23 August 2021 - 3 min read
Megan Lipscombe
Head of Marketing
Compliance and legislation – two things that cause many of us a headache. Whether you run a hospitality, retail or leisure business, ensuring your team are happy in their roles is a priority. And making sure you’re hitting the right standards when it comes to the likes of the working time regulations, GDPR and break policies, is something that goes hand in hand with employee satisfaction. But juggling all of this can be easier said than done; especially if you have lots of staff and multiple sites.
In this blog we cover everything compliance and legislation related, that Rotaready can take care of for you. So you can always be sure every member of your team is working the right number of hours, their data is being stored securely and any unsociable hours are compensated for. Plus a few other things that perhaps you didn’t know Rotaready could help you with.
Working time regulations state that you can’t work more than 48 hours a week on average – normally averaged over 17 weeks. Sounds straightforward enough, but you’ll know as well as us that this can be incredibly difficult to calculate manually. Especially when you have to factor in the different rules that apply to under 18’s and those who have opted out of the 48 hour week. Rotaready takes these calculations off of your plate and ensures you’re always compliant with working time regulations. Some of your staff have opted out? No problem, Rotaready will exclude them from these checks. Oh, and as a bonus, Rotaready will also consider the other facets of working time regulations; such as minimum rest periods between shifts, minimum days off over a period, along with the required tweaks for under 18’s.
The GDPR requires you to store and process personal information securely, and ensure that employee information doesn’t end up in the wrong hands. Storing sensitive information on the likes of a spreadsheet or worse still, physically, could lead to accidental exposure to the wrong people. Using Rotaready’s secure document storage and permission levels remove this risk and ensure employee information can only be accessed by the right people. This leads us nicely onto our next point…
As well as document storage, Rotaready has a secure document signing functionality. This is 100% legally binding in the UK, and across Europe. So, any employee contracts can be signed within Rotaready and automatically uploaded to the correct document category against the employee’s Rotaready profile. Saving you time on the paperwork and ensuring you have all of the correct information in one place.
Regardless of working time regulations, each of your employees will be contracted to work a certain number of hours. It can be tricky to stay on top of this when building staff rotas for the coming weeks. Rotaready shows each person’s contractual hours on the rota and highlights whenever someone is scheduled less hours than required. It also has a report designed specifically to help you analyse contractual hours compliance, over time. So you can be sure your team always works their contracted hours. And without the aggravation of any manual calculations or cross checking.
Applying the correct rest break on each shift can be easier said than done. Especially as the break length will often depend on the length of the shift, the start time of the shift, the nature of the shift, and who’s working it. With Rotaready, you can craft your own company policy, meaning the correct rest break is automatically applied. This keeps everything accurate; from timesheets and payroll to labour metrics and holiday accrual.
If you’re managing things manually, you’ll likely find that preparing your timesheets is an onerous and error prone task. Rotaready removes any room for error by automatically reconciling the shifts you’ve scheduled, against the times that your employees clocked in and out. This means we know which shift each employee has clocked in for, can establish whether they are early or late, and ensure accurate payroll as a result.
Each customer will have their own rounding rules – something we call sanitisation – which Rotaready will automatically apply. For example, if someone’s clocked in early, you may want them to be considered payable from the time they were scheduled to start; and if they clocked in late you may want to consider them payable from the time they actually started.
Sometimes your team may have to go above and beyond and work extended or unsociable hours. For example, if someone works past midnight, works on a bank holiday or exceeds their contracted hours in a week. In other words, scenarios where overtime should be triggered, and/or alternate pay rates applied. This is fully customisable within Rotaready; meaning your labour forecasts accurately reflect your company policies, and your payroll is right first time. So, your employees are always appropriately compensated for the hours they’ve worked.
It’s essential to ensure that sensitive information (such as pay rates) is only exposed to the relevant employees. It’s also really important to offer enough flexibility so your teams have the ability to do exactly what they need. Rotaready’s permissions are fully customisable, helping you meet your desired balance. We work with our clients right at the start of their journey with Rotaready to help them configure their permissions in a way that suits their business.
If you have any questions about any of the above, or would like to see these features and functionalities in action, just get in touch via live chat or email us at team@rotaready.com.
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