Tracking Labor Laws in the Evolving Mobile-First Workplace
Most organizations have recognized that we have been in the midst of an accelerating – and evolving – mobile transformation in the workplace for some time. While Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) programs were all the rage a few years ago, analyst firm Gartner predicts that by 2016, 38 percent of companies will stop providing devices to workers and by 2017, half of employers will require employees to supply their own device for work purposes.
Working mobile – and collaborating across multiple offices and locations – is no longer a novelty, it’s a common practice. And while a lot of the focus around the drivers of this has been with Generation Y and ‘digital natives’, the reality is that the nature of the job, rather than the age of the employee, dictates the extent of how much work is conducted on mobile devices each day.
As mobility has evolved, so too have the complexities emerging within the organization regarding the workforce – particularly when it comes to the litany of labor laws that have emerged over the last few years. Over the last decade, there was a whopping 400 percent increase in the number of collective action lawsuits alleging wage and hour violations, and the US Department of Labor (DoL) estimates 70 percent of companies are not compliant with wage and hour laws.
In a recent case, an employee took his company to court for unpaid time he had worked using his personal device. The court ruled in favor of the employee and the company had to pay damages to the employee. Meanwhile in California, a state already famous for having one of the most complex labor laws, employers must reimburse employees for job-related use of their personal devices.
The DoL now initiates 43 percent of its investigations on “emerging business models”, directing their resources to where the data and evidence show wage violations are most likely to occur. This means that organizations not only need to focus on better ways to make it easier for employees to stay productive, connected, and accountable but also need to closely look at processes and solutions to reduce inefficiencies, and to gain better visibility into how employees are working and spending their time.
For an organization to better serve the needs of its dispersed workforce and remain compliant with the plethora of local, state, federal and global labor laws, it needs to establish carefully drafted policies, ensure clear visibility into how employees track their hours, and implement technologies that easily track time and attendance. At Replicon, we recently announced the first and only out-of-the-box support for pre-configured pay rules that cover all U.S. states, all Canadian provinces and most European and Asian countries. With this library of pay rules, businesses can rapidly deploy a time and attendance solution without time-consuming and expensive customization work.
