Product Updates

3 Employer Wage and Hour Compliance Tips

Monitoring and Documenting Hours, Timekeeping & Pay
To Help Avoid Wage and Hour Claims

 

OnePoint HCM sponsored several regional SHRM legal update conferences at the beginning of 2017.  After hearing from labor law experts about the Legal Updates affecting us in 2017, it is obvious that wage-and-hour compliance make up the top concerns for HR Professionals.

Wage and hour law suits are on the rise and make up the most active source of litigation in the employment law sphere!  There has been a year-to-year increase in claims that has persisted since 2000, going up by more than 450 percent.

For a company to mitigate risk of wage and hour violations, it is important to have the right systems, policies and processes in place.  In addition, documenting and retaining these systems, policies and practices as well as maintaining accurate records and employee data, is required by state and federal law (see previous blog: Managing Employee Record and Retention Strategy).

To assist employers with ensuring good practices surrounding Hours, Timekeeping and Pay, we have compiled three wage and hour compliance tips that employers should adopt to minimize their risk of Wage and Hour Claims

3 Wage and Hour Compliance Tips To Help Avoid Claims

1. Develop Consistent Policies

Developing, publishing and implementing sound wage and hour policies and practices.

Here are the must have policies:

 – Hours of Work
– Flexible Hours / PTO tracking
– Working off the clock
– Meal and rest breaks
– Exception time
– Donning and doffing
– Pre and post-shift work activities
– Meeting and training time
– Travel time
– Shift differentials
– OT on bonuses and commissions
– Remote working provisions and home-shore policies
– Payroll changes
– Controlling overtime hours
– On-Call / Emergency Call-Back Pay

California employers also include:

– Reporting Time Pay

– Split shift premiums

– Make-Up time

Utilize OnePoint’s HR Support Center to update or create an entire new employee handbook.  There is a full library of various policies as well as a Handbook wizard and HR professionals to assist you in creating a handbook to ensure your current policies are accurate and up to date.

2.   Attestation Documentation

Have all non-exempt employees sign an Attestation Clause using Electronic Disclaimers and Notifications.  Utilize your time keeping technology to include an attestation clause which employees and managers must acknowledge and sign prior to submitting time cards.  The attestation clause should state the all time, including hours outside of the employee’s normally scheduled workweek, overtime, etc. has been submitted by the employee.  OnePoint has a new Attestation Clause feature which can assist you in reducing your risk by:

  •  Improving enforcement of your work rules
  •  Engaging employees to complete timecard attestation
  •  Engaging managers to monitor employees
  •  Simplifies compliance with automated notifications and reminders
  •  And offers reporting capabilities

3. Automate Time and Attendance Work Rules:

Workforce management solution should provide administrators with automated Time and Attendance Work Rules.  OnePoint Time and Labor solutions with clocks hardware and mobile functionality ensures employers have a record of who is doing what, when, and why in real time.   Our single database architecture provides a complete employee view on a One employee record which is essential to maintaining compliance as well as payroll accuracy.

In addition, wage and hour laws are continually changing; therefore you can not just set and forget your systems pay calculations and work rules.  OnePoint HCM solutions make it easier to review work rules and pay calculations and be able to audit historical employee data.  The main benefit of a truly unified HCM solution is that one database ensure that updates or changes made by HR or the employee are shared in real-time across all applications (i.e payroll is updated in real-time when changes are made to employee work rules. This ensures consistent data, historical information is stored and minimizes compliance risk.