Simplify Sick Leave Management
Everyone gets sick. How employers deal with sick employees varies widely. Whatever your sick leave policy, WorkforceHUB from HR Ledger simplifies sick leave administration.
Some employers don’t provide paid sick leave for hourly team members. Others do for full-time hourly workers but not part-time hourly personnel.
If you knew that staying home meant that you couldn’t pay the water bill or buy groceries—you would come into work anyway. Consider what this type of stress does to a person. (It can’t be good for your health!) What would happen if a nasty flu bug spread through your staff? Many employers who offer paid sick leave believe that it saves money in the long run.
Regardless of your opinion about paid sick leave, absences due to illness are a fact of life. All employers need to adopt a sick leave policy. Here are different types of policies and the advantages and disadvantages of each.
Types of Sick Leave Policies
At the beginning of the year, each staff member receives the same number of sick days to be used when needed.
This is fair, but an employee with an extended illness could use all the days up by the end of February.
Sick days are included with vacation days or other paid time off (PTO).
Employees who rarely get sick enjoy more vacation days. Employees who get sick more often may be tempted to come in anyway because they don’t want to shorten their vacation.
Staff members accrue paid sick leave based on years worked.
Accruing paid sick days based on years employed can be an incentive to remain with the organization. But new hires get sick just as often. If they come in sick, they could spread it throughout the workforce. A widespread illness would hurt productivity a lot more than one employee taking a few days off.
Employees are allowed all the sick leave they need.
Some business owners have dropped all limits on paid sick leave. They let their staff members use their own judgment. This has been successful at many large employers like Virgin and Netflix. There’s no reason it couldn’t work at a small company.
Think twice before changing a policy. Especially if you have been allowing staff members to “bank” paid sick days. If you discontinue this benefit, you will probably receive some blowback.
With the previous policies, the business owner has to decide if unused sick days roll over at the end of the year. If they don’t, you may have half the labor force absent during December because they don’t want to lose their paid days off.
WorkforceHUB sick leave management can help companies with salaried or hourly staff members. For more details, call 530-887-3812.
UPGRADE TODAY
HR Ledger offers WorkforceHUB, the unified Human Resources portal that makes it easy to optimize the performance of your supervisors, employees, and organization.
WorkforceHUB includes TimeWorksPlus, TimeSimplicity, and TimeWorks Mobile. We’ve just added onboarding, benefits enrollment, performance reviews, and employee engagement! WorkforceHUB is developed for busy employers like you who need to streamline scheduling, automate time and attendance tracking, maintain regulatory compliance, and reduce labor costs.
How much can you save? Check our HR Ledger ROI Calculator.
We can get you up and running with WorkforceHUB in minutes. Contact us today to book a demo.
Data Mine Your HR Records: A Scientific Approach to Increasing Productivity
Today’s message is for business owners who have limited experience with data analysis, use manual timekeeping and scheduling processes, and want to use a scientific approach to better manage their workforce.
Workforce Management 101
Capturing Workforce Management (WFM) data is the first step to creating a Human Capital Optimization strategy. In order to gather and manage the data, you need efficient tools. Affordable WorkforceHUB provides such tools and is ideal for the WFM beginner. WorkforceHUB is as easy to use as your favorite phone app and automates time-consuming HR processes while gathering the data that is important for improving productivity and, by extension, profitability.
You Can’t Improve What You Don’t Understand
Let’s look at a few ways WorkforceHUB captures strategic data. TimeWorksPlus is the cloud-based employee timekeeping system in the suite. It can be used in combination with TimeWorksTouch to capture punch-ins, or team members can simply punch in/out in the employee dashboard from any internet-enabled device. TimeSimplicity paired with TimeWorksPlus has key benefits for employee timekeeping, schedule creation, employee shift trading, and general inter-departmental communication. But for the purposes of this article, let’s look at the types of data WorkforceHUB automatically captures.
Ease and Accuracy
TimeWorksPlus tracks time to the minute. Why is this important? By simply automating punch in/out, you can find out exactly who habitually punches in early or punches out late. Do you know exactly how much overtime your associates log? With pen and paper time and attendance systems, you have to look through all the time cards, find the ones with overtime listed, and add it up. TimeWorksPlus tracks overtime automatically and you can monitor it by simply looking in your manager portal.
Scheduling: Are the individuals with the necessary skills and/or certifications scheduled at the right time? How are production levels influenced by scheduling changes? Does personnel morale change from shift to shift?
Absences, tardies, breaks, and time theft: Who punches in early? Who forgets to punch out during breaks? Who habitually punches out late every day, adding many unauthorized minutes a week to their time card?
Coverage gaps: What shifts are understaffed? How does this affect production, customer service, and workflow? Are your managers wasting time trying to find personnel to cover shifts at the last minute?
Overstaffing: What shifts are costing you more in labor than is necessary? Are team members wasting time due to overstaffing?
Overtime: How much are you spending in overtime every month? Could this be reduced with smarter scheduling or automatic notices?
Mobile staff: Are your offsite and mobile employees where they should be?
Schedule flexibility: Can your associates easily trade shifts? Would you have improved retention if schedule preferences were better accommodated?
Admin time: How many hours a week do your managers spend researching and fixing time card errors, tracking accruals, doing compliance reporting, submitting payroll, responding to employee requests for HR information, and dealing with other employee issues?
To recap the process:
1. Capture data about human resource management.
2. Analyze the data to see opportunities for improvement.
3. Make changes.
4. Ascertain whether the modifications were effective and adjust where necessary.
5. Continually monitor the results, especially when there have been significant changes in workflow, staff, labor law provisions, or business objectives.
Of course, each one of these steps can be broken down significantly. For example, here are some sub-steps to number 3 above:
- Eliminate redundancy through automation.
- Reduce time devoted to non-billable processes.
- Improve documentation management.
- Let employees take over time card management, accrual monitoring, and shift trading.
WorkforceHUB Takes the Mystery Out of HR Data Mining
We would love to discuss more about how WorkforceHUB can help you leverage essential HR data to increase efficiency and profitability at your company. Call 530-887-3812 today to set up a demo.
UPGRADE TODAY
HR Ledger offers WorkforceHUB, the unified Human Resources portal that makes it easy to optimize the performance of your managers, employees, and organization.
WorkforceHUB includes TimeWorksPlus, TimeSimplicity, and TimeWorks Mobile. We’ve just added onboarding, benefits enrollment, performance reviews, and employee engagement! WorkforceHUB is developed for busy employers like you who need to streamline scheduling, automate time and attendance tracking, maintain regulatory compliance, and decrease labor costs.
How much can you save? Check our HR Ledger ROI Calculator.
We can get you up and running with WorkforceHUB in minutes. Contact us today to book a demo.
How to Put Your Employees in the Driver’s Seat
Your team members don’t call their bank when they need to check their balance, they simply access their account from their mobile device. They also purchase game tickets and book flights without ever communicating with a real person. Self-service access lets men and women manage their lives at their convenience, on their own terms.
Take the Hassle Out Of, Well, Everything
Do you provide the convenience of self-service Workforce Management to your staff members? Why should they need to call you (or your HR department) when they want to trade a shift or identify how much sick leave they have accrued?
Empowered Employees Are Happy Employees
TimeWorksPlus from HR Ledger brings the ease and convenience of self-service time card and schedule management to your staff members, dramatically lifting employee morale, minimizing turnover, and minimizing time spent collecting and managing data.
WorkforceHUB with Employee Self-Service (ESS) and the Virtual Trade Board allows your staff to:
- Manage their own time cards, minimizing the time required to review and confirm with a manager
- Punch in/out from a mobile device for more accurate timekeeping on remote jobs
- See PTO, sick leave, and vacation accrual reports
- Request schedule changes, pick up additional shifts, and view approvals without having to talk with a manager
WorkforceHUB with Employee Self-Service (ESS) and the Virtual Trade Board enables your managers to:
- Create and modify schedules promptly and effortlessly with drag-and-drop schedule templates
- Confirm shift change requests with automatic employee messages to reduce communications overhead
- Automatically track PTO for more accurate and timely reporting
- Monitor time and attendance with threshold reporting so you don’t miss important events
- Customize overtime alerts so you can meet your scheduling, workflow, cost of labor, and compliance objectives
Increased Loyalty Curtails Turnover
Why spend more time and money managing your workforce than necessary? You hire smart, capable people—it makes perfect sense to let them manage every possible Workforce Management task. Your workforce will enjoy the convenience, improved efficiency, and reduced confusion of Employee Self-Service (ESS). Let us show you how quick we can get you up and running with WorkforceHUB.
UPGRADE TODAY
HR Ledger offers WorkforceHUB, the unified Human Resources portal that makes it easy to optimize the performance of your supervisors, employees, and company.
WorkforceHUB includes TimeWorksPlus, TimeSimplicity, and TimeWorks Mobile. We’ve just added onboarding, benefits enrollment, performance reviews, and employee engagement! WorkforceHUB is created for busy employers like you who need to streamline scheduling, automate time and attendance tracking, maintain regulatory compliance, and reduce labor costs.
How much can you save? Check our HR Ledger ROI Calculator.
We can get you up and running with WorkforceHUB in minutes. Contact us today to set up a demo.
TimeSimplicity: Fast, Easy Shift Scheduling
Good scheduling is important for your customers as well as employees. You can dramatically improve your schedules with shift scheduling software. When you schedule better, your employees can serve your customers better.
Spreadsheets don’t cut it.
Why?
Spreadsheets are old technology. They really only work to record data. You can’t manipulate the data very easily.
If you are using basic spreadsheets, you are missing out on features that could help you become an expert employee scheduler.
“Does it cost a lot?”
TimeSimplicity, the shift scheduling software from HR Ledger is very affordable. Because it’s cloud-based, you don’t have a large upfront cost With cloud-based scheduling software, it’s like paying a monthly subscription. The price is based on the number of employees. Since you only pay a small fee per employee, it’s affordable for the smallest business. If your IT department is too busydon’t worry. They won’t have to do a thing.
You access TimeSimplicity with a web browser. That means you can create schedules from any mobile device.
“Is it hard to learn how to use TimeSimplicity?”
TimeSimplicity is easier than Excel but far more powerful.. Its simple tools are very powerful—but very easy to use. You can drag-and-drop employees into shifts. Copy schedules forward. Adjust as needed. Create schedule templates for departments or locations. See schedules by day, week, or month.
How does TimeSimplicity help me schedule better?
- Create months of schedules quickly
- Avoid shorthanded shifts
- Stop unnecessary overstaffing
- Respond to fluctuating staffing demands quickly
- Make schedules far in advance so your workers can plan ahead
- Eliminate shift schedule confusion between staff and management
- Gain control over labor costs
- Helps managers do their jobs better
- Forecast staffing needs
With TimeSimplicity, you create employee profiles that help you schedule. When you pull a staff member into a shift, the system will notify you if they aren’t available. It will also alert you if you don’t cover the necessary qualifications during a shift. You will be guided by your custom rules at every turn. It lets you outsource your memory. TimeSimplicity is the smartest managing assistant you’ve ever had.
When you can accommodate your employees’ shift preferences, they can focus on their jobs. When you can easily make schedules months in advance, your business runs better. Your employees can serve your customers better—and that’s always good for your bottom line.
UPGRADE TODAY
HR Ledger offers WorkforceHUB, the unified Human Resources portal that makes it easy to optimize the performance of your supervisors, employees, and company.
WorkforceHUB includes TimeWorksPlus, TimeSimplicity, and TimeWorks Mobile. We’ve just added onboarding, benefits enrollment, performance reviews, and employee engagement! WorkforceHUB is created for busy employers like you who need to streamline scheduling, automate time and attendance tracking, maintain regulatory compliance, and reduce labor costs.
How much can you save? Check our HR Ledger ROI Calculator.
We can get you up and running with WorkforceHUB in minutes. Contact us today to book a demo.
