unique demand patterns of your company. When are you the busiest? Which nights are typically quiet? What regular events impact your foot traffic?
  • Know your staff’s skills and abilities: This is where managerial knowledge becomes priceless. For example, knowing which workers are particularly good at handling customers or which ones are great at mentoring less experienced staff means you can always put the right people in the right place at the right time.
  • Check safety regulations: Don’t overlook the practicalities. If you’re legally obligated to have a certain number of trained first-aiders on shift or need to maintain a ratio of staff to kids in a childcare setting, this needs to be baked into your schedule from the start. 

By making these a core part of your shift management system, you’ll head off lots of future problems and build your schedules on rock-solid foundations.

Creating a shift schedule

Once you’re armed with intimate knowledge of your market conditions and predicted needs, it’s just a case of filling those empty shifts. With the right preparation, this part of the job should already be less intimidating, but here are the key things to keep in mind when you create a shift schedule.

  • Know your staff availability: Assigning workers to shifts they cannot attend isn’t just inefficient for you, but it’s also frustrating for employees. Keep track of things like childcare arrangements, evening classes, and other important things in your workers’ lives. It allows you to get your schedule right the first time and shows them that you are taking notice of what matters to them.
  • Communicate schedules quickly and accurately: Don’t leave employees in the dark about their shifts. The earlier you can inform them of their hours and the clearer the information is, the sooner you’ll identify any potential problems.
  • Use the right tools: Many companies still use spreadsheets or even pen and paper for shift planning. Not only are these methods inflexible and prone to error, but they’re also hard to distribute and make it easy to lose track of details. Specialist shift planning and time tracking software can automate the hardest parts of scheduling and send up-to-date shift information to your workers’ phones in real-time.
  • Always plan ahead: If you’ve taken all the previous steps into account, you should be able to confidently plan shift schedules at least two weeks in advance. Indeed, depending on where your business operates, you may be legally obligated to.

It can be a lot to take in, and for people new to shift planning, this is where the feeling of being overwhelmed can rear up again. Trust your data, be methodical, and even the most complex shift planning job can be broken down into manageable parts. Remember, you can always use scheduling software to automatically match employees to shifts based on your criteria.

Navigating predictive scheduling laws

If you manage shift workers and aren’t yet familiar with the concept of predictive scheduling laws, then you should brush up on the details even if you don’t operate in an area where they are in effect.

  • What are predictive scheduling laws? These laws, also referred to as “Fair Workweek,” generally require shift workers to be given at least two weeks’ notice of their schedules and mandated rest periods between shifts. This means no “clopening,” where the same employee closes up at night and reopens the first shift the next day.
  • Where are predictive scheduling laws in place? So far, one state (Oregon) and eight cities (San Francisco, Berkeley, Emeryville, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York City, Philadelphia, and Seattle) have passed predictive scheduling laws. Other states have bills coming up for debate. There are regional variations, so be sure to find out if these laws apply to any of your operations and, if so, what the specific requirements are.

The penalties for breaching these laws can be steep as they apply to each infraction. If you have multiple shift workers whose schedules do not comply, the fines will mount. 

Careful planning and good recordkeeping will help ensure you are not exposed to unnecessary legal risks. As well as compiling your shift data automatically, employee scheduling software can be easily set up to catch infractions at the scheduling stage, eliminating the danger of falling foul of predictive scheduling legislation in your region.

Even if you are not legally required to follow these laws, it’s worth implementing some of the changes regardless. Studies have shown that workers who have advance notice of shifts and healthy breaks in between are more productive and stay with companies longer. If staff churn is an issue for you, taking a long-term approach to shift planning may help retain employees.

Managing time-off requests

No schedule is written in stone, of course, and employees will want to take personal time off. This doesn’t need to throw your shift planning into disarray, provided you have established a clear framework for managing employee time-off requests.

  • Create a PTO policy: If your company doesn’t have an existing policy dictating the rules of personal time off, create one as a matter of urgency. It doesn’t have to be pages of legal language. A common-sense policy that lays out what is expected of both employees and the company is all you need.
  • Implement a PTO policy: The crucial aspect of any PTO policy is notice periods. How much notice must employees give when booking time off? How quickly will the company approve or deny requests? These are the questions your policy should answer.

As a manager, keeping track of who has time off and when is vital. You don’t want to approve requests that leave you understaffed. Using scheduling software is the quick and easy way to avoid this, as it can automatically alert you whenever a time-off request creates a problem elsewhere on the schedule.

Dealing with staff shortages

Emergencies will happen, and staff will sometimes not be able to work for unpredictable reasons. While this is never ideal, staff coverage doesn’t have to be a problem. In fact, you will already have insulated your business against this issue by preparing properly for shift planning in the first place.

  • Plan shifts using past data: You should already know when your highest sales periods are and when business is typically slow. Prioritize having backup staff for shifts that typically get slammed and cannot be understaffed.
  • Communicate schedules early: You should also be in the habit of assigning shifts a few weeks in advance. This won’t save you from staff with transport problems on the day of or trips to the ER, but it will give employees the opportunity to alert you of unexpected occurrences that aren’t same-day emergencies. Even a day’s notice is better than no notice at all.

The most robust way of minimizing the impact of staff unavailability is to allow employees to swap shifts to plug these unexpected gaps.

Webinar: How to Schedule While Understaffed

Accommodating shift swaps

The idea of shift swaps, or shift replacements, can create anxiety for some managers. Giving employees the option to request shift replacements seems to fly in the face of shift planning. A shift trade policy can actually be a benefit to both the staff and the company when properly managed. Not only does it help fill the gaps caused by unexpected staff shortages, but 87% of workers now want to have more control over their work schedules. 

  • Create a shift replacement policy: As with a time-off policy, this doesn’t need to be complicated. Simply make clear the period in which shifts can be dropped and picked up by available employees, subject to managerial approval.
  • Communicate the policy: Let your staff know that they are encouraged to request shift replacements if needed and won’t be penalized for doing so. Encourage them to use the process, and many of your last-minute staffing problems will fix themselves.
  • Automate with technology: Shift replacement processes are only as effective as the level of automation invested into them. Instead of scrambling last minute to find replacement staff over text and email, replacements should be completed on a single, online system. When an employee requests coverage for a shift, their peers should automatically get notified and a bidding process should follow. – this workflow takes the logistics of seeking replacements off a manager’s plate. 
  • Retain managerial oversight: Just like booking time off, you should still approve requests carefully to make sure that appropriately skilled staff are swapping like-for-like shifts and that any trades don’t nudge workers into overtime.

If you still handle your shift planning using spreadsheets or pen and paper, then tracking and implementing shift trade requests does become exponentially more complicated. Scheduling tools make the process painless by allowing employees to make their requests digitally while empowering managers to offer open shifts to specific workers. Any changes or requests will be instantly available to both employees and management through notifications through employee communications software.

Now you can be confident in your shift planning

Shift planning is less intimidating when you approach it fully prepared and break it down into a methodical process. Taking control of shift planning doesn’t just make the life of managers less stressful, but it also results in more efficient use of your employees and a company culture that is less likely to be derailed by staffing issues.

There’s nothing involved in this process that can’t be done using manual techniques, but if the complexity still overwhelms you, consider shift planning software to ease the strain.

Shift planning software uses automation to facilitate the building of schedules and timesheets, making the organization of shift work much easier. 

Try it out for yourself today, or, check out the free webinar below on the ROI of shift planning software, featuring exclusive research from Forrester Research:

Webinar: Building a Business Case for WFM

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Most Common 12-hour Shift Schedules (2023)

Post Summary

  • 12-hour shift schedules boost morale and lower inconsistency

  • Pick from a variety of the best 12-hour shift scheduling examples

  • Labor law compliance and occupational fatigue concerns need to be accounted for

So, you are considering a 12-hour hour shift schedule. This is a bold move that has the potential to increase both employee efficiency and morale. But how do you properly manage to transition your workforce to four extra hours per shift? Debbie in HR needs her priorities balanced with that of Dale down in the warehouse; their daily routines are at the mercy of you, the all-powerful manager. This is a lot of pressure, I know. 

This pressure to make the perfect schedule stems mostly from all the potential benefits your company stands to gain from making the change. Workers get extended time off, allowing for a generally better work-life balance in the long run. 12-hour shifts also have lower turnover, resulting in fewer errors in employee miscommunication and inconsistency between shifts. Lower shift turnover also means less unproductive downtime – the value from this adds up quickly after a year. 

All of these benefits are great and all, but let’s slow our roll. The first step is to choose a specific type of 12-hour schedule. Fortunately, there are many options to choose from for organizations operating 24/7. 

So, let’s dive into some of the best 12-hour shift schedule examples. Make sure to evaluate them with your employees before adopting any particular one.

 

The DuPont

Named after the company where it originated in the late 1950s, its most notable feature is seven straight days off during every 28-day rotation. It uses four teams and two twelve-hour rotating day and night shifts to provide 24/7 coverage on a four-week cycle. Each team works 4 consecutive night shifts, followed by 3 days off duty, then 3 consecutive day shifts, followed by 1 day off duty, then 3 consecutive night shifts, then 3 days off duty, then 4 consecutive day shifts, then finally 7 consecutive days off duty.

 

The 2-3-2

This schedule emerged in the 1960s and became popular in the 1980s. It’s sometimes known as EOWEO or “every other weekend off.” Employees follow a 14-day pattern of 2 days on, 2 off, 3 days on, 2 off, 2 days on and then 3 off.

Workers know they’ll have a three-day weekend off every other weekend and won’t have to work more than three-night shifts in a row. However, workers don’t get more than three days off in a row unlike with many other 12-hour rotating schedules. Also, this schedule often requires workers to rotate rapidly between night and day shifts – this can be quite fatiguing.

A slightly adjusted version of this schedule is called the Pitman schedule and features the same 2-3-2 format. However, with the Pitman, there are two or more teams. Some of these teams are on day shifts while others are on nights.

 

4 On, 4 Off

Here, employees work four days or nights and then have four days or nights off. At some companies, workers stay on nights for as long as 24 days; at others, they switch every eight days. It usually consists of two teams, one covers day shifts and the other covers night shifts.

This schedule offers workers enough time off to recuperate. Also, in every eight-week cycle, workers have one period in which they get three straight weekends off.

Alternatively, management could adopt a three on, three off schedule, which, I would hope, should be fairly self-explanatory to you at this point.

 

5-5-2-2 and 5-2-2-5

If you are looking to maximize days off, this one might be for you. Two sequences are in the schedule here. On a two-week cycle, one squad works 5 days on then has 5 days off, then 2 days on 2 days off. The second squad works 5 days on and has 2 days off, then 2 days on and 5 days off. This sequence is repeated with two more squads for night shifts. 

This method is great for getting consistent long breaks. However, workers are also subject to working five 12-hour days over a seven-day stretch with only a two-day break in the mix.

 

Solving the 12-hour Shift Schedule

Overwhelmed yet? I wouldn’t blame you. Crafting these schedules for yourself may seem like a daunting task. Luckily, Workforce.com has a solution for this task, offering software that combines a simple user interface with comprehensive employee scheduling automation. If you are a business staffed by hourly employees in retail, hospitality, food & beverage, or healthcare, workforce management software could be the answer to your 12-hour shift problems. 

Here are a few of its key features:

Shift Patterns

The shift pattern tool allows managers to create schedules that follow “rules” like the recommended schedules listed above. Employees can be assigned to teams that follow certain patterns. Once a shift pattern is created, managers can then save and use it to auto-generate future schedules. 

Shift Parameters

Workforce.com also allows managers to auto-build shifts based on demand. Managers can set parameters for every shift, like making them all 12 hours minimum in length. While this method sacrifices a consistent 12-hour shift schedule pattern, it properly adjusts for consumer demand and makes the scheduling process even faster. 

Compliance

Beyond the obvious logistical hurdles of manually creating a 12-hour schedule, errors in labor compliance and break scheduling are additional causes for concern. Luckily, Workforce.com has compliance features such as classification tags designed to conform your business with regional labor and union policies regarding minimum wage, overtime, and break schedules.

Breaks in particular are a tricky part of the 12-hour schedule equation. Employee burnout resulting from excessive work demands and mismanaged break planning can be quite a common problem with this style of schedule. 

Oh, you want an example? I’ll give you one. Nurses are especially prone to a condition deemed “occupational fatigue” when working 12-hour shifts according to a study published earlier this year in The Journal of Nursing Administration. The last thing a hospital or a patient wants is a bleary-eyed nurse haphazardly administering the wrong meds. 

Employee burnout like this is something you absolutely want to avoid. Proper measures need to be taken to ensure workers subject to 12-hour shifts have sufficient recovery time between and during shifts. Luckily, Workforce.com makes it quick and easy to set up breaks to be automatically built into every employee’s schedule. Managers can also track breaks in real-time via notifications to ensure employees are taking properly timed breaks. 

Labor Tracking

And remember: often, switching from an 8-hour to a 12-hour shift schedule can increase wages by around 2%. Workforce.com ensures cost neutrality during the switching process via live labor tracking that can tell you exactly when employees are working and how they are being compensated for their time.

 

Not for everyone

It is also worth knowing that 12-hour rotating shifts are not always applicable to every industry. For jobs requiring strenuous physical activity or long hours in the outdoors, 12-hour shifts may be too physically draining for employees to handle on a daily basis. Older employees and single parents may also find difficulty adapting to 12-hour shift schedules.

Moreover, workforce management software is best suited for automating 12-hour shifts for hourly workers in retail, hospitality, staffing, and sometimes healthcare. If your business is in a much more niche industry with highly specialized needs, it would be best to look for software specific to your use case.

Get Started

Are you ready to get started scheduling 12-hour shifts? Workforce.com has your back. Go ahead, book a call today or see it in action with a free trial.

 

(Psst…be sure to check out our user reviews below!)

Workforce.com is a leader in Employee Scheduling on G2

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Managing Employee Time-Off Requests [Guide + Examples]

An employee requesting time off on their phone

Summary

  • Vacation, sick time, PTO banks, and unpaid leave are only a few forms of employee time off — More

  • There are multiple things to consider when building and implementing an effective time off policy — More

  • Use a variety of software tools and best practices to properly manage employee time off requests — More

As a business owner or human resources professional, managing employee time-off requests is a balancing act that you’re likely to perform on a daily basis. 

On the one hand, you need to respect and value your employees’ personal lives. You must give them the opportunity to take time off work to rest, cover sick days, or handle last-minute emergencies. 

On the other hand, you need to find a way to manage leave requests in a way that won’t jeopardize your company’s productivity or the quality of service you give to your clientele due to staff shortages. 

The only way to strike this balance is to develop a clear time-off request policy. This ensures that you align your business’s needs with your leave management process. It also helps you streamline the process in a way that is clear to your HR department as well as your staff. Your time-off request process and procedures should be clearly outlined in your employee handbook.

Employee time off comes in different forms

Before you start designing your policy, it’s important to understand the different types of time off and how they apply to your business.

Paid time off (PTO)

In the United States, employers are not legally required to give employees paid time off, unlike other developed countries. However, 12 states and Washington, D.C., currently have additional laws in place mandating paid time off.

Taking time off is good for both productivity and employees’ mental health. Offering paid time off can also help you retain talented employees and promote work-life balance for your staff. Some companies that offer paid time off choose to group PTO under one umbrella, and others break it down into different categories. PTO categories might include:

  • Vacation time: time off from work for employees to rest and take a break.
  • Paid sick leave: days set aside for when employees are ill, caring for a sick family member, or attending doctor’s appointments.
  • Bereavement leave: leave offered for the death of a close family member, often to attend the funeral.
  • Maternity/paternity leave: paid leave for new parents.
  • Jury duty or voting time: paid time off to cover jury duty or to vote.

Unpaid time off

As the name implies, this is time off that employees don’t get paid for. If your business doesn’t offer PTO, all the requests for time off that you deal with as a manager will fall under this category.

While the United States doesn’t require paid medical leave, the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) does require that businesses offer 12 weeks of job-protected unpaid leave every year for certain family and medical reasons.

What to include in your time-off policy

Once you know what kind of time off your business offers to hourly employees, you can build your policy accordingly. Your policy should be shared with all your employees (via an employee handbook or equivalent) and be easily accessible for them to consult at all times. Here are some of the key things your policy should include:

How much time off employees receive

Your time-off policy should not only outline the different types of time off that employees get but should also include details on how much of each type that employees receive. For example, does the number of days employees can take off increase the longer they have worked for you? Do they get zero time off during their probation period?

How to request time off

Do you prefer to receive requests by email, through an app, by text, or even by having your staff fill out a time-off request form and drop it on your desk? Any of these options are fine just so long as you’re not regularly forgetting time off requests and scheduling the wrong staff members. But even without obvious mistakes, manually requesting and tracking PTO requests limits your organization’s overall efficiency potential. 

Make sure to create a system to file and review time off and vacation requests. You can use a calendar to block out requests or an email folder to keep all requests in one place. You can sort them by status to make it easy to browse between pending, denied, or approved requests. They can also be sorted by employee name, making it easier to spot if one person requests a lot of time off compared to their co-workers.

You can also use workforce management software to handle these requests automatically.

Workforce lets you see and approve all time off requests
Workforce allows you to see and approve all employee requests for time off in one place.

How far in advance requests should be made

Incorporating clear rules into your time-off and vacation policy can save you hours and make scheduling much easier. It’s much faster to create a weekly schedule without including absent employees than it is to try to redo a schedule and find coverage for them at the last moment.

You can also decide that you need more advance notice for longer periods of time off. Maybe you only need two weeks’ notice to grant someone two days off but would prefer to have two months’ notice before approving a full week of leave. Make sure to include that, too.

How often employees can request time off

Communicate to employees if there are limits to how often they can request time off and use their vacation days. If you can only grant time off twice a month (or twice a year), make sure to include that in your policy, too.

When are time-off blackout periods?

Finally, spell out any blackout periods for your business. These are times of the year when you generally won’t be able to grant time-off requests. For example, retail businesses are often very busy during the holiday season and need all hands on deck, and restaurants in popular vacation spots experience their busiest periods in the summer.

Workforce.com App Time off request
Workforce.com’s employee app makes it easy to submit time off requests.

How to actively manage time off requests

Now that you have a clear policy in place, let’s look at how you can put it into practice and use it to manage requests in a way that’s clear, fair, and compliant with legal regulations.

Create a process for overlapping requests

Acknowledge to yourself that even in a perfect world, you won’t be able to accommodate all time-off requests, especially if they overlap and risk leaving your business short-staffed.

Create a system for yourself to manage overlapping requests. Different systems have different advantages: For example, you could allocate time off on a first-come, first-serve basis. This encourages staff members to make their requests far in advance and makes it easier for you to plan your schedule. You could also decide to prioritize time-off requests from employees with more seniority or who make requests less often.

A shift schedule clashes with paid leave
Use an employee scheduling tool like Workforce.com to prevent accidental scheduling of employees taking time off.

Leave space for managerial discretion

Whatever you decide, it’s important to leave space for managerial discretion. If you need at least one bartender on every shift and none are available to step in, granting a time-off request will leave you in a bind. But be aware there’s a risk that your most valuable team members may resent you if you deny all their requests because your business can’t function without them. Use your best judgment to keep things running smoothly.

Always strive to be fair

At the same time, strive to be as fair as possible. Most employees are sensitive to favoritism in the workplace, and creating an unjust dynamic in the workplace will tank morale.

Don’t grant exceptions only for one employee, for example. Try to rotate which team members cover the most undesirable shifts, both throughout the month and from one year to the next: You may not remember who covered Christmas Eve last year, but the employee who worked that night certainly does. Consider incentives for harder shifts, like offering weekends off later in the year to whoever covers the holidays, for example.

Allow shift swapping

If you can, consider allowing your employees to swap shifts, and create a clear system for them to do so — make sure they know to run it by you for final approval, so you don’t end up short-staffed or lacking the specific skills you need on a busy shift. For example, you can request that employees email you their shift trades. By giving your team more autonomy to trade shifts, they can help manage their schedules and create less work for you.

Workers using Workforce.com’s employee scheduling software can submit shift swap requests from the mobile app; you and your managers can quickly review and decline/approve shift swaps from one place within the platform.

Expect the unexpected

Even with the best policies in place, always expect the unexpected. Unavoidable emergencies will come up, and even your most reliable employees might have to call out without warning. Build up a trusted roster of part-timers who can fill in, especially during your business’s busier periods.

Communicate clearly to make managing time-off requests easier

It’s important to communicate with your employees so they understand how time-off requests work at your company. Being transparent and fair are key to maintaining morale and creating a positive work environment for everyone.

The best way to find employees who can follow your time-off policies is to explain them upfront during the hiring process. That way, prospective employees can figure out in advance if they can work within those requirements, and you can save time by hiring people who are the best fit for your business’s needs.

If you can’t grant an employee’s time-off request (you’re short-staffed that day, or too many people are requesting the same day off), sit your team member down and see if you can reach a compromise or offer an alternative. Would a different day that same week work, or a different weekend in the month? Showing your team you’re willing to work with them when possible goes a long way toward creating goodwill and encourages them to be flexible in turn.

Bolster your time-off policy with Workforce.com

Besides a robust time-off policy, workforce management software like Workforce.com makes implementation easier. Tools like scheduling and time and attendance automate and streamline processes related to overseeing and approving time-off requests and ensuring that things are done in a transparent and fair manner. 

For more information on how to level up your employee scheduling, check out The Complete Guide to Employee Scheduling, or, get in touch with our team today.

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4 proven steps for tackling employee absenteeism

Summary

  • Identifying the cause of employee absenteeism not only helps uncover deeper-rooted issues — More

  • Establishing an employee attendance policy promotes transparency across your company — More

  • Keeping your employees engaged makes them more likely to be productive and present at work — More

  • Implementing a scheduling process that is reliable and flexible will tackle a number of issues that would otherwise increase the likelihood of employee absenteeism. — More

A common yet highly disruptive issue any business owner or human resources professional has to deal with is employee absenteeism. This sort of employee absence refers to unscheduled absences beyond what is acceptable and planned within a company’s policy. Acceptable absences include things like paid time off (PTO), sick leave, or unpaid time off someone might take as part of the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA).

Having regularly absent employees results in lost productivity, as unplanned absences create extra pressure and more work for other team members. This extra work could lead to burnout. The causes of excessive absenteeism can also be indicative of deep-rooted issues, such as low employee morale or a toxic work environment. 

Employee absenteeism is a perennial problem, but it is particularly damaging in the shift-based service industries. According to the most recent figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, service industries have the highest absenteeism rate in the US economy. Workforce.com’s own research backs this up. In our 2021 survey, 31% of businesses listed disruption to shifts caused by employee absenteeism as one of their biggest problems.

With the right tools and data in hand, managers can reduce employee absenteeism as well as identify and tackle its underlying causes.  

1. Identify why employees are frequently absent

Your business is a complicated machine. Just as you wouldn’t try to fix a problem with your car or computer by randomly replacing parts, you can’t successfully address persistent absenteeism in your company without knowing where the problem is.

Using employee scheduling software can tie together all of your shift schedules and time clock information. This joined-up approach allows you to query that data in order to spot the patterns of absenteeism and identify the who, where, and when of the problem.

Identifying the frequent trouble spots is important as the root causes of absenteeism can occur at different organizational levels.

  • Specific staff members: If a particular employee is persistently missing workdays, it’s worth checking if there is a valid reason. There may be problems that can be addressed without escalating to disciplinary action.
  • Specific shifts: If you find that absenteeism is a recurring issue only on certain shifts, it could be a problem with a particular shift leader or similar personnel issues that are making employees avoid that shift.
  • Specific locations: If you see red flags for absenteeism at a particular outlet or office, this may be a sign of managerial problems at that location. It could be an indication of something more sinister such as workplace bullying or workplace harassment. There could also be a local or geographical context — is that location particularly hard to reach on public transport?

Now that you know more about the source of your employee absenteeism, you can start addressing it.

2. Establish a clear employee attendance policy

Absences have immediate financial costs for a business. Absences related to mental health issues alone results in a $47.6 billion annual loss to the US economy through lost productivity. There should, therefore, be no ambiguity over attendance.

Employees will always require sick days or will be unable to work due to personal issues. Regardless, they should know what is required of them in such cases through a clearly defined absenteeism policy. This way, they are also aware of the disciplinary procedure that will kick in should they not meet their end of the agreement.

Your company needs a clear and accessible employee attendance policy. A good attendance policy should include:

  • How much notice employees must give if they can’t come in
  • What absence rate or number of absences is considered unacceptable
  • How many days of “no-call” or unexcused absences will be considered grounds for immediate dismissal

When considering attendance data with regard to employee absenteeism, it is especially important to take absence frequency into account rather than just how many days were missed. Ten days of absence in a row caused by a serious illness tells a very different story than 10 days of last-minute absences spread across the year that always fall on Mondays, for instance.

3. Implement incentives like employee wellness programs

Increased workloads and burnout are major contributors to low morale and absenteeism. Therefore, looking out for your employees’ physical and mental well-being has long-term benefits for them as well as your bottom line. 

Implementing employee wellness programs is a great way to achieve this. Such programs promote and encourage your employees to maintain good physical and mental health. 

A wellness program can take on many different forms. Some common examples include:

  • Installing fitness centers at your offices — this might be trickier for small businesses. If you have the space and resources, it’s a great way to help your team stay in shape.
  • Commuting incentives — encouraging your staff members to get to work on foot or by bicycle instead of using their cars keeps them and the environment healthy.
  • Covering expenses for things like gym membership, yoga classes, or even sports equipment.   

4. Create a reliable and collaborative scheduling procedure

Unhappy employees become disengaged and prone to excessive absences, and erratic work schedules are frequent causes of this disconnect. Creating reliable and predictable shifts gives workers more control over their work-life balance and allows them to plan their time with less stress. Research makes the connection clear: lower employee engagement results in increased employee absenteeism.

Implement predictive scheduling

Investing in predictive scheduling will not be optional for companies operating in certain US states and cities. Predictive scheduling laws are already on the books in Vermont, Oregon, San Francisco, Berkeley, Emeryville, San Jose, Seattle, New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia. Eight states have pending legislation on the subject.

Whether you are legally obliged to implement such a system or not, it’s worth adopting the most common aspects of predictive scheduling:

  • Changes to schedules should be communicated well in advance.
  • Employees should have sufficient rest between shifts — between nine and 11 hours.
  • Avoid the practice of “clopening,” where the same employee closes up at night and reopens the next morning.
  • Offer available shifts to current employees before taking on temporary staff.

Following these basic rules will encourage a more engaged, happy, and loyal workforce and reduce employee absenteeism.

Offer collaborative scheduling

Absenteeism can also be a sign that employees are unable to work the shifts they’ve been assigned. One way around this is to give employees the ability to have more say in which shifts they work or even swap shifts with colleagues. Allowing this involvement in the scheduling process helps employees fit work around their other commitments.

Not only does this collaboration remove one of the common excuses for missing work or tardiness, but research also supports the idea that offering employees more control over when they work directly addresses the causes of employee absenteeism. A study by Future Forum shows how workplace flexibility means employees are more productive and more connected to their workplace culture. 

There are two methods of introducing more collaborative scheduling to your company — shift bids and shift swaps. With shift bids, the manager puts out a list of the shifts that need to be filled, employees bid to be assigned the ones most convenient to them, and then the manager makes the final choice from those who put themselves forward. With shift swaps, workers are able to trade shifts on an ad-hoc basis while the manager signs off on the swaps to ensure full staff coverage is maintained. In both cases, employees get more control over when they work without undermining the manager’s authority.

The prospect of changing the way your shifts are assigned can seem daunting, but employee scheduling software such as Workforce.com has features to streamline the process for easy implementation.

Employee absenteeism is your alarm call

A high level of employee absenteeism is a sign that something isn’t working in your business. Consider it a warning that staff morale is low, and there are scheduling and managerial issues that need to be addressed to stem the tide. Data from your employee scheduling software will identify these pain points, and the responses listed above will tackle not just the symptoms of absenteeism but the cause as well. Seize the opportunity to make your business work better, and you’ll not only solve your immediate absence problems but also create a happier, more engaged workforce for long-term benefits.

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Employee or contractor? 6 worker misclassification FAQs

Astronaut Dog Thinking

Summary

  • Misclassifying full-time employees as independent contractors can lead to legal and compliance issues down the line. 

  • There are a number of ways to determine whether or not a worker should be classified as an employee or contractor. 

  • Aside from seeking legal counsel, employers can use workforce management solutions to stay compliant with labor laws and properly classify workers. 

The number of freelancers and independent contractors is growing steadily in the United States. McKinsey found that approximately 58 million American workers, or 36% of the American working population, consider themselves to be independent workers. This figure is expected to reach 90.1 million by 2028. 

With this rise in contractors in recent years, worker protection laws are shifting to reduce incorrect worker classification.

Worker misclassification is when a company hires individuals as self-employed or independent contractors to carry out the tasks of a full-time worker. 

To learn more about the misclassification of employees and its implications, we spoke with Hinshaw & Culbertson law partner Aimee Delaney.

What exactly is worker misclassification?

“Misclassification is a term that is used when an employer incorrectly identifies an individual or position as an independent contractor when the individual is really an employee,” said Delaney. 

According to Delaney, there are a number of circumstances that can motivate employers to classify individuals as contractors: 

  • Independent contractors are not subject to state and federal wage laws, which means they are not entitled to overtime if they work over 40 hours a week. 
  • An employer does not have to pay the employer portion of payroll taxes and does not make withholdings for an independent contractor. 
  • An independent contractor is also not entitled to benefits such as workers’ compensation or unemployment benefits from the organization that the individual contracts with. 

“Misclassification does not require bad intent to be a violation,” said Delaney, “so even if it was an honest mistake, it can still present a violation of law.”

Delaney added that the definition of an employee, as opposed to an independent contractor, lies with the employer. It should evaluate whether it has employees on the payroll who are performing the same work and function as the independent contractor. A good follow-up to that question is will the independent contractor be performing the main work of the business.

“Answering these questions in the affirmative is usually a sign of trouble,” Delaney said. “So if I run a home health business and have a staff of 25 home health workers but want to bring on three more as independent contractors, you are probably well on your way to misclassification.”

Delaney said the home care and home health industry can suffer from labor shortages. While trying to use independent contractors to address a shortage of workers may be tempting, it can also be risky, she said.

“Staffing agencies would be a better resource in that scenario, as it avoids the misclassification issue,” Delaney said. “You may not be able to avoid a joint employer issue, but at least you should avoid the misclassification issue.”

Why does employee misclassification matter?

Employee misclassification is bad for business, bad for workers, and bad for the public sector. According to the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), misclassified employees lead to lost government contributions that should be going towards things like state unemployment insurance and workers’ compensation insurance.  

While employers might attempt to incorrectly classify their employees to avoid having to deal with tax withholding, the financial and reputational consequences of doing so greatly outweigh the savings.

Workers who carry out the role of employees but are contracted as freelancers are not entitled to the same rights and benefits. They are not eligible for things like paid vacation and sick leave and can be laid off much more easily.  

Independent contractors are also responsible for paying their own Social Security and Medicare through the Self Employment Tax (SET).

How do employers typically classify a permanent employee versus an independent contractor? 

When an employer hires a permanent employee, that person is expected to devote their full workday to the tasks they are given by the employer. Permanent employees cannot work for other organizations at the same time. 

The employment relationship between a company and an independent contractor, on the other hand, is of a different nature. According to Delaney: 

An employer will typically only have an independent contractor for some type of special project that falls outside of the normal business conducted by the operation. For example, a law firm may need to upgrade its document management system and retain a third-party vendor as an independent contractor to complete the project. The contractor is not performing the work of the law firm, the law firm does not exercise control or supervision over the vendor and only controls the ultimate product. This concept is also separate from the concept of temporary staffing, which relies on the use of temporary workers that are employed by a third party.

The  California law Assembly Bill 5 (AB-5) clarifies the difference between employee and contractor in the state. The California Supreme Court requires the use of the ABC test, outlined on the ca.gov website, which assigns three conditions that must be met to consider an employee as an independent contractor:

  • The worker is free from the control and direction of the hiring entity in connection with the performance of the work, both under the contract for the performance of the work and in fact;
  • The worker performs work that is outside the usual course of the hiring entity’s business; and
  • The worker is customarily engaged in an independently established trade, occupation, or business of the same nature as that involved in the work performed.
(Source: https://www.labor.ca.gov/employmentstatus/abctest/)

Also read: Ease compliance concerns with workforce management software

What is the advantage for employers to classify their workforce as independent contractors? 

Some employers think worker misclassification is worth it because contractors are more affordable. But Delaney says the risks involved outweigh the perceived benefits:

“There is no advantage to employers if the classification is not correct, because the risk and liability will generally outweigh any benefit. If the classification is appropriate, the advantage is often a lower cost with a known end date. As noted above, independent contractors are not subject to state and federal wage laws, so they are not subject to the minimum wage and overtime requirements.”

What should employers know about defining their workforce to avoid misclassification? 

“Employers must be aware of the key concepts and tests that are applied to determine whether independent contractor status is appropriate,” says Delaney. “These are the tests that will get used by the Labor Department, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the IRS, etc. In some form or fashion, these tests all look to the level of control exercised by the organization over the individual and the economic realities of the relationship.”

If you are using the services of independent contractors, Delaney recommends that you carry out regular audits to make sure that you are doing so in a compliant way. If you do find cases of misclassified employees, you will also need to assess whether any overtime wages are owed to them.  

Also read: What employers and HR should expect from new Labor Secretary Marty Walsh

Is employee misclassification a growing trend in wage and hour/overtime violations? If so, why is that?

The wage and hour laws stipulated in the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) do not apply to independent contractors. Because of this, companies with misclassified workers are often found guilty of breaking wage and overtime violations.

If a worker is found to be misclassified, their employers might end up owing them significant amounts of money in back wages. 

Stay compliant with a workforce management tool

Navigating federal and state laws around labor codes and employee classification can be tricky. The language is complicated and misinterpreting it can lead to mistakes that break the bank and your reputation. So when in doubt, seek legal advice. 

Workforce.com can help with our powerful wage and hour compliance platform. It accounts for federal, state, and regional wage laws when paying salaries, even in situations where your staff might be distributed around the country. And most importantly, an automated workforce management system helps you maintain an accurate paper trail for whenever external audits come knocking. With detailed labor records, you can rest assured that misclassification accusations will never catch your organization off guard. 

Book a demo today to keep your time tracking and scheduling air-tight. 

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How staffing agencies can better manage a remote workforce

Summary

  • As remote work continues its rise, modern workforce management technology is being adopted – staffing agencies should be at the forefront of this development.

  • Flexibility and visibility are key when it comes to how staffing agencies manage employees

  • Make it mobile: scheduling, time tracking, and labor compliance all need to be mobile-friendly to cut down on costs and increase employee experience

Managing remote employees has rapidly shifted from being a new and unpredictable challenge to a regular part of the work landscape over the last two years. The National Bureau of Economic Research estimates half of the workforce is now working remotely at least part of the time. While we have developed an incredible number of tools and processes to support remote staffing, remote work is still developing, and it still comes with its own unique challenges.

Staffing agencies are tackling remote work in their own ways. Some may be managing remote workers as part of their workforce, while others focus entirely on staffing remotely. Even those who don’t regularly manage remote staff may have to deal with the workplaces they staff occasionally shifting to remote work to accommodate unpredictable events.

All staffing agencies with remote workers will benefit from continuing to refine their remote workforce management skills and systems. Effective management builds a remote workforce that feels supported and gets the resources they need to do their work well, which ensures your clients always get the quality staffing they hired you for.

Streamline communication channels

Remote workers will be able to work more effectively if they have easy access to information and important notifications. It’s harder to share timely information when you’re not working face to face. While there are many channels for communicating remotely, having too many options is a problem when you have critical or time-sensitive information to share.

Slack and email threads are easy to lose track of since there is a lot of noise on those channels. Workers hired through a staffing agency might not even be plugged into a company’s Slack or email system yet. Texts and phone calls are harder to send to larger groups simultaneously, and you may not want to share everyone’s personal numbers in a group text.

You want to figure out a streamlined notification system for your staffing agency. All important communication should go through that one channel, so nothing gets lost. Ideally, the software you’re using for scheduling and time tracking will include an app and a notification system so that everything stays in the same place. You want a tool that can send individual alerts as well as push important announcements to groups of workers directly.

Plan for interruptions and unpredictability

Though we have all adapted to new working habits, unpredictable world events are still throwing unexpected interruptions into work and personal lives. On a purely practical level, smart staffing needs to anticipate these interruptions and have systems ready to deal with them. Your clients and your workforce will both be better off if you can build some accommodation into your staffing systems.

Workers may be sick unexpectedly in ways that make focusing impossible and require calling out. They may experience mental health challenges. Schools and daycares may close, leaving workers without childcare at the last minute. Travel plans are now more likely to get canceled, leaving workers stranded and scrambling to find ways to get back to a functional working environment.

Be prepared and communicate as needed during times of crisis to keep your employees safe and supported and ensure your clients’ needs are reliably fulfilled. Set up notifications ahead of time and use tools to easily manage your scheduling when it needs to change. Flexibility in a crisis and effective communication will help ensure that work isn’t derailed long term.

Find an efficient scheduling system

The most important, and often most challenging, part of staffing remotely is making efficient schedules. Employee scheduling software can help you schedule in a more sophisticated way, communicate those schedules efficiently, and make easy changes when needed. Even if workers aren’t commuting, they need reliable scheduling information so they can manage their time.

Give employees mobile access to their schedules so they can view upcoming shifts from anywhere, including the job site. This will help improve employee experience and cut back on miscommunication, confusion, and no-shows.

Make schedules early so you can alert workers in advance and avoid increasingly common predictive scheduling laws in certain areas. Labor forecasting will help you anticipate where staffing will be needed, avoiding the negative consequences of over- or under-staffing and optimizing labor costs. You also want to have systems in place to track attendance and quickly fill open shifts in case of no-shows or emergencies.

 

 

Use digital tools to manage a remote workforce

The digital tools you use to manage your workforce will be the key to smooth and effective management. Remote work is only possible because of the amazing array of digital tools we have available to us now, so take advantage of them. All of the practical parts of managing remote workers are easier if you use software tailored for the job.

Time and attendance

It’s vital to understand how, when, and where staff clock in – especially for agencies managing employees scattered across job sites. Proper time and attendance tools should be utilized to eliminate excessive wage costs stemming from issues in time theft, tardiness, and overtime. Employees should have the ability to clock in and view shifts on their phones right from the job site, and managers should be able to set clock-in parameters according to GPS location. Live time clock feeds are also a great way to improve back-office visibility into front-line attendance.

Paperless onboarding

Onboarding is hard to do remotely, as it requires sorting lots of information and getting documents read and signed. Onboarding quickly and efficiently gets you off on the right foot with new hires. Digital tools will help you automate your HR data, get documents signed, and collect personal information, bank details, and addresses quickly. They can even introduce staff to your policies and systems and begin training remotely.

Payroll

You may have payroll software, but you also need it to integrate with the rest of your management tools. Use a tool that can connect payroll to your scheduling and attendance software to make remote payroll management more efficient. Software can help you manage PTO and overtime payments that may vary by location as well.

Labor compliance

Remote work can quickly get complicated when trying to stay compliant with labor laws. They may change from state to state and city to city, and your workers may not even be in the same locale as their workplace. Digital tools exist to help you navigate labor compliance easily instead of trying to work each situation out case-by-case. Use your scheduling software to automate breaks to avoid labor violations in some states.

Simple and direct systems make remote staffing work

The common thread in each of these strategies is simplifying systems and providing clear, direct management processes for your remote staff. Workers in person receive information through interpersonal conversations, physical written materials, and the actual working environment they are entering, as well as digital sources. That makes it easier to ask questions casually or reduce distractions by physically moving or shutting off your computer.

Remote work concentrates all tasks and communications into a single channel. Counterintuitively, this often makes the information overload much higher. It’s harder to focus, and harder to sort the important details from the noise. Onboarding to remote jobs — absorbing lots of information digitally and learning new software and tools — is often the hardest part. Workers placed through staffing agencies may have to repeat this process frequently.

If you provide them with a single source of truth, they will be able to work more confidently, knowing they have access to all the information they need. Simplify your management. Communicate through one clear channel. Give them access to schedules, time tracking, and payroll in one place. Reduce the noise and overwhelm so that your workers can get up to speed quickly and focus their attention on doing their jobs well.

Book a call with one of our team members to learn more, or try our software for free today.

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Job Abandonment: What is it, How it Happens & How to Handle it

Summary

  • Job abandonment occurs when an employee doesn’t show up to their job for a specified number of days without notice and any intention to return.

  • Handling job abandonment involves defining it clearly, investigating the causes, providing coverage, and complying with labor laws.   

  • It’s possible to prevent job abandonment by regularly addressing burnout, communication, and engagement issues. 

Imagine a scenario where your most valuable staff member is a no-call, no-show one day – and then the next day, and the day after, and even the day after that.

A week goes by, and it’s quite clear – they have abandoned their job.

Too many instances of this – or even one instance – can leave you shorthanded. Your operations slow down, you’re unable to serve customers properly, and affected staff members start to lose morale.

Job abandonment like this is not rare. In fact, it is quite common. Only just recently, the American economy was rocked by the “Great Resignation.” As such, employers should take steps to target the main culprits behind job abandonment, namely burnout, miscommunication, and poor engagement.

Webinar: How to Address Staff Burnout

What is job abandonment and why does it happen?

Job abandonment is when an employee abandons their company abruptly by not showing up to work for a predetermined number of days (a quantity determined by the employer) without notification. This is considered a “voluntary resignation,” even though the employee may not have formally quit their job. By failing to communicate, it’s assumed that the employee has no intention of returning to work.

For example, an employee may not show up for work for many business days consecutively without reasonable explanation, might stop responding to calls and emails, or may have removed their personal belongings from their work station. Or an employee who is on unpaid/paid leave doesn’t show up for three consecutive days after the leave ends.

There are several reasons why job abandonment occurs:

  • Fear of quitting the job in person due to embarrassment
  • Getting a job with another employer
  • An unexpected personal or family member emergency
  • Dissatisfaction with the job due to a lack of recognition or poor company culture
  • Fear of returning to work due to health/hygiene concerns (as in the pandemic)
  • A careless or negligent attitude by the employee

In other instances, an employee may have genuine reasons for not notifying their employer. For example, they might have a medical emergency or may have lost access to their phone and the internet if they’re away on leave. Such situations require careful consideration before being classified as job abandonment.

How to handle job abandonment

Employers must minimize the negative consequences of job abandonment to their business by having a job abandonment policy in place. They should anticipate the problems it can create, like scheduling issues, and take steps to mitigate the effects of job abandonment, both before and after it happens. Here’s how you can handle job abandonment:

Define job abandonment clearly

Create and communicate a company policy dictating how many no-call, no-show days qualify as job abandonment. There’s no federal law that defines job abandonment clearly, so it’s your responsibility to provide clarity to your employees on what counts as job abandonment. Remind employees of the consequences of abandonment and let them know that job abandonment deprives them of unemployment benefits as it’s considered a voluntary resignation.

Follow a thorough investigation and termination procedure

There should be an investigation process in place for every job abandonment, as employers are responsible for ensuring the employee had no intention of returning. Upon thoroughly investigating and recording, employers should follow a detailed termination process in order to mitigate liability as much as possible. To do this, some steps you can follow include:

  1. Attempt to contact the employee via phone calls and email to find out why they missed their shift. Try to figure out if they intend to return to work by communicating with them.
  2. If the first attempt is unsuccessful, make a second and third attempt after waiting for 24 hours or try to get in touch with the employee’s emergency contact. After this, make as many attempts as necessary to contact the employee up until they have been absent for the minimum number of days constituting job abandonment as defined by your company policy.
  3. Ensure you accurately record every attempt at communication with the absent employee. You may need a reliable paper trail to fall back on in case of legal action.
  4. If all attempts for communication fail, send a letter to your employee’s address mentioning your attempts to contact them, along with the employee’s missed dates of work. Include a notice that if the employee doesn’t respond to the letter within a week, their absence will be considered job abandonment.
  5. If the employee still doesn’t respond, terminate the employment through a job abandonment letter, mentioning the reason behind the termination, their date and times absent, company property to return, and a contact in case the employee has any questions regarding their termination. Use these termination letter templates as guides.
  6. Upon notifying an employee of their termination of employment for job abandonment, make sure to double-check payroll to ensure the terminated employee will receive all that they are owed on their final paycheck.

Use your scheduling management software to ensure that abandoned shifts are covered. Allow employees to communicate freely with scheduling managers so they can pick up abandoned shifts. Allow shift swapping and cross-train employees to be able to fill in for staff members who’ve abandoned their jobs.

It would be sensible to learn from past experiences of job abandonment and plan schedules as far out into the future as possible. Have a network of “on-call” employees to count on in case of job abandonments, so you’re never faced with a staffing crisis.

Remain compliant with employment laws

You must always take steps to confirm that the job abandonment was indeed a voluntary resignation to avoid potential legal action. Dismissing an employee due to medical reasons can be tricky and could be scrutinized. For this reason, the job abandonment policy should address short-term disability and the Family and Medical Leave Act. Clarify that if a staff member does not come to work for three successive days and does not file their short-term disability paperwork or request a leave of absence on the grounds of a family emergency, they will have abandoned their job.

A recent California appellate court decision in the Bareno Case reaffirms the sensitivity of dismissals when medical reasons are involved. This case involved an employee who had notified her employers that she wouldn’t be able to attend work due to medical reasons. The employer said that they didn’t receive one email and terminated the employee on the grounds of an “unexplained absence.”

The employee sued for wrongful termination, claiming her employers terminated her for simply taking medical leave. The court’s decision was that the employer should have asked the employee for further details about her leave rather than just waiting for a few days and terminating the employee. Based on this decision, employers are advised that if they believe the employee is absent from work because of medical reasons, they should assume the employee has not resigned.

Employers also need to be mindful that email and spam filters may lead to unread or skipped messages from the employee. To avoid a similar scenario that occurred in the above case, where a message goes missing, employers should consider using a single channel of communication without spam filters to make it easy and simple to communicate with their employees.

Be consistent in applying a job abandonment policy

It’s important that you have a documented job abandonment policy. Record detailed notes of every unexcused absence and every attempt to contact the employee. Include a copy of your job abandonment policy in your employee handbook and human resource portal, so there’s no room for confusion among employees. There should be no surprises when employees are terminated.

How to proactively prevent job abandonment

Job abandonment is not easy to deal with, and one way of avoiding its negative consequences is to prevent it from happening. Having fair policies centered around inclusiveness that keep employees engaged and a good company culture that motivates employees to do their best work can help engage employees and prevent them from abandoning their jobs.

Make your job abandonment policy visible

Including your job abandonment policy in your employee handbook or explaining it in detail when employees are being onboarded is a great way to make employees aware of your leave policies and the consequences of job abandonment. The more aware employees are, the higher the chances of them complying with your policies.

Stay on top of “no call, no shows”

These are your early indicators that an employee is at risk of abandonment. You need to be able to track who’s consistently not showing up for work and clearly communicate the consequences of these actions. An attendance point system can help in this area, while mobile shift replacement software can help your teams quickly find replacements.

Webinar: How to Reduce No Call, No Shows

Have an accessible PTO policy

More often than not, people abandon their jobs because they’re overworked, frustrated with their job, and don’t have enough time off. A comprehensive leave policy should help staff understand how and when they can take time off, while also empowering them to take time off via self-service tools. An open and accessible PTO policy makes employees feel valued, while a closed off and confused policy tends to discourage staff from taking leave.

According to an interview with The Washington Post, Raygun owner Mike Draper said, “It’s tough if you have a family crisis and you need to deal with that and you have an employer that says, ‘If you leave to deal with that, you’re fired.’” His company is lenient with things like calling out and paid time off. He said, “We provide an environment where people don’t find themselves in that situation. Work doesn’t have to be intractable.”

Practice flexible scheduling

Allow employees to bid for open shifts or swap shifts with managerial approval so they can meet their personal, financial, and professional commitments. Enable employees to do these things by equipping them with the right mobile scheduling tools, and try to honor them as much as possible using flexible scheduling policies.

Communicate and engage

Preventing job abandonment hinges on engaging your employees. By regularly communicating with them via shift feedback and pulse surveys, you’ll be able to more easily identify morale problems on the front line. Treat communication as a two-way street. Provide regular feedback to employees to keep them engaged, but also provide them avenues to give feedback on management. This is a two-pronged approach that will help keep your employees engaged while making you aware of any glaring issues, so you can take preventative measures to curb job abandonment.

Address immediate well-being needs

A comfortable work environment is essential for staff retention as it directly impacts employee productivity, engagement, and overall job satisfaction. Employees who feel comfortable and supported in their workspace are more likely to remain committed to their role and the organization. For instance, one popular trend that has emerged in recent years is the use of standing desks. These desks allow employees to work in a more ergonomic position, reducing the risk of health issues associated with prolonged sitting. Providing such options shows that the organization cares about employee health and well-being, which can lead to higher levels of employee satisfaction and retention.

Job abandonment comes at a BIG cost

Last year, Gallup reported that replacing a full time employee can cost an employer up to twice the amount of the employee’s annual salary. Ouch.

Needless to say, high turnover affects more than just team morale and scheduling logistics – it places a severe drag on your bottom line. Find out how to reduce turnover like this our webinar below featuring management consultant and author Kris M. King.

Webinar: How to Stop Employee Turnover

It is one thing to map out a plan for how your business will handle job abandonment – it’s another to actually go out and execute that plan. Both managers and employees need the right tools to efficiently work together to prevent and overcome job abandonment in the workplace. Contact us today to learn more about how to handle job abandonment on the front line using cloud-based scheduling and HR compliance software.

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How short-staffed resorts can optimize scheduling

We live in the time of “The Great American Labor Shortage.” The leisure and hospitality industry faced a high unemployment rate of 39.3% in 2020, which, combined with the high number of job openings, reveals just how understaffed the sector is.

The World Travel & Tourism Council estimated a labor shortfall of 690,000 workers in the tourism and travel industries in 2021. Vail Resorts is one of many resort companies facing this problem. A shortage of chairlift operators, lift engineers, and snowcat drivers has delayed the resort’s ability to open doors to its skiing visitors.

Why has COVID led to a shortage of talent?

According to the Colorado Sun, lots of resorts in the country are in the same predicament as Vail Resorts. This widespread lack of active workers in the industry can be attributed to several reasons — all tied to the COVID-19 pandemic:

  • COVID fears: Staff doesn’t want to return to work because they’re scared of catching the virus.
  • Poor management: Resort management let go of many people last year, and one of the possible reasons they may not be hiring anyone back is to help recover from the profit lost during shutdowns.
  • Parental caregiving during the pandemic: The COVID-19 pandemic led a number of schools across the country to shut down. Parents without access to childcare are forced to remain home and are unable to rejoin the workforce.

In order to prevent the loss of customers whose needs are unmet, resort managers must optimize their scheduling while short-staffed.

To optimize scheduling while being short-staffed, you need to:

1. Use labor forecasting

Estimate sales demand by using labor forecasting software to look at historical sales data and then schedule shifts accordingly. You’ll be able to schedule your scarce labor smartly to meet sales demand. For instance, you might be able to schedule more experienced employees when the sales demand is high.

Sales demand is likely to fluctuate post-pandemic, and managers need to ensure that worker scheduling can adapt easily to meet sudden demand shifts.

You can also forecast labor demand by individual departments and monitor whether, say, more employees need to be scheduled in mountain operations versus lodging at a ski resort. For instance, a lot of people may be coming to ski for the day but not booking rooms for the weekend, meaning the level of scheduled labor needed will vary between the two departments.

2. Make schedules agile and adaptable

Prepare schedules in advance, two weeks at a minimum, to give employees the ability to communicate their need for coverage in the event of unforeseen scheduling conflicts.

Use hospitality employee scheduling software to centralize scheduling and increase your staff’s commitment to shift adherence. By using mobile technology like shift swaps and replacements, you minimize any last-minute scheduling changes, increasing both administrative adaptability and staff agility.

You must also manage leave requests in a timely manner to avoid being short-staffed. You don’t want too many employees taking leave at the same time. Discuss leave requests with each staff member to avoid any scheduling surprises down the road. Staff members should be encouraged to put in leave requests by giving at least a few days’ notice, so you can plan schedules in a timely manner.

3. Increase employee engagement

Focus on improving your overall staff experience. If your employees feel engaged, they are more likely to show up and do their best work and provide the best service.

With a centralized communication tool, it’s possible to quickly notify staff of timely updates or important company announcements. Getting your message out there efficiently on a unified system properly engages staff, makes them feel valued, and solves issues in disconnected communication with management.

Another way to increase employee engagement is to open up more avenues for staff to provide shift feedback. Employees may feel inclined to report on how various aspects of their shifts, from coworker cooperation to issues in staffing levels. Having the ability to give management feedback like this empowers employees, making them feel more valued. This leads to engaged and productive resort staff, even in the face of a shortage in labor.

You should also offer incentives to engage employees and boost their morale. Workers are happier when they’re well compensated. A lot of restaurant and hotel owners are offering higher wages to attract and retain employees. For instance, an ice cream parlor raised wages to $15 an hour and filled all of their 15 open positions immediately. As per Hotel Tech Report, higher pay rates can decrease absenteeism and control employee turnover, which is good news for short-staffed hotels and resorts.

Replicate these successes and improve employee motivation by offering a higher pay rate during busier shifts and during peak season.

4. Automate breaks

Employees need breaks so they don’t feel stressed or overworked, factors that often lead to staff attrition.

Between multiple departments with varying needs, resort management already spends too much time preparing employee schedules manually — up to 12 hours a week. Short staffing levels only add to this time, causing even more headaches for management. In the midst of all these hurdles, scheduling and enforcing breaks might slip between the cracks.

Solve this by implementing employee scheduling software that automatically applies legally compliant breaks to every employee’s schedule. These breaks should be easily monitorable by both employees and managers alike, ensuring short-staffed teams stay well-rested and productive. Leadership should receive notifications when employees miss breaks, and they should be able to track a live timeclock feed to know when and where workers are taking their breaks.

5. Cross-train employees

Train employees to handle a broad range of tasks so they’re more well-rounded and well-equipped to deal with short-staffing challenges. The best way to do this is to encourage your staff members to mentor and train each other.

Start by making a list of everyone on your team and include their job descriptions. Think about the expertise each role requires and then pair positions that share similar skill sets. For instance, you can pair up wait staff with those working in the front office team, both client-facing roles. The wait staff team members would learn how to perform check-ins, check-outs, and make reservations, and the front office team members would learn how to serve customers at the restaurant.

If all of your staff are cross-trained and multi-functional, they’ll be able to fill in for each other. It will become possible for you to rotate your staff across different departments to meet varying customer needs.

Proper WFM practices mitigate short-staffing pains

Workforce management can be quite complex for individual departments to handle, especially while short-staffed. By uniting staff on one platform and deploying the tips above, it’s possible to have executive oversight on staffing needs. If you’d like to overcome the challenges of the short-staffing problem at your resort, get in touch with us today!

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Restaurant Labor Costs: Good Percentage & 5 common mistakes

Restaurants have been struggling to survive as they cope with high labor costs post-pandemic.

As per WKBW news, Lisa Riniolo, who runs The Garage Bar and Restaurant, is complaining about workers demanding higher rates of pay. She says, “People are coming in with unrealistic numbers that they want. A dishwasher — $20 an hour — I can’t afford it. If I have to pay a dishwasher $20 an hour, I might as well close the doors.”

Labor costs are important to the ever-evolving equation that is a restaurant business – in fact, they make up 29–33% of costs in the restaurant industry. And there’s plenty of room for error while you manage them. Here are five of the most commonly made mistakes while managing restaurant labor costs:

1. Inaccurately scheduling labor without anticipating sales demand

Failing to predict sales demand prevents managers from scheduling the optimal number of staff on each shift. Restaurants become overstaffed or understaffed, leading to either inflated or overly reduced labor costs with inadequate staff to meet customer needs.

How to avoid this mistake?

Tap into the power of your restaurant employee scheduling software and analyze historical sales data to schedule the right number of employees. If you know you need X number of employees for Y level of sales, you’re more likely to get the scheduling numbers right.

Make notes in your employee scheduling software for every shift. Highlight if you were understaffed, overstaffed, or optimally staffed for the sales figures you’ve recorded. Use these notes to learn from your past scheduling mistakes.

2. Paying overtime wages unnecessarily

Poor planning leads to employees working more than 40 hours a week which means, you guessed it, paying high overtime wages. Time and again, restaurants fail to consider overtime laws and continue to schedule labor on an ad-hoc basis.

For example, as per New York State law, most employees must be paid at the rate of 1.5 times their regular rate of pay for all hours worked above 40 hours per workweek.

How to avoid this mistake?

Spread your staff evenly across shifts, and make sure they’re all scheduled below the 40-hour threshold. Use predictive scheduling to plan work schedules at least a week in advance, so you make sure you don’t exceed the threshold. This way, you’ll not only save on overtime costs, but you’ll also end up giving your employees more predictability around their schedules and keeping them satisfied, leading to lower staff turnover.

Ideally, your employee scheduling software should alert you with an automated warning message every time a staff member is about to cross their overtime threshold. Simple automation like this provides management with increased visibility into how to best mitigate unnecessary overtime, and in turn, high labor costs.

3. Stingy scheduling, leading to understaffed shifts

In an attempt to boost profits, some restaurant managers schedule the lowest possible number of employees to keep tight control over labor costs. This can cause the restaurant to be understaffed and lead to issues like long lines and increased wait times, all leading to customer attrition.

How to avoid this mistake?

Have a more evolved goal of achieving ‘optimum’ labor costs so you can serve your customers effectively. Keep track of both your revenue data and your labor cost data. On average, labor costs should be less than 30% of gross revenue in the restaurant industry.

Always keep the customer in mind when scheduling labor. Seek their feedback on what they thought about your staff after they’ve dined at your restaurant. Ask how they felt about the level of available customer service. Customers are your number one priority. Controlling costs is your secondary goal.

4. Cutting wages to reduce labor costs

It’s a common mistake to think that cutting staff wages is an effective way to reduce labor costs. This is often a blind and oversimplified attempt at quickly lowering labor costs in the short term. Cutting wages can lead to short staffing issues, employee burnout, and bitter workers.

How to avoid this mistake?

Before laying off employees, those in hospitality must take a step back and realize the value of tracking scheduled vs. actual labor costs. By understanding the variance between these two costs, managers can pinpoint the source of increased labor costs.

Thankfully, modern solutions exist for restaurant owners. The right workforce management system should map labor costs to sales in real-time while also displaying the variance between scheduled and actual wages. This data increases visibility into front-line issues, helping managers tackle high labor costs before they get out of hand.

According to Josh Cameron of Workforce.com, “What’s much better is to have the schedule and the attendance in one system, so you can tick these things off throughout the day or at the end of the shift and if there are differences, you can go see why that happens.”

5. Not investing time and effort in employee engagement

Sometimes, bars and restaurants fail to properly curate employee engagement. For instance, management might not invest in continual training and cross-training, which can lead to issues in customer service and proper equipment care. If left unchecked, these issues can greatly increase operating and labor costs.

Improper employee engagement may also take the form of toxic, inefficient, or uninspired workplace environments, resulting in expensive staff turnover. One study found turnover rates in the hospitality sector (including restaurants) to be as high as 74.9%. When the restaurant fails to engage its employees, it causes disgruntled employees to leave the business, leading to high labor costs resulting from hiring and training new talent.

How to avoid this mistake?

Some employees leave their jobs because they may not know the exact processes to follow, their specific responsibilities, or their role’s connection to the larger business of the restaurant. By investing time and money into professional development, you’ll support their job performance and boost job satisfaction levels. Make sure you have detailed job descriptions, for starters, so your employees know exactly what they’re hired to do.

Keeping track of the number of hours your staff has spent on training is a great way to ensure their knowledge and skills are up to the mark. Make sure your employee scheduling software has the ability to record employee qualifications like training hours or specific certifications — this extra organization always ends up paying off.

Also, focus on collecting shift feedback from your employees. It’s a concrete way to boost engagement since you can ask staff to rate shifts and provide comments on them every time they clock out. This way, managers can uncover issues in staff satisfaction before they become a headache.

For instance, maybe a waiter says that they worked an overstaffed shift and didn’t get to serve enough tables. Or perhaps a waiter could say that they were working in a shift with staff they don’t get along with. Use this feedback to adjust schedules, boost employee engagement and reduce labor costs associated with turnover.

Record, report, and analyze labor data to manage restaurant labor costs effectively

It is easy for restaurants to overlook all sorts of granular data when managing their labor costs. To avoid this, they need to recognize the power of automation and workforce analytics. Restaurant timekeeping platforms should actively record and report data on wages, overtime, and hours worked, and also fully integrate with local POS and scheduling systems, so as to properly account for demand and employee engagement.

Learn more about how to avoid costly mistakes in restaurant labor by chatting with us today.

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How to determine weekly work hours for your staff

Do you know how to set weekly work hours for your shift workers?

The average number of weekly hours worked by full-time employees in the U.S. is 41.5 hours. It’s lower in European countries, like Denmark, where it’s 37.2 hours per week.

The statistics are only an approximation. Your business and staff needs are unique. And you need to learn how to determine weekly work hours for staff in a balanced, methodical way — balancing between staff productivity, staff morale, business profitability, and legal requirements.

Here’s how to determine the right number of weekly working hours for your staff:

#1: Understand your staff needs

While setting weekly work schedules, it’s important to learn your staff’s work and life goals. Some workers might be college students, while others might have family commitments. Talk with them to discuss their weekly work schedule expectations, so you can take that into consideration.

If you set the weekly work hours too high, it may be bad for your staff’s health and productivity. A study by the World Health Organization found that working more than 55 hours a week increases the risk of having a stroke by 35% and the risk of dying from heart disease by 17%.

Setting weekly work hours too high can be counterproductive as it unnecessarily overworks staff and often causes burnout. Research shows that productivity falls sharply after 50 hours per week and drops dramatically after 55 hours. On the other end, setting weekly work hours too low may not compensate your staff to levels that keep them satisfied.

Set weekly hours in a way that enhances staff productivity while keeping them healthy and happy. This requires empathy at an individual staff level so you can set weekly hours for each staff member most effectively. This will also boost your employee retention rates, leading to higher profitability in the long run.

The best way to achieve higher productivity and morale is to view the exercise of setting weekly work hours as a collaborative effort between you and your staff. You need to seek their feedback before and after setting their weekly hours. This will help you evaluate their preferences and know how they’re feeling after delivering a full work week.

Being human-centered in your approach is essential when scheduling for maximum employee productivity and satisfaction.

#2: Evaluate what your business needs

Business is about supply and demand. When your sales are high, you need more staff to help you deliver on customer expectations. The million-dollar question then is: How do you predict sales demand so you can set the weekly work hours to meet it?

The simplest way to predict sales demand is to examine your historical sales data. You’ll know the shifts where you’ve been busy in the past and ones that have been quieter. And the chances are high that sales will follow a similar pattern in the future, too.

Use revenue and shift data from your employee scheduling software to set weekly work hours accurately for meeting sales demand. More importantly, you can avoid the expensive mistake of overstaffing or understaffing.

You also need to minimize employee turnover as much as possible. Fast-food chains like McDonald’s are offering flexible hours and higher hourly rates to their employees. Following a similar tactic could help you reduce employee turnover costs to a large extent, making your business more profitable in the long run.

Know your personnel needs to effectively set working hours. From past experience, what mix of employees do you need for which shifts? How many supervisors and entry-level employees do you need on each shift? These questions will help you determine how many hours you need from each level of employee.

You must allow shift workers to cover for one another in case anyone falls sick, so you can maintain the same number of weekly hours you’d originally planned. Empowering employees to pick up the shift of a sick staff member will prevent you from being understaffed.

#3: Stay within legal boundaries

You need to ensure your weekly scheduling is compliant with both local, state, and federal laws. For instance, in New York City, retail and hospitality companies with over 20 employees aren’t allowed to have staff on an ‘on-call’ basis. They should be given a written schedule 72 hours in advance, so they have a predictable schedule.

There may also be laws in your state that need you to give a certain amount of gap between shifts to allow your employees to rest. In New York, you’re required to pay an additional hour of pay to staff who work split shifts, i.e., working two or more shifts per working day.

You also need to follow overtime laws. The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) requires non-exempt workers to receive overtime pay for any time worked over 40 hours, and some states even have different laws regarding overtime pay. And in certain circumstances, legislation may set limits on the amount of overtime employees can work, so you need to keep this in mind too.

If you plan weekly work hours meticulously with your employee scheduling software, you’ll realize you can avoid overtime costs, or at least prevent them to a large extent. The right employee scheduling software can help you navigate these laws and make it easier for you to set weekly hours.

Use predictive scheduling features within your employee scheduling software, so you can create weekly work schedules ahead of time. Avoid annoying your employees who might be pedantic about their working conditions.

Move toward a lean workforce to set optimum weekly hours

Aim to move toward a lean and agile workforce to ensure your business is setting weekly hours cost-effectively. Remember, weekly scheduling proves to be a balancing act between staff satisfaction, business success, and legal standards. By fulfilling these three needs in a flexible way, you are sure to strike the perfect amount of weekly work hours for your staff.

If you want to continue the conversation about how to set weekly work hours for your business, please feel free to contact us today. We’re here to help.