A group or department of your employees came to you with a simple request: you want to use the overtime they accumulate each month as a “flexible” day off. Easy, right? False. Your employees are asking for a flexible day each month, instead of being paid overtime, if granted, it would violate California law. However, employees may receive either compensatory time off (CTO) for overtime worked or another workweek schedule to achieve a similar goal. To effectively implement a CTO agreement, the employee and employer must reach a written agreement before the employee works the overtime that counts for the CTO. In addition, all of the following criteria must be applied:1. CTO can only be available for daily overtime. CTO cannot be used for weekly overtime (more than 40 hours per week). Therefore, the CTO is not available to employees who are not eligible to receive daily overtime.2.
The CTO can only be taken during the pay period in which the overtime was worked. It cannot be carried over to the next payment period. (See 1 above: If carried forward to the second week of a pay period, the employer must still pay overtime for more than 40 hours worked in the first week. It is therefore often easier to require the employee to take the CTO in the same week that it is earned.) 3. CTO should be calculated based on the premium rate at which overtime would be paid (e.g. if the applicable rate for overtime is 1.5 times the hourly rate, 1.5 CTO hours must be available for those hours; if the applicable overtime rate is twice the hourly rate, two CTO hours are available for those hours). 4. If the CTO is not employed during the pay period in which the overtime was worked, the CTO is paid as overtime pay.5. It is advisable that each employee acknowledge that the request for a CTO is not a guarantee that it will be granted, and that employees cannot rely on his agreement. While an employer may want to review CTO requests, it is not always possible to meet them given the needs of the business. The decision to grant a CTO should be left to the discretion of the employer.6.
CTO can be used in exchange for a maximum of 240 hours of overtime per year.7. An employee`s request to the CTO can be revoked at any time. On the other hand, you might consider setting up an alternative work week schedule for these employees. This would give workers leave on certain days, in exchange for longer hours on other days on a regular schedule, and allow employees to work more on certain days and fewer days in the same work week. However, as with the CTO, you must still meet the requirement that overtime must be paid for all hours greater than 40 hours in a work week. If installed in accordance with the voting procedure described below, a regular alternative work schedule not exceeding 10 hours per day may be maintained during a 40-hour week without payment of overtime pay. A replacement work week agreement adopted may not provide for a shift of less than four hours. Overtime must also be paid to employees who work more than 10 hours per day and to those who work less than scheduled hours at the request of the employer. Index of BLS reports on workers with flexible and shift schedules A report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on the trend towards flexible work schedules.
Flexible hours can lead to problems with the FLSA Once you`ve established a policy, you need to make sure you don`t run into the nemesis of flexible hours, which FLSA.By a wide margin that this legislation causes the most problems for HR staff – for both exempt and non-exempt employees. This raises an important point: make sure you know beyond any doubt whether the worker planning a flexible arrangement is really exempt or not. Job sharing is another way to achieve work-life balance. Job sharing has been around for decades, but as more professionals seek a better work-life balance, job sharing has increased in the legal industry. Article: “More than a quarter of full-time employees have flexible work hours” Learn more about flexible hours. Operational requirements, staffing models, space considerations, and health and safety issues may preclude a request for flexible hours. Research on work and family issues, including flexible work arrangements. Another growing initiative is staggered work hours – a full work week at non-standard work hours that best fit the employee`s schedule. Staggered work hours are beneficial for women with school-age children, employees pursuing higher education, and others with significant commitments outside the office. They allow a law firm to meet the needs of its clients at all times by increasing the scope of employee presence.
The traditional 8-5 week Monday through Friday (which is only about 27% of a 7-day week) does not ideally serve customers in an increasingly 24/7 industry. However, as more and more companies embark on new ways of working, these problems are being solved. And at the end of the day, most problems are generally avoidable – as long as HR remains rigid enough when it comes to understanding flexible scheduling arrangements. Cake decorators, home researchers, nurses, couriers and restaurant workers were all found as employees, although they could choose their own schedules. [x] Laws do not require workers to choose between basic workplace protection and flexibility. Companies are doing it. For exempt employees: Keep in mind that recording their hours is risky. This means that they are hourly workers and can legally be treated as such. First Begin: Get Started Of course, there is no law that requires you to offer your employees flexible work arrangements. But there are laws that determine the wording and structure of your policy. The most important thing to remember when taking your first step is that you need to have a policy.
“These agreements should be seen as work orders,” says Camille Olson, a labour and employment partner in Seyfarth Shaw`s Chicago office. “There should be legitimate and objective standards, set out in a written policy, as to which positions are open to these agreements and which are not. It shouldn`t be informal because it could be seen as a reward. As the 2019 legislation known as AB 5, which would codify the “ABC test”[i] for determining employee status, makes its way through the California legislature, corporate interests have clashed with the bill. More recently, companies that are the face of the “gig economy” have argued that if they were to treat their workers as employees, as many would be under AB 5, these workers would lose their flexibility to decide when to work. These allegations are not supported by a reasonable analysis of the legal requirements of the bill; Instead, they are motivated by the desire of companies to continue to treat their workforce as independent contractors, which allows them to deny responsibility for the workers who build their businesses. Many of today`s employees, whether in the gig economy or not, already benefit from the flexibility that these companies make impossible for them. Yes. For example, an employee who works nine hours a day for four working days may be scheduled only four hours on the fifth day of the week to avoid overtime. If an employee who reports to the ADA requests flexible work arrangements, carefully review the request. Teleworking is a possible option for a person with a disability.
When telecommuting and flexible work schedules such as good behavior rewards are distributed, excluded employees can be upset — and if they tend to be women or people of color, they may actually have reason to be angry about.
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