Here’s What You Need to Know About Philadelphia’s Fair Workweek Rules

Fair Workweek regulations are coming into force across the nation. These ‘predictive scheduling’ laws aim to promote flexibility for shift workers and protect against unfair scheduling practices.

The rules are complex and fines for violations are heavy.

In Philly, the rules come into play in January 2020 and apply to full-service restaurants and fast-food operators with more than 250 employees and 30 or more locations worldwide, including franchisees. Among other headaches, shifts must be planned 10 days in advance (increasing to 14 days in 2021) and records must be immaculate to avoid costly fines.

In 2017, the owner of two outlets at the city’s food hub, Reading Terminal Market, agreed to pay over $660,000 to settle a case brought by the Labor Department. The alleged violations included not paying workers the appropriate overtime pay and not keeping proper records.

This example shows how important it is to keep your records accurate and stay up-to-date with regulations. The fact regulations vary significantly state-by-state makes it all the more difficult for restaurant groups who operate across multiple cities.

Many operators have put dedicated finance teams in place to identify violations and deal with penalties to ensure compliance. But this approach deals with the symptoms of the problem rather than the cause. 

What is needed is a holistic solution that tackles the root cause while also mitigating risks throughout the business, enabling all departments to consistently and proactively work together. 

Giving managers the power to use predictive scheduling effectively, minimizes violations and pushes any violation data straight to payroll to be dealt with in accordance with the law.

The result is greater efficiency and less stress for managers, more flexibility and protection for employees, and better results for the business – not only in terms of happy workers but in costs saved and embarrassment avoided.

Let’s take a look at the rules and penalties for Philadelphia and then how Harri’s system deals with the many challenges they pose to restaurant operators in the city.

Regulations and Penalties for Philadelphia

Good Faith Estimate

The employer must provide the new hire with a written Good Faith Estimate of their work schedule over a typical 90-day period. The Good Faith Estimate should include:

• The median number of hours the employee is expected to work in a workweek. 

• Whether the employee is expected to work on-call or not.

• The days of the week the employee can expect to work and expect to have off.

The employer must revise the Good Faith Estimate when there is a significant change.

Right to Rest

An employee may decline, without penalty, any work hours scheduled: 

• Less than nine hours after the end of the previous day’s shift.

• During the nine hours following the end of a shift that spanned two days. 

The employee may consent to work such shifts. This consent must be provided in writing, either for each such shift or for multiple shifts, and may be revoked by written communication at any time. 

The employer is liable to pay $40 in compensation for shifts worked during this rest period.

Advanced Notice on Scheduling

All schedules must be posted, whether or not an employee is scheduled to work that week, at the workplace at least 10 days before the scheduled shifts. This period increases to 14 days on 1 January 2021.

An employee may decline to work any hours or additional shifts not included in this posted work schedule. An employee may voluntarily consent to work such hours. This must be recorded in writing.

Changes to Schedules

The employer must also provide notice of any proposed changes to the schedule as soon as possible and prior to the change taking effect. 

They must revise the written work schedule to include changes within 24 hours.

Penalties for Changes to the Date or Time of a Work Shift (Predictability Pay)

If the employer adds time to a work shift or changes the date, time or location of a work shift under the following conditions, they are liable for the corresponding penalties:

• No change in the number of hours:

• Pay one hour at the employee’s regular rate of pay.

•  Additional hours:

  • Pay one hour at the employee’s regular rate of pay.

•  Subtracted hours:

  • Pay half the regular rate of pay for the hours that were subtracted.

• A shift is canceled:

  • Pay half the regular rate of pay for the hours that were lost.

Access to Hours for Existing Employees

Employers are required to offer more hours as they become available to existing employees before hiring new staff or contractors externally. 

• The employer must provide written notice of available work shifts for at least 72 hours (unless a shorter period is necessary in order for the work to be performed). 

• The notice must: 

  • Be posted in English and in the primary languages of the employees at the workplace.

  • Be posted in a conspicuous location at the workplace that is readily accessible and visible to all employees. 

  • Also be provided electronically to each employee if the employer normally communicates scheduling information with employees in this way.

  • Include a description of the position and its required qualifications, the schedule of available shifts, the length of time the employer anticipates requiring coverage for the additional hours, and the process by which employees may notify the employer of their desire to work the offered shifts.

The employer may provide the notice concurrently at the location where the shifts described in the notice will be worked, at other locations, and to external candidates.

Employers must not retaliate by, for example, dismissing or disciplining employees who either request or decline more hours.

On-Call Protection

If a scheduled on-call shift is canceled the employer must pay half the employee’s regular rate of pay per hour, for any scheduled hours.

Exceptions

The employer is not liable to penalties under the following conditions:

• An employee requests a shift change by written communication.

  • Including voluntary additions or subtractions of hours initiated by the employee, the use of sick leave, vacation leave, or other leave policies offered by the employer. 

• A schedule change is the result of a shift swap between employees.

  • Subject to any employer policy regarding required conditions for employees to exchange shifts. 

• The employer’s operations cannot begin or continue due to any of the following: 

  • Threats to employees or the employer’s property.

  • The failure of a public utility or the shutdown of public transportation.

  • A fire, flood, or other natural disaster.

  • A state of emergency declared by the President of the United States, Governor of the state of Pennsylvania, or Mayor of the city.

  • Severe weather conditions that disrupt transportation or pose a threat to employee safety. 

• An employee begins or ends work no more than twenty minutes before or after the scheduled start or end time of the shift.

• An employee volunteers to work additional hours in response to a mass written communication from the employer about the availability of additional hours, under the following conditions:

  • The mass communication is only used for additional hours resulting from another employee being unable to work the scheduled hours.

  • The communication makes clear that accepting such hours is voluntary.

  • The employee has the right to decline such hours.

• Employee hours are subtracted due to termination of employment.

• Changes are made to the posted work schedule within 24 hours.

• The covered employer subtracts hours from an employee’s work schedule for disciplinary reasons.

  • Provided the employer documents this in writing.

• A ticketed event, due to circumstances that are outside the employer’s control and after the employer has posted the work schedule, is canceled, scheduled, rescheduled, postponed, delayed, increases in expected attendance by 20% or more, or increases in duration.

• A hotel banquet event is scheduled, due to circumstances that are outside the employer’s control, after the employer provides the posted work schedule with the required advance notice.

Harri’s Intelligent Scheduling 

Harri’s intelligent scheduling system automatically keeps operators up-to-date with regulations, even across multiple jurisdictions. It helps you not only to actively comply with regulations, but also to use predictive scheduling to improve your business.

Here’s a rundown of the main features.

Good Faith Scheduling Support

The system includes the following features to make employees aware of the Good Faith Schedule during onboarding:

• The automatically generated Good Faith Estimate document provides new hires with a clear schedule in accordance with the local laws.

• This is seamlessly integrated into the onboarding process for review and e-signature by the new hire. 

Direct Shift Swaps

Harri’s Hot Fill system allows employees to exchange shifts directly without employer involvement. The peer-to-peer shift exchange does not violate the above rules on shift swaps based on pay rate and overtime thereby avoiding late-change penalties.

Hot Fill - “Uber for your employees”

Here’s how it works:

1. An employee is unable to attend work and they release the shift.

2. Other employees have indicated they wish to work on that day if a shift becomes available (note, they are not “on-call”).

3. The system alerts these employees via SMS and push notification. 

4. The first employee to accept gets the shift. 

5. The manager on duty is notified of the employee’s ETA and distance from work.

This system offers more flexibility for employees and makes it far easier for managers to oversee a shift swap, all while avoiding costly late-change penalties.

Calculation of Right to Rest Compensation Payment

The Right to Rest regulation ensures employees adequate rest between shifts. Harri helps managers to comply by alerting them if this rule is violated when the schedule is created, or any time after it is created, so they can proactively make changes to the schedule.

Manager Alert for Penalties Related to Schedule Changes 

Managers have the ability to define compensation rules for changes after the advance notice period. Shift change premium pay is indicated on the schedule itself and included in the total wage cost calculations.

This means managers are fully aware of the cost impact of schedule changes before they put them in place so they are able to plan and make strategic decisions accordingly. It also makes it easy for the finance department to calculate the costs and pay the right amount to the employee.

Predictive Scheduling Premium Reporting

This feature provides managers with reports indicating, in detail, all the premium payments resulting from schedule changes. These can then be passed seamlessly to the finance department where they can be processed.

They can also be analyzed and scrutinized by management so that key decisions can be made on the company-wide scheduling policy to avoid future fines.

Make Sure Your Business is Protected

The best way to ensure compliance, at scale and across states and cities, is to use a holistic system designed for the purpose.

Harri’s smart scheduling tools simplify every stage of the process, dealing with the cause of the problem in order to minimize violations and streamline communication between departments, managers, and employees.

To see how you can use the system to protect your business and lead a happy, better-rested team, get started with Harri’s smart scheduling tools.

NRA 2019: The 5 Biggest Takeaways

Team Harri landed last week in Chicago and was in full force at the 100th National Restaurant Association Show. After days of meeting with hundreds of operators, here are the 5 biggest takeaways from this years conference:

1. Retaining talent continues to be the primary concern of operators. With a majority of the industry narrative pointing to engagement as the key to preventing turnover, it’s very clear that a single dimensional solution, such as engagement, to solve a multidimensional problem such as turnover, is an incomplete perspective.  With wage inflation pressure adding fuel to the labor problem fire, operators are turning to lose-lose decisions in order to counteract rising labor costs and maintain economic equilibrium. According to the 2019 Wage Inflation Survey by Harri, 45% of operators experienced labor costs rise from 3-9%. In response to these changes, operators are making changes to labor and business operations ranging from reducing employee hours, raising menu prices, cutting jobs, and closing locations.  What’s compelling is the correlation between those decisions and a spike in turnover events (35%) that are occuring in their wake. Moreover, with 71% of respondents raising menu prices, the industry experienced a rise in average check values by 4.2% but a 2.1% drop in traffic (Bloomberg Intelligence). This means that operators (emphasis on casual dining and QSR) are losing elasticity in their pricing and will no longer be able to lean on rising prices to simply counteract increases in labor costs.  They need a sustainable solution that allows them to be strategic in managing the economics of the business, particularly in all facets of labor control.

2. Unit-level adoption of employee facing technology continues to be an up-hill battle. Finding a technology platform that’s built from the ground up, mobile friendly, highly intuitive, and meet the expectations of a multi-generational workforce is a rare find. The Workforce OS by Harri was built with this entirely in mind. With the introduction of the Harri Live, operators can grant frontline managers the ability to access live sales and labor data, full scheduling management, employee requests, communications, live compliance alerts and team data in one place, on the go. The application also allows for cross-location employee data, which is useful to have up to date information at the unit level.

3. Gaining a better hold on the candidate experience to attract and hire the right talent has felt like mission impossible for the industry.  Whilst there is certainly an emphasis on winning the War for Talent in today’s labor market conditions (the process of driving greater volumes of candidate acquisition in a highly competitive market), there’s simultaneously a Race for Talent (getting highly qualified candidates from point A ‘applying’ to point B ‘hired and on the job’ as quickly as possible).  Understanding and optimizing each stage of the candidate lifecycle is achieved in combination of enacting talent acquisition best practices and deploying device agnostic technology that generates speed, efficiency, and positive candidate experiences. As recently demonstrated at HR in Hospitality, Harri’s partnership with CAVA has resulted in a 107% improvement in their average time to hire and has attributed to their success in opening numerous locations in complex geographies and significantly improving overall retention rates.

4. “People related challenges are just par for the course in the hospitality industry, everyone is dealing with the same issues and there isn’t a clear way to address them.”  We hear this almost everywhere we go given that so much focus remains on the inflation of raw materials, optimizing inventory management, and delivery's impact to the bottom line. The acceptance of the ‘status quo’ plagues the industry and leads to costly mistakes.  Recent examples like Steak n’ Shake, who made a 7.7 Million dollar error by misclassifying 286 store managers best exemplifies this conclusion. Specifically, Steak n’ Shake classified managers as exempt from overtime pay, then required those managers to work 50 hours or more a week in order to perform non managerial tasks while restaurants were understaffed.  This primary example only bolsters the need for tools such as Harri’s Smart Scheduling system. A system that is integrated to a biometrically controlled time and attendance environment and combines seamless demand forecasting, activity based manning matrices and streamlined schedule distribution to create an optimized sales forecast and help organizations maintain compliance to avoid costly errors like Steak n’ Shake.

5. The power of one. The days of building, managing, and engaging teams through fragmented, one-off technologies are no longer an option given today’s operating environment.  The industry needs to deeply consider the value of consolidating employee facing technologies in the pursuit of driving the retention, engagement, and satisfaction of their employees.  According to TDn2K’s People Report, there is a direct correlation between brands that have the best metrics in overall sales, traffic, and intent to return and the aforementioned people related KPIs.  Aside from embracing the concept of driving business performance through employee performance, there's a tremendous opportunity to aggregate all employee related data under a single system ( from both pre and post hire events) that deliver insights to drive business performance and sales, optimize hiring practices and costs, decrease turnover rates, drive people related compliance and risk mitigation, and optimize labor costs.  Only a platform that integrates all of those points and interactions of the employee lifecycle can achieve such a powerful dynamic.

Harri Expands Workforce OS, Introduction of Harri Live App and Smart Scheduling

Industry leading hospitality employee technology platform rapidly expands mobile and predictive intelligence functionality in response to challenging labor market conditions

Harri, the leading workplace management solution for restaurants and hotels, today announced new innovations that elevate the capabilities of its core labor management platform, Workforce OS, which helps hospitality business build, manage, and engage their teams.  Harri Live, the most effective mobile app offered to frontline managers, headlines these new expansions amongst next-generation enhancements to Harri’s suite of products including Scheduling, Learning Management, Analytics & Reporting and Integrations.

“After announcing the introduction of the Workforce OS nearly a year ago, we’ve taken monumental strides to deliver on our core mission; to build the deepest, richest and smartest technology platform available to strategically manage our industry’s greatest asset,” said Luke Fryer, Founder and CEO of Harri. “The days of building, managing, and engaging teams through fragmented, one-off technologies are no longer an option given today’s operating environment. We’re immensely proud to announce these amazing milestones and are invigorated by the continuous innovation that’s deeply rooted in our customer-centric values.”

According to Harri’s Data Intelligence team, sub-90 day turnover represents nearly $70 billion of wasted labor costs a year to the restaurant industry. When considering the impact of those turnover events to guest experience and sales, the net losses are even greater. The opportunity to help restaurants regain the employee retention initiative starts with recognizing that 65% of employees leave in the first 90 days due to scheduling dissatisfaction. Given such a compelling trend, Harri has released the first in a series of powerful new scheduling and employee development tools to address the industry's greatest economic opportunity.

Designed to support restaurant partners, Harri’s most recent innovations include:

• Harri Live: The most powerful mobile application on the market granting frontline managers the ability to access live sales and labor data, full scheduling management, employee requests, communications, live compliance alerts and team data in one place, on the go.

• Smart Scheduling System: This next generation scheduling technology saves managers time in building and optimizing schedules by combining seamless demand forecasting, activity based manning matrices and streamlined schedule distribution. An optimized sales forecast and schedule for a 50 employee full-service operation can now be created and published in a handful of minutes instead of hours.  

• Learning Management System: To be progressively introduced over 2019, this LMS will be the first in market to intelligently respond to both an employees’ stage in the employment lifecycle as well as their individual employment needs. The first module - Workplace Harassment & Discrimination Training - directly addresses training needs specific to sexual harassment and related local regulation.

The aforementioned products work in conjunction with Harri’s existing Workforce OS platform, connecting over 250 top hospitality brands with the talent, technology, and insights needed to help build, manage and engage talent. With more than 30 modules, Workforce OS provides solutions for talent acquisition, employer branding, applicant tracking, scheduling, communications, compliance, analytics, and more.

Harri On the Rise...Why We're Celebrating

This quarter has been tough on our competitors in talent technology platforms. There’s news of consolidation, leadership changes, and potential layoffs -- all cause for concern. Meanwhile, here at Harri HQ, we’ve spent these past couples of months celebrating some exciting milestones and we couldn’t wait to share them with you:

Top Start-Up

Cue the fanfare! Harri has been recognized as a Top-50 Startup in the United States by LinkedIn. The professional networking site weighed factors such as interest in the company, engagement with employees, job interest, and retention to rank the most sought-after startups where professionals want to work and more impressively, stay. LinkedIn cited Harri’s ability to make life easier in the hospitality industry – a tough sector with one of the worst employee turnover rates – by owning all stages of the hiring process, from sourcing hotel and restaurant workers to managing employee schedules. What an honor. "Five years ago,” says CEO Luke Fryer, “we began the Harri journey with a vision of creating the next generation of broadly capable, industry optimized, employee management technology. This was and continues to be an audacious but increasingly achievable goal that's validated by moments like this."

Growing Our Team

While the job market suffers elsewhere, we’re happy to announce that we’ve just hired our 100th engineer and are on track to double that number in the next 12 months. Finding and retaining a skilled engineering team means we can continue to develop a powerful suite of tools to help you with your talent needs, create seamless and user-friendly platforms, and deliver unparalleled customer service.

Expanding Our Global Footprint

Not only are we growing our own staff, we’ve hit a fantastic landmark in growing our customers. Since launching in the United Kingdom in May 2016, we’ve acquired so many great brands as clients. In fact, we just recently signed our 50th customer – Dishoom!

Dishoom is an Indian restaurant chain that pays homage to the old Irani cafes of Bombay. Inspired by true flavors of home cooked Indian food, Dishoom’s founders are re-creating the community hubs they have seen to exist in the restaurants of Bombay. Among their dozens of awards, The Sunday Times recently ranked Dishoom 36th in their ‘100 Best Companies to Work For.” We count ourselves lucky to have such an innovating brand on board - not only is the food sensational; they are pioneers of great candidate experience and we are excited to help them grow through their people!

Powered by Harri, Customers Expand

When we help you build and manage your workforce, you’ll find that you have much more bandwidth to focus on other aspects of your business. That’s why we’re so excited when our partners expand into new locations and concepts. We’re on the same team.

Take ThinkFood Group. We’re currently helping them with talent acquisition and management for their brand-new location in Disney Springs, Florida. The concept, Jaleo By José Andrés, will feature Spanish tapas, paella and sangria.

We’re also stoked to be a part of Snooze, an A.M. Bakery’s incredible growth. After a record six new openings in 2017, the chain is on pace for eight new restaurants this year and 12 in 2019. We recently spoke with their Senior Vice President of People Resources, Brianna Borin, to find out her best practices for ensuring quality talent management as the enterprise continues to grow.

“People are your biggest asset. The second you lose sight of that, things can go really wrong, really quickly -- especially if you’re growing as fast as we are as a company,” she recently told us. “You have to power those assets to be the best asset they can be. Use as many tools and resources that can aid you in doing that well. It’s really critical.” (Watch the inspiring conversation here.)

This is just a snapshot to share that we’re celebrating big wins in how we’re building, growing, and investing in the next-generation talent technology platform for hospitality. In spite of what you’re reading about the fate of some of our competitors, rest assured, the future is bright.