Flexible Benefits via the People Inc. ESS
Introduction
The demands of modern life are no longer synonymous with a 9-to-5, 365-days a year job; individuals often need some degree of flexibility in their working hours. In recognition of this, recent legislation has given individuals the right to request flexible working from their employer. Flexibility might be provided, for example, by adjusting their working hours, by providing unpaid leave, by introducing a flexi-time scheme, by agreeing to home-working, or by introducing job-shares. Providing this flexibility for staff not only makes it easier for them to manage their lives, but it can also help their employer to attract, motivate and retain staff; a happy workplace is a productive workplace.
To enable organisations to managing flexible working practices, they need to be able to record details of employee’s contractual hours, details of the hours they work each week, and details of any time away from work. The People Inc. system is designed to record information relating to all of these areas. For example, details of career breaks, part-time working, study-leave and home-working can all be recorded in the standard People Inc. system. Moreover, the inherent flexibility provided by the system means that more complex arrangements can also be managed. Buying & Selling Holiday & Flexitime are just two illustrations of what’s possible with the toolkit supplied with People Inc.
Buying and Selling Holiday
Providing employees with an option to buy additional holiday (or if they would like to increase their earnings, sell some of their holiday allowance) can be implemented as a custom feature within the People Inc. system. Employees could then vary the number of holiday days/hours available to them in a particular year (by submitting a request using the ESS, which is routed to their manager for approval). An adjustment could then be made to their salary to reflect this change. In this type of arrangement, there are normally limits to the number of days that can be bought and sold, and this logic can be added to the system to control the requests submitted by individuals. For example employees might be allowed to buy up to five extra days, or sell up to two days as long as their holiday entitlement does not go above or below the stated maximum and minimum. For the purposes of this scheme, a value would need to be associated with a holiday day. This might relate to 1/260th (or 1/261th) of their annual salary (depending on the number of working days in the year). Once again, this can be automated within the People Inc. system.
Flexi-time
By adding custom ESS workflow functionality (using the People Inc. screen-designer), organisations would be able to manage flexi-time using People Inc. This wold be achieved by logging the hours worked by employees and comparing these with their contractual hours. The basic attendance details can be collected using the standard ESS employee timesheets add-on. This enables the organisation to record the number of hours employees work each day. These timesheets are passed to the employee’s manager for approval to ensure a level of control. A comparison of the hours worked and employee’s work pattern could then be used to generate flexi-time information. This information would be recorded as adjustments to the employee’s flexi-time balance and this could be booked as time off in the normal way (via an ESS request). Where limitations are set against the number of hours that could be accrued as flexi-time, this could also be managed automatically using customisation within the People Inc. system.
More Information
For more information on how to add these new features to your system, please call us on 01977 734 074 or email info@software4hr.co.uk