When running a business, it’s not uncommon to find you and your employees are occasionally guilty of keeping certain procedures a little too “old school” in the name of comfort. If you know what you’ve done before works, it’s easy to stick to that method, whether it’s the best way to do it or not. Studies have found that around 40% of our daily activities are driven by habit rather than decision-making. And habits are hard to break, and they always have been. As far back as ancient Greece, victorious Olympians were warned not to rest on their laurels, their wreath crowns symbolizing past victories.
Getting too comfortable with your scheduling procedures may be stunting your business’s growth. Manually tracking and maintaining business data – scheduling jobs and employees on a whiteboard in the breakroom or updating it on a spreadsheet, for example – may be your trusted method. Still, it could be making your employees less productive or your operations less efficient. And it could make you more vulnerable to compliance risks or even affect your bottom line.
Boosting Employee Productivity
Employees today also expect real-time, flexible time recording capabilities. Gone are the days of manually punching time cards into a timeclock. The increase in remote workers has made mobile and web-based time punching capabilities and time collection methods essential.
In many scenarios, employers need to draft and post schedules as a function of the time system. And this ideally occurs well in advance, so employees can view their schedule in real-time, post and swap shifts as needed, manage time off and non-availability, and, ultimately, stay productive!
With Commonwealth’s isolved People Cloud, not only is time recorded through mobile and web-based applications, but you can also allow your employees to request which shifts they want to work and to request coverage for a shift within a pool of fellow employees. And you can maintain shifts in draft form as managers and supervisors edit schedules.
Improving Operational Efficiency
The methods you use to collect time, manage things like PTO, and track your employees have to stand up to the test in any work environment, whether it’s on the road, in the field, on the factory floor, or in a home office.
Commonwealth’s solutions use GeoFencing technology, which can help you monitor where and when your employees are punching in and logging time. In addition, isolved Workforce Scheduling is an available enhancement to isolved Scheduling that allows you to address complex requirements – quickly and all within a single program. Using this enhancement, you can:
- set customizable values for how employees are counted per shift (number of work hours, occupancy percentage, number of beds, etc.)
- categorize employees and build staffing rules around employee types and count needed per day
- communicate shift shortages and requirements and notify employees who are eligible to fill open shifts
- set schedules and assign employees directly to a shift predict future workforce needs
Closing the Gap on Compliance Risk
Timekeeping and the ‘adding up’ of hours are where the enforcement of key wage and hour laws comes into place. This includes things like paying overtime at 40 hours (or daily depending on your jurisdiction), paying time for ‘showing up’ for shifts, and how notice and pay required for canceled shifts in some places creates even more challenges for you to be compliant. Employers are challenged in that they have multiple categories of employees, such as exempt vs. non-exempt employees, part-time vs. full-time employees, employees in California vs. employees in Connecticut, tipped employees (sub-minimum wage) vs. non-tipped employees, union members vs. non-union members, and, finally, employees who are job costing and those who are not.
To make compliance more challenging, all of these categories have different rules around timekeeping, commonly called ‘Policy,’ based on specific criteria. It’s critical for employers to have ways to enforce and make these policies automatic, as well as to automatically ‘categorize’ employees into the correct groups.
With Commonwealth’s isolved People Cloud, compliant scheduling is a very manageable process! Policy groups may be assigned using a flexible system of eligibility rules, and the policy groups may be created and assigned based on those rules. With isolved Scheduling, you’ll receive instant alerts when schedules are created and pushed live, and you can:
- set rules for assigning shifts across employees
- determine who is responsible for working each shift
- quickly view when employees are unavailable to work
- notify employees when schedules are created
- manage shift and coverage requests
Contact Commonwealth Payroll & HR
Our scheduling solutions help employers keep their employees happy and productive, improve the efficiency of their scheduling procedures, and reduce their vulnerability to compliance risks – all of which can help you cut unnecessary costs and increase revenue. Take our self-assessment, view a demo, or check out our ROI calculator to see the potential cost savings for your company. Contact Commonwealth today to learn how we can help your business streamline your scheduling, HR, and payroll processes!
*The information provided in this article does not, and is not intended to, constitute legal advice; instead, all information is for general informational purposes only. Information in this article may not constitute the most up-to-date legal or other information. This article contains links to other third-party websites provided only for the convenience of the reader.
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