Running a hospitality business – restaurant, hotel, or another guest-focused venue – is harder than ever before. Minimum wage increases are usually great for your workers, but they put pressure on employers to make changes throughout their business to accommodate these adjustments.
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NEW YORK, NY (February 21, 2019) – Harri, the next-generation software solution that helps hospitality businesses build, manage and engage their teams today announced, in partnership with the New York City Hospitality Alliance, a new digital anti-harassment and discrimination training platform for restaurants and nightlife establishments. The platform will provide hospitality-relevant training modules for employees, using a curriculum developed in partnership with Fox Rothschild LLP that fully complies with the Stop Sexual Harassment in NYC Act.
“Acts of harassment and discrimination have no place in our people-centric industry,” said Luke Fryer, Founder and CEO, Harri. “Aside from the entertainment industry, no other professional community was as seismically impacted by the #MeToo movement. The operational realities of the hospitality workplace require a more intensive and curated approach to educating our employees regarding workplace behaviors. The potential for damage is significant to both employees and owners, which is why Harri is taking an active role alongside our partners at the New York City Hospitality Alliance to help our clients mitigate risk and improve the integrity of the restaurant workplace.”
The platform, a module within Harri’s TeamLive workforce management suite, will comply with New York City and State requirements and will exceed the minimum legal standards by covering anti-discrimination laws. In doing so, the platform is intended to help cover two of the industry’s biggest blind spots. With the rise of minimum wage impacting profitability and a seemingly unstoppable onslaught of employee-related legislation, the industry requires a comprehensive solution to risk mitigation and help in ensuring that restaurants are a fair, safe, and welcoming place to work. Specific features of the platform will include:
Training Customized for the Hospitality Industry
Content Covering Anti-Harassment and Discrimination
Streamlined Platform Providing Legal Compliance
Audit-Friendly Functionality Providing Employee Completion Status and Record
Platform will be available in both English and Spanish
“We must stop sexual harassment and discrimination in the workplace, and help ensure our members comply with the newly enacted anti-harassment training requirements. That’s why we’re proud to partner with Harri to provide restaurants and nightlife establishments a high-quality training program that’s customized for the hospitality industry workplace,” said Andrew Rigie, Executive Director, NYC Hospitality Alliance.
The platform will be hosted by Harri and available starting April 2019.
We're excited to share our latest product and feature releases for May 2018!
These enhancements may affect your account. Check out the highlights below, and please check in with all appropriate members of your team to ensure you're implementing the updates that will best serve your business.
ADVANCED JOB POST SETTINGS
As a hospitality professional, you need more control over every aspect of your business. This feature gives you even more control over the jobs you post. With Advanced Job Post Settings, you can now set jobs as ‘Evergreen,’ meaning they have no expiration date. You’ll also be able to pause a job, which will remove it from Harri, your Career Portal, and other job boards. You also have the ability to set a number of hires when creating a job post, set a fill date, and set actions when marking a job as filled, ensuring it’s mandatory for managers to move candidates to either the ‘Hired’ or ‘Skipped’ columns.
ENHANCED SCHEDULE PRINTING
Schedules are the glue holding everything together. A well-built, insightful schedule has the ability to not only put the right people in the right places, it can also improve the experience of scheduling managers and improve team engagement. Our improved table view option prints the week's schedule on less pages with more info, and can also be grouped by employee, day part, and revenue center.
PAY DATA SHEET IMPROVEMENTS
Everyone looks at things differently, which is why we’ve added new sorting options to our pay data sheets, including the ability to sort employees by first and last name (these options have been added to the timesheet, as well). We've also added labor cost/total wages to the Pay Data Sheet, and made improvements to both the employee name column on the Pay Data Sheet and the Pay Data Sheet header to make it readily available when managers scroll down.
EXPANDED LABOR REPORTING
Are you an operations or finance professional looking for more visibility into what makes up your total labor cost? Our new Detailed Employee Labor Variance Report enables you to view actual hours worked and labor costs vs. scheduled hours worked and variance. It's easily customizable and aggregated, too: You have the ability to aggregate across the time frame of the report (timeline can be customized). We call this report 'detailed' because additional categories for wage and wage penalties are broken down (spread of hours and overtime pay is included), giving you even more visibility into what makes up your total labor cost.
TEAMLIVE CHANNELS
In Q1 we added a new feature to our TeamLive communications capabilities called TeamLive Channels. This feature allows managers to communicate with their team members via position, category, and custom groups. Managers will also be able to send messages to specific groups - like servers - without spending time creating a group and adding servers to it.
Hospitality businesses are forced to adapt to the ever-evolving landscape of labor challenges and laws - or face the consequences.
It’s our mission to position hospitality businesses for success. That’s why we're constantly striving to perfect our product.
Below, we've recapped some of our biggest updates so far this year:
CAPTCHA
Hospitality's adoption of tech and data continues to trend up. To protect our clients, we've added an extra level of security to the login process through a captcha (powered by Google) which will be prompted after 3 failed logins or when suspicious activity is detected.
Reporting Time
Also known as “Call-In Pay”, this tool refers to what happens when an employee reports to work for a shift, but are sent home before the conclusion of their scheduled shift (and therefore are entitled to pay for unworked hours). Our tool automatically calculates the pay that employees are entitled to for being sent home before the conclusion of their scheduled shift, ensuring full compliancy.
Employee Pooling
As labor costs become less flexible, we're here to help. Employees' wage costs can now be recorded at the unit they've clocked into, regardless of whether it's their home location. Overtime & spread-of-hours calculations are accurately calculated on a cross-location basis.
Interview Scheduler
This premium feature was designed for customers with centralized interview scheduling or multiple hiring managers in mind. It includes enhanced capabilities like custom interview duration and location, the ability to assign and schedule specific hiring managers by role, direct applicant interview messaging interface, upgraded open day functionality, and Google Calendar sync.
Time Card Adjustment Flow
Time Card Adjustment Flow (TCAF) creates enhanced transparency between employers and employees regarding hours worked. When an employer or a manager makes adjustments to a time card, the changes are sent to the employee for their review. TeamLive stores the changes and the employee's response, creating a record of communication and giving the employer the ability to reference their acknowledgment at any time.
Employee Card
Notify employees of time card changes with new shortcuts, features, and layout. Access messages, schedules, and employee availability through icons in the top nav, add more detailed info about your staff, and more.
Interested in learning more? Schedule a demo with a Harri expert!
On the first day of 2018, minimum wage increases will go into effect (New York’s changes will go into effect the day before, on December 31, 2017).
On July 1, 2018, Maryland, Oregon, and D.C. will follow suit with increases of their own.
The ever-changing landscape of the hospitality industry can be confusing and overwhelming - that’s why we’ve created a guide to help you navigate your state’s changes.
Check it out below:
New York State*:
New York City - Non-Fast Food Employers with More than 10 Employees:
New York City - Non-Fast Food Employers with 10 Employees or Less:
New York City - Fast Food Employers:
State Minimum Wage Changes Effective July 1, 2018
*Local laws may require different minimum wage rates.
What Employers Can Do Now:
Get Your Scheduling Down to a Science: Analyze your most crucial shifts and recognize the strongest members of your staff in order to strategically schedule your team (tools like Harri's TeamLive can help managers and operators with schedule alignment, labor costs, and budget).
Consider Adjusting Your Hours: By tracking your stores’ sales patterns, you may gain valuable insights to determine the working hours that are most productive for your business. For example, if you frequently experience a spike in customers/sales around lunch Monday through Friday, but find there's a slump during evenings on the same days, you may want to consider closing earlier during the week and focusing your marketing efforts towards weekday lunch. (Pro Tip: Your POS weekly and monthly reports should be a great indicator of these trends.)
Take a Close Look at Menu Item Prices: This is a last-ditch but sometimes necessary effort to combat minimum wage increases. Analyze each menu item and break it down by cost (with the help of your culinary team), and consider comparing vendors. Know that you may lose some customers at the expense of your menu changes. If you decide to increase your menu prices, communicate to your guests that your business has done so in order to stay open, pay your employees fair wages, and continue to serve them!
Harri has recently launched TeamLive, the first truly end-to-end workforce management software for the hospitality industry.
Let us know if you are interested in learning more about how TeamLive can dramatically improve profitability at your business.
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