costomer service is nice, but when i am geting $6.70 an hour, i can really care less about the store
Is this what you call "work ethic"? Customer service is nice, and if the company wants it, it's your job, regardless of pay. You can't bitch about your pay unless you're doing your job, right? (Time clock issues aside, because of course you should be paid for the time you work, even if you work badly) And when I flipped burgers, $6.70 would have been panacea. Instead I was stuck around $6.30, and the only way I could get a raise was by going into management. And I had one of the highest non-management hourlies there, within $1 of assistant manager.
Customer service is something your company either does or it doesn't, and if it's part of your job, then a good work ethic requires you fulfill it to the best of your ability. You can have any problem with the company you want to have, but don't take it out on customers. They're just innocent bystanders.
unless you come in anyways when you can see a line of cars snaking all the way around the building and into the road and complain about it,
Reminds me of a certain night I worked a drive thru window at a Long John Silver's.:) In case any of you live in Austin, go look at the Long John's over by Northcross Mall. That's the window I was in. The line literally snaked all the way back through the back of the mall parking long, out onto the street, and there were cars lining up on three streets to get into the mall. A lady at the back of the line, when she got to the front of the line (where I was) told me that nobody had turned off, they were all heading to this window. I was bagging the orders myself, making all the drinks, and of course ringing up orders, taking orders, taking the money, and giving them the food. The assistant manager and shift leader sat there by the window the whole time just chatting. (I was pissed) The cooks in the kitchen were working their asses off to keep the food coming, and the cook working the window even commented to me that the others were just standing around when we were busy as fuck. All told, it wound up being something like $1200 in sales during one hour, all of it made in the drive-thru, and every single customer serviced. I even made a few bucks in tips because people were so impressed with the service.
So, yeah, whining about being "too busy" is just whining, and you should keep it to yourself. The rest of us don't care, and I at least have been there and done that.
it can be hard to concentrate on making food properly and not accidently adding in some horrible posion when you are under stress and crying for being insulted.
Yeah, this is a funny joke inside the restauraunt business, but don't give me an application. I wouldn't hire your sorry-ass attitude. You're more trouble than you're worth.
Problem is, many folks will forget to punch in or out, punch in before they change, or otherwise try to game the system in their favor.
Heh, I couldn't read this without thinking of my best attempt to game the system, ever, by far. Back in my burger-flipping days, we daytime cooks would frequently go hide in the back doing some shit chore or other during the shift change so the MOD wouldn't notice. By the time the daytime manager left, the night time manager wouldn't even know we were there. Then we'd go back up and just start cooking in the kitchen. I could usually get an extra half hour doing this, and my buddy claimed the record at a little over an hour.
Then I beat him, hands down (of course, I had circumstances in my favor). I hung around, knowing I was about to break his record of an hour, and then we got *slammed*. All the shit hit the fan in the front area, and the nighttime MOD finally noticed I was there. He took a look around and said "Dave, I know you were supposed to have left already, but can you stay another half hour or so? We're really busy". I, of course, agreed. I wound up milking two and half extra hours that night. Labor was still in line, too, so it was quite beneficial.
We called this milking the clock, like everybody else.:)
How about when the worker clocks in/out, they get a reciept with the time and an encrypted time signature on it. If there smart enough to keep there reciepts, they have evidence to contest. It would be even better to have a 3rd party company supply the service to avoid things like internal cheating.
When I worked at Sonic in Austin, they did that, actually. It was also generally considered an employee's fundamental right to have their receipt if they wanted it. Whenever an employee tried to accuse the management of shaving the time clock, the manager would always tell them to keep their receipts and compare them to their paycheck. Whether the employee did it or not, they usually quit bitching.:) Nothing like "I've offered you a receipt so you can audit me" to shut someone up when they know they're just talking out of their ass.
Thus, we'd work a few extra minutes, but it wouldn't make a difference, because they would always round down for 7 minutes or less of over time. With 8 minutes, then they'd round up to 15.
Rounding to the nearest quarter is standard practice, and if you don't see it directly on your time sheet, it probably happens elsewhere. It's easier, therefore faster, to do payroll that way. The amount of money on any specific instance is also usually negligible to both parties, and it really does even out in the end.
I have my employees round to the nearest quarter mostly so that when they say "It's 8:55 and I'm not scheduled to start until 9" I can say "Doesn't matter, you have to round to 9 anyway".;)
(That last part is a joke, but rounding is standard practice, and it does even out in the end, but it is a system the employee can abuse that the employer usually can't)
Take it for what it's worth, I found your post entertaining. Then I found you in my shower and couldn't keep my hands off you. So I went to my wife and said "Hey honey, look at Mike Hawk."
You *know* things are going to go wrong so have some labour in reserve to cope with it or pay the workers the overtime they deserve.
Hey hey hey, I *never* said "don't pay the workers the overtime they earned". Never.
See, I'm in the school that wants to schedule people 36-38 hours for full-time work. That way, when they do need to stay late, the fact that it will likely push them into overtime is an incentive for them to stay late. Asking someone to stay late is a big deal for them, especially if they have plans. Having a little extra financial incentive is a *good* thing. It makes it easier to get someone to voluntarily stay late when you really need them and is a win-win situation.
Forced overtime is never acceptable. In fact, forced anything is never acceptable. The employee/employer relationship is a delicate thing, and if handled properly can be very rewarding for both parties and the customer. It must be treated with the respect it deserves.
I was only saying that it's not possible to plan for every emergency, and sometimes you just have to deal with it, whatever the emergency is. Sometimes you take being shorthanded because you either don't have the choice or because an employee tries to take advantage of you in return for helping you out. If the employee isn't treating the employer/employee relationship with respect, he's probably going to cause more problems than he's worth having around.
What bothers me most about your post, is that you seem to be saying that it is "ok" to short change employees that are working for you.
Heh, you should probably reread to the top of the thread. I don't think the parent poster was wanting to shave employee time clocks, just that he's understanding that you can't always plan for every contingency and/or it would be more expensive to just schedule people to work to handle any problem than it would be to just deal with it when it happens.
I don't think you'll find that many people here on slashdot that will disagree that it's wrong to steal money from payroll, but you will find lots of people who know that you can't just plan away any possible problem that comes up, and sometimes you've just gotta grab the bull by its horns and hope for the best.
Under your scenario, picture an employee with an axe to grind who decides to start padding his hours to start collecting some ill-gotten overtime. Knowing that if I go to court and lose I'm out 15,000 times his hourly rate (time and a half times hourly rate times your penalty multiplier), how am I supposed to keep my employees honest? Your solution is as much an invitation for fraud as the problem you seek to redress.
Simple. If an employee has an axe to grind, find out his problem and solve it. If his problem is unsolvable (usually caused by the employee being unreasonable), run him off. If he still won't go, take the next opportunity to fire him using whatever procedures your company has for firing people.
Always works.:) If you're reasonable and your policies are reasonable, then you can approach any problem with a reasonable expectation of solving it. If it can't be solved, get rid of the person causing it. Since most people really are reasonable and want to solve problems rather than pad their time sheets, then you will be able to solve most problems with employees that ever come up. The ones you can't solve you just make sure that everything you did was reasonable and the employee isn't demanding/expecting anything unreasonable. If the employee is being unreasonable, and you're absolutely certain of it, and they won't open up for the problem to be solved, then you can get rid of them with a clear conscience, resorting to firing if needed.
I've never seen an employee that had to be fired. You can usually convince them to quit long before you have to fire them.:)
Redundancy makes sense in engineering when it doesn't cost anything (or very little) to have something available that sits around and does nothing except in the event of failure of the main something or other.
Doesn't make sense in scheduling because it only results in skyrocketing costs and either reducing or eliminating your profit margin or causing your prices to skyrocket to compensate, effectively removing you from the market.
Even emergencies that happen "all the time" are unpredictable in nature. You say you can just hire one more person and the problem goes away. Now schedule that guy. Put him on the schedule. Where does he go? The nature of the emergency dictates the solution, and the more hours you are open the harder it is to have another guy. If you're only open 10 hours a week, then hiring one more person to work 10 hours a week will keep you covered. But if you're open 160 hours a week, it's a different story.
Here's how you handle scheduling. It's very simple, and the system works well. First you determine how much work is needed to open the store. Then you schedule enough people to do all the work needed and have it open by a specific time. Next you determine, to the best of your ability, how much business you will do before 5pm. 5pm is the standard turnover hour in retail, although I've seen places do their evening shift change at 4pm or 6pm, and I've even seen places not have a shift change. (They were a mess) Now you multiply the amount of business you anticipate by the ideal labor ratio for your business, divide the result by the average hourly wage in your store, and that tells you how many people to schedule. That's not usually good enough, though, since for many businesses afternoon business drops off after lunch, so instead you break the day into smaller chunks and do the same math. Then you look at who can work that day, what you've already scheduled them for, and what you need to schedule them for later on. (After awhile you get a knack for it and don't have to do the fancy math) Great, so far.
Now you build in some redundancy (the best managers already build in some redundancy in their schedule, believe it or not). The best place to build your redundancy is to schedule someone who says "I want all the hours you can give me" to get off work immediately before the time period in which you are concerned about having enough employees. That way, if you need more, you can just ask that guy to stay, knowing he'll probably say yes. There's other ways.
Alright, now you say we should have one more person on the schedule to deal with "emergencies". We have to pay him. Having one more person each hour on the schedule (assuming he's not the one with the emergency) will drive your labor ratio through the roof, and in many retail businesses will actually cause the business to be unprofitable.
Now, as a businessman, pick one:
Go out of business because you paid your employees too much
Go out of business because you charged your customers too little (almost the same thing) as the first one)
Go out of business because your competitors beat you in the marketplace with lower prices
Go out of business because your competitors beat you in the level of their services
Stay in business
Having just enough people to do the work that is needed lets you have the lowest prices possible with an acceptable profit margin (assuming other costs are also in line) and still provide the level of service you need to in order to stay in business. Scheduling another person for each hour of business requires your prices go up. Sending people home early because of stupid overtime policies reduces the level of service you can offer.
It's a complex equation. It's also very shortsighted to set your company policies on the word "overtime" rather than the other numbers available. I've made killer overtime in places I've worked while overall we had great service and low labor ratio. The bosses didn't c
The problem with your theory is that employee's do not just cost an hourly wage, each employee has state/federal costs that the employee doesn't see. For example SSI is payed for 50/50, ask anyone who's self employed, it's no fun seeing that number you used to see on your paycheck as a deduction double in size.
Those are generally figured as the cost of doing business. You have two important ratios generally used for employees. Labor ratio is strictly based on actual dollars/hour. Then you have cost/employee, which takes into account the other stuff. Labor ratio is used to determine if you have enough employees to do the total volume of work that needs to be done, while cost/employee is used differently, generally on your way to figuring out what your profit margin is. Both have to be kept at specific values, varying from company to company, set to achieve specific goals. If your goal doesn't include "keep employees for a long time" for whatever reason, your cost/employee will usually be set about at the minimum required by law. If your goal is "hire the best, keep the best, and forget about the rest", you have a higher cost/employee because you're offering vacations, health, dental, vision, et al. You also tend to put your labor ratio a little higher in that case so you can pay more on the hour.
People who don't work with these numbers have a tendency to overrate what they're used for. Employees aren't viewed as a cost, but they do have to be figured in as cost, generally. Only accountants view them as costs.:) Good management views them as investments, generally speaking.
Several. First, $10/hour is considered "rich" by those actually working in those jobs (except in communist WA state, apparently). Try $7, or better yet, Minimum Wage + $0.25.
Second, getting employees to only work 20 hours. Next to nobody can survive on that income, and the ones that can are working 2+ jobs to do it, so they don't have that income. Conversely, they also don't have flexible schedules.
Third, it's not about total payroll costs. The magic figure is labor ratio. Some companies say "Keep your labor in line and don't let anybody work overtime". THey never say "Shave hours". Incompetent middle management shaves hours. Maybe others, I didn't read the fucking article. But here's labor ratio, in a nutshell:
Get out your calculator. Labor ratio is labor paid divided by gross sales. So if you have one employee who makes $10/hour work for four hours, your "labor paid" is $40 for those four hours. If you make $100 in sales, your labor ratio is 40%. Your ideal labor ratio is usually dictated by upper management, and frequently upper management doesn't care about overtime. They care about keeping your labor ratio in line. If it gets out of line, you're in trouble. Too high and it means you're working people when there isn't any work for them. Too low and it means you're not servicing your customers well because you're shorthanded. So if you say your ideal labor ratio is 15% (which is what I've defined for Texas Brand Barbecue), then that means you pay $15 for every $100 you make each hour. It doesn't matter if you distribute that between two employees, six, or give it all to just one. As long as you get all the work done, great. Labor ratio. That's all.
I've seen store managers shave employee hours in order to keep their labor ratio in line. I've threatened physical violence and taken the problem to upper management. I've organized employees with the intention of quitting if it gets done again. The problem has been resolved for me every time, but I've had to go to lengths to get it resolved. I've also seen store managers add some extra time when they knew the employee needed it. There's lots of good people out there in management.:)
And then what? What about when they don't happen? What do you do then? Send people home early? Great, until those people spend their extra time finding another job.
Can I ask you guys a couple of questions? How poor have you ever been as head of household?
Hmm, $1600/month gross with a wife and three kids. And that gross was before taxes, since I had to pay taxes on it separately, with $2k in self-employment taxes (just did my taxes for it a few days ago). Yeah, I'm getting a nice-sized return, thanks to EIC and Additional Child Credit.:)
Or, perhaps more realistically given the Slashdot demographic, how many single mothers with incomes less than 12,500 USD/year do you have working for you?
None, that I know of. I've hired for the start of the season, but as far as I know I haven't hired anybody with kids. A girl going through college who has no kids, and a guy coming home from overseas who also has no kids. I may hire more, but the nature of my new business venture is such that I'd prefer *not* to hire someone dirt-poor with kids. They'd be better off collecting welfare than working for me, since i"ll have to fire them in October anyway.
I mean, sure, no one is going to pay those fees. They will just pick up their kid, head home, and..... then what? Do you have any idea how hard it is to find child care for 5 PM to midnight? I won't even mention trying to find overnight care. The care provider has all the power in that situation, not the working parent.
True, all true. I've never looked for a care provider because my wife stays home with the kids. We'd rather be dirt-poor and take care of our kids ourselves. Besides, there's no way my wife working works out favorably with a daycare in the mix. Her monthly income would come out to just about what a daycare charges, so why throw all that money into a black hole? For the privilege of having someone else raise our kids? No way.
I hear you, though. I've worked alongside a lot of mothers just like who you're talking about. Daycare (or night care) wasn't even an option for them, they didn't have the money. State day care? Sure, there're daycare providers that get paid by the state instead. Ever seen the inside of one of those places? Doesn't work. Get your mother or someone to watch the kids instead. That's what the other women I've worked with have done, anyway.:) Not the best solution for some of them, but better than the alternatives, and they have to work.
And the next time the employer demands unscheduled overtime, then what? When the care provider drops them, then what?
It's a shitty situation, and it sucks to be in it. There's no easy solution, it's a hard life. It'd be nice to tell your employer "Can't work the extra hours unless you pay my late fees at the daycare." But that's not always an option. Look for another job? Hard enough getting this one! And so on and so forth. IN the '90s it was a different story, jobs were easier to come by. Mind you, those dirt-poor mothers could and frequently did work for fast food places, and jobs were aplenty in those days. Now we've got all these programmers clogging up the fast food places, food quality is going downhill, and employee complaints are at an all-time high.
The suits need to get the fuck out of the kitchen.
Bullshit. If things go wrong once in a long while, then fair enough. Sometimes you have to do some overtime to make it all happen in a crisis. If you have a 2-4 hour/employee crisis every week, you're just an incompetent manager with no planning skills.
Heh, bullshit yourself. Things go wrong all the time, especially in retail.
What do you do when your night guy calls in sick at the last minute? Well, you either run shorthanded and risk losing business because you don't have the people to handle it, or you have one of your day people work a few extra hours to compensate during the evening rush, then send them home. This has the effect of making the remaining night people stay a little longer themselves, and could add another 6-10 hours total that were not budgeted on those peoples' week, and could threaten to push them into overtime by the end of the week.
Car accidents? And so on and so forth. The more people you have working on any given day, the greater the likelihood that some one or more of them will have a problem that causes others to stay past their time. And that's stuff that's easily visible to the MOD.
How about when you have a busier day than normal (common, and not really possible to plan for) and you are unable to send people on breaks? While this is illegal in some places (WA state, for example), it still happens. That's stuff you really don't see until later, and can also add another unbudgeted 2-4 hours for each employee each week that could throw them into overtime by the end of the week.
And that doesn't even consider that the more people you have working for you for the week, the greater the likelihood that one of them will have a problem that pushes another into overtime.
I've even seen days where more people were scheduled because business was anticipated to be much higher than normal, and they still had to call someone on their day off and ask them to come in for a few hours.
Fact is, if your business is going to survive, you must expect at least a 2-4 hour time clock crisis each week, that means you've got business.
Now, this has the obvious counter "Just schedule everybody to work 30 hours, and you've got 10 to work with." That's great, until the store down the street starts hiring and they'll work you 40 hours and won't have a problem with overtime. Since you still have to be competitive in the job market, you would have to pay more on the hour, making overtime itself an even greater expense when it happens (and it will happen). Not to mention that many retail places, especially in larger metropolitan areas, are running in a permanent state of shorthandedness. When I flipped burgers, the place was always shorthanded. Fact was, people don't want to work in those jobs, and the quality of the workers isn't as good as you might expect (although I must say that some of the best workers and smartest people I've ever known flipped burgers for a living, and loved it). So you not only have more emergencies coming up, you also have higher turnover. People talk about how many in IT only work for a place for a year or so, and that's high turnover? Fuck that. Try hiring three people, starting them all within a week of each other, and none of them are left at the end of the month. And that's when you do pay overtime, gladly, and more on the hour than any other place in town.
That said, deciding to deal with the problem by editing people's hours isn't the solution either.;)
When was the last time you dug in your yard to see whether there was a buried treasure there? I bet you haven't: you make the reasonable assumption that there is no treasure buried there and digging costs valuable time. Until you receive additional information, the cost is simply not worth the expected benefit.
Well, if some renowned physicist showed up with some excellent math demonstrating that there must be buried treasure in my yard, it's worth a day's work to dig it up and test his hypothesis. Wouldn't you say?
Interesting opinion, but you are just shuffling the cost off to later generations. Say for example gravity control comes out of discovering a error in relativity. Is that worth it?
I don't think that's what he was talking about. Instead, I think he was trying to explain why there aren't any venture capital funds to fund scientific research. Well, duh. If it's called "venture capital" that means it's used in "capitalistic ventures", and science is not a capitalistic venture.
Translation of parent post: "Since we can't use the math for string theory to build a bomb, we're not going to believe it until such time as we can use it to build a bomb."
(Correct me if I'm wrong, didn't Einstein get laughed at until the development of the atomic bomb?)
It's when you're watching a movie in xine, and you hover over the movie, click the left mousebutton, and drag the current "frame" to your desktop. Xine then automatically exports it to.png and saves it to your desktop.
This is a phenomena which some scientists believe they have observed, was predicted by Einstein, apparently, and which NASA has spent $700 million to make an attempt to measure.
I regularly drive long distances from Canberra to Sydney or Melbourne or even up to Rockhampton, and a lot of these trips are on superb roads, long and straight and flat.
Dude, you're on crack. As every American knows, all Australians drive 4WD vehicles that kick the ass out of anything we have in America, drive on windy dirt roads, and frequently have to wave their hands in some crazy longhorn pattern to get the livestock to move off the road.
Oh yeah, and they shave with their knives and can tell time by looking at the sun, with the latter power being one that works regardless of which hemisphere the Australian is in or grew up in.
The part that sucks is that sometimes the cruise control decides to gun the engine when going up a hill. It's unacceptable for a human driver to spike the tachometer to 4500 RPM near the top of the hill just because he's 5 MPH under his desired speed.
Actually, it's not that unacceptable. That's where the Honda motor's power peak is, after all, and for it to regain that 5 MPH that's what it has to do. In order for it to react in a completely acceptable fashion, it would have to be able to sense the topology and know that it shouldn't do anything if it's close to the top of the hill.
I don't use cruise control.:) When it's available, I sometimes set it, but then I spend a lot of time micro-managing it. Better off without it, I think.
The cruise control operates by measuring the actual speed, comparing it to the desired speed, and controlling the throttle. It can react to small changes in speed MUCH faster than you can.
Some can, but many (especially older ones and ones you might find on the bottom-of-the-line models) operate solely on engine vacuum, since engine vacuum is a somewhat accurate measurement of vehicle speed combined with certain road conditions, provided you don't switch gears, which would, of course, defeat the purpose.
Humans can anticipate. Cars cannot. Case in point: the automatic transmission. Try merging onto the interstate with a short merging lane while going uphill with an auto and see how fun it is.
Ever hear of what's called "Wide Open Throttle"? That's a handy little gadget, implemented on, hmm, let's see now, all automatic transmissions where when you push the accelerator to the floor, the tranny downshifts. That means you've requested more power for some reason (transmission doesn't care what) and it gives it to you. Older systems were vacuum-controlled, newer systems tend to have little switches. Both systems adjust timing and stuff at the same time to give you the most power from the engine they're capable of.
If you don't know that you can do this, you probably shouldn't be taking an automatic transmission on the freeway. Luckily most people discover this fact somehow anyway, early early in their driving career.
If you are putting the pedal to the metal and not getting the power you need, and the tranny is shifting, you have what's generally referred to as "runnability problems", and you should take your car in and have it checked out. I do not know of a car that was so poorly designed it couldn't accelerate up a hill when you put the pedal to the metal, although many older cars suffer this fate as a result of wear. But the feature you're looking for is already there.
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costomer service is nice, but when i am geting $6.70 an hour, i can really care less about the store
Is this what you call "work ethic"? Customer service is nice, and if the company wants it, it's your job, regardless of pay. You can't bitch about your pay unless you're doing your job, right? (Time clock issues aside, because of course you should be paid for the time you work, even if you work badly) And when I flipped burgers, $6.70 would have been panacea. Instead I was stuck around $6.30, and the only way I could get a raise was by going into management. And I had one of the highest non-management hourlies there, within $1 of assistant manager.
Customer service is something your company either does or it doesn't, and if it's part of your job, then a good work ethic requires you fulfill it to the best of your ability. You can have any problem with the company you want to have, but don't take it out on customers. They're just innocent bystanders.
unless you come in anyways when you can see a line of cars snaking all the way around the building and into the road and complain about it,
Reminds me of a certain night I worked a drive thru window at a Long John Silver's. :) In case any of you live in Austin, go look at the Long John's over by Northcross Mall. That's the window I was in. The line literally snaked all the way back through the back of the mall parking long, out onto the street, and there were cars lining up on three streets to get into the mall. A lady at the back of the line, when she got to the front of the line (where I was) told me that nobody had turned off, they were all heading to this window. I was bagging the orders myself, making all the drinks, and of course ringing up orders, taking orders, taking the money, and giving them the food. The assistant manager and shift leader sat there by the window the whole time just chatting. (I was pissed) The cooks in the kitchen were working their asses off to keep the food coming, and the cook working the window even commented to me that the others were just standing around when we were busy as fuck. All told, it wound up being something like $1200 in sales during one hour, all of it made in the drive-thru, and every single customer serviced. I even made a few bucks in tips because people were so impressed with the service.
So, yeah, whining about being "too busy" is just whining, and you should keep it to yourself. The rest of us don't care, and I at least have been there and done that.
it can be hard to concentrate on making food properly and not accidently adding in some horrible posion when you are under stress and crying for being insulted.
Yeah, this is a funny joke inside the restauraunt business, but don't give me an application. I wouldn't hire your sorry-ass attitude. You're more trouble than you're worth.
Problem is, many folks will forget to punch in or out, punch in before they change, or otherwise try to game the system in their favor.
Heh, I couldn't read this without thinking of my best attempt to game the system, ever, by far. Back in my burger-flipping days, we daytime cooks would frequently go hide in the back doing some shit chore or other during the shift change so the MOD wouldn't notice. By the time the daytime manager left, the night time manager wouldn't even know we were there. Then we'd go back up and just start cooking in the kitchen. I could usually get an extra half hour doing this, and my buddy claimed the record at a little over an hour.
Then I beat him, hands down (of course, I had circumstances in my favor). I hung around, knowing I was about to break his record of an hour, and then we got *slammed*. All the shit hit the fan in the front area, and the nighttime MOD finally noticed I was there. He took a look around and said "Dave, I know you were supposed to have left already, but can you stay another half hour or so? We're really busy". I, of course, agreed. I wound up milking two and half extra hours that night. Labor was still in line, too, so it was quite beneficial.
We called this milking the clock, like everybody else. :)
How about when the worker clocks in/out, they get a reciept with the time and an encrypted time signature on it. If there smart enough to keep there reciepts, they have evidence to contest. It would be even better to have a 3rd party company supply the service to avoid things like internal cheating.
When I worked at Sonic in Austin, they did that, actually. It was also generally considered an employee's fundamental right to have their receipt if they wanted it. Whenever an employee tried to accuse the management of shaving the time clock, the manager would always tell them to keep their receipts and compare them to their paycheck. Whether the employee did it or not, they usually quit bitching. :) Nothing like "I've offered you a receipt so you can audit me" to shut someone up when they know they're just talking out of their ass.
Thus, we'd work a few extra minutes, but it wouldn't make a difference, because they would always round down for 7 minutes or less of over time. With 8 minutes, then they'd round up to 15.
Rounding to the nearest quarter is standard practice, and if you don't see it directly on your time sheet, it probably happens elsewhere. It's easier, therefore faster, to do payroll that way. The amount of money on any specific instance is also usually negligible to both parties, and it really does even out in the end.
I have my employees round to the nearest quarter mostly so that when they say "It's 8:55 and I'm not scheduled to start until 9" I can say "Doesn't matter, you have to round to 9 anyway". ;)
(That last part is a joke, but rounding is standard practice, and it does even out in the end, but it is a system the employee can abuse that the employer usually can't)
Take it for what it's worth, I found your post entertaining. Then I found you in my shower and couldn't keep my hands off you. So I went to my wife and said "Hey honey, look at Mike Hawk."
You *know* things are going to go wrong so have some labour in reserve to cope with it or pay the workers the overtime they deserve.
Hey hey hey, I *never* said "don't pay the workers the overtime they earned". Never.
See, I'm in the school that wants to schedule people 36-38 hours for full-time work. That way, when they do need to stay late, the fact that it will likely push them into overtime is an incentive for them to stay late. Asking someone to stay late is a big deal for them, especially if they have plans. Having a little extra financial incentive is a *good* thing. It makes it easier to get someone to voluntarily stay late when you really need them and is a win-win situation.
Forced overtime is never acceptable. In fact, forced anything is never acceptable. The employee/employer relationship is a delicate thing, and if handled properly can be very rewarding for both parties and the customer. It must be treated with the respect it deserves.
I was only saying that it's not possible to plan for every emergency, and sometimes you just have to deal with it, whatever the emergency is. Sometimes you take being shorthanded because you either don't have the choice or because an employee tries to take advantage of you in return for helping you out. If the employee isn't treating the employer/employee relationship with respect, he's probably going to cause more problems than he's worth having around.
What bothers me most about your post, is that you seem to be saying that it is "ok" to short change employees that are working for you.
Heh, you should probably reread to the top of the thread. I don't think the parent poster was wanting to shave employee time clocks, just that he's understanding that you can't always plan for every contingency and/or it would be more expensive to just schedule people to work to handle any problem than it would be to just deal with it when it happens.
I don't think you'll find that many people here on slashdot that will disagree that it's wrong to steal money from payroll, but you will find lots of people who know that you can't just plan away any possible problem that comes up, and sometimes you've just gotta grab the bull by its horns and hope for the best.
Under your scenario, picture an employee with an axe to grind who decides to start padding his hours to start collecting some ill-gotten overtime. Knowing that if I go to court and lose I'm out 15,000 times his hourly rate (time and a half times hourly rate times your penalty multiplier), how am I supposed to keep my employees honest? Your solution is as much an invitation for fraud as the problem you seek to redress.
Simple. If an employee has an axe to grind, find out his problem and solve it. If his problem is unsolvable (usually caused by the employee being unreasonable), run him off. If he still won't go, take the next opportunity to fire him using whatever procedures your company has for firing people.
Always works. :) If you're reasonable and your policies are reasonable, then you can approach any problem with a reasonable expectation of solving it. If it can't be solved, get rid of the person causing it. Since most people really are reasonable and want to solve problems rather than pad their time sheets, then you will be able to solve most problems with employees that ever come up. The ones you can't solve you just make sure that everything you did was reasonable and the employee isn't demanding/expecting anything unreasonable. If the employee is being unreasonable, and you're absolutely certain of it, and they won't open up for the problem to be solved, then you can get rid of them with a clear conscience, resorting to firing if needed.
I've never seen an employee that had to be fired. You can usually convince them to quit long before you have to fire them. :)
Redundancy makes sense in engineering when it doesn't cost anything (or very little) to have something available that sits around and does nothing except in the event of failure of the main something or other.
Doesn't make sense in scheduling because it only results in skyrocketing costs and either reducing or eliminating your profit margin or causing your prices to skyrocket to compensate, effectively removing you from the market.
Even emergencies that happen "all the time" are unpredictable in nature. You say you can just hire one more person and the problem goes away. Now schedule that guy. Put him on the schedule. Where does he go? The nature of the emergency dictates the solution, and the more hours you are open the harder it is to have another guy. If you're only open 10 hours a week, then hiring one more person to work 10 hours a week will keep you covered. But if you're open 160 hours a week, it's a different story.
Here's how you handle scheduling. It's very simple, and the system works well. First you determine how much work is needed to open the store. Then you schedule enough people to do all the work needed and have it open by a specific time. Next you determine, to the best of your ability, how much business you will do before 5pm. 5pm is the standard turnover hour in retail, although I've seen places do their evening shift change at 4pm or 6pm, and I've even seen places not have a shift change. (They were a mess) Now you multiply the amount of business you anticipate by the ideal labor ratio for your business, divide the result by the average hourly wage in your store, and that tells you how many people to schedule. That's not usually good enough, though, since for many businesses afternoon business drops off after lunch, so instead you break the day into smaller chunks and do the same math. Then you look at who can work that day, what you've already scheduled them for, and what you need to schedule them for later on. (After awhile you get a knack for it and don't have to do the fancy math) Great, so far.
Now you build in some redundancy (the best managers already build in some redundancy in their schedule, believe it or not). The best place to build your redundancy is to schedule someone who says "I want all the hours you can give me" to get off work immediately before the time period in which you are concerned about having enough employees. That way, if you need more, you can just ask that guy to stay, knowing he'll probably say yes. There's other ways.
Alright, now you say we should have one more person on the schedule to deal with "emergencies". We have to pay him. Having one more person each hour on the schedule (assuming he's not the one with the emergency) will drive your labor ratio through the roof, and in many retail businesses will actually cause the business to be unprofitable.
Now, as a businessman, pick one:
Having just enough people to do the work that is needed lets you have the lowest prices possible with an acceptable profit margin (assuming other costs are also in line) and still provide the level of service you need to in order to stay in business. Scheduling another person for each hour of business requires your prices go up. Sending people home early because of stupid overtime policies reduces the level of service you can offer.
It's a complex equation. It's also very shortsighted to set your company policies on the word "overtime" rather than the other numbers available. I've made killer overtime in places I've worked while overall we had great service and low labor ratio. The bosses didn't c
The problem with your theory is that employee's do not just cost an hourly wage, each employee has state/federal costs that the employee doesn't see. For example SSI is payed for 50/50, ask anyone who's self employed, it's no fun seeing that number you used to see on your paycheck as a deduction double in size.
Those are generally figured as the cost of doing business. You have two important ratios generally used for employees. Labor ratio is strictly based on actual dollars/hour. Then you have cost/employee, which takes into account the other stuff. Labor ratio is used to determine if you have enough employees to do the total volume of work that needs to be done, while cost/employee is used differently, generally on your way to figuring out what your profit margin is. Both have to be kept at specific values, varying from company to company, set to achieve specific goals. If your goal doesn't include "keep employees for a long time" for whatever reason, your cost/employee will usually be set about at the minimum required by law. If your goal is "hire the best, keep the best, and forget about the rest", you have a higher cost/employee because you're offering vacations, health, dental, vision, et al. You also tend to put your labor ratio a little higher in that case so you can pay more on the hour.
People who don't work with these numbers have a tendency to overrate what they're used for. Employees aren't viewed as a cost, but they do have to be figured in as cost, generally. Only accountants view them as costs. :) Good management views them as investments, generally speaking.
What's the down side?
Several. First, $10/hour is considered "rich" by those actually working in those jobs (except in communist WA state, apparently). Try $7, or better yet, Minimum Wage + $0.25.
Second, getting employees to only work 20 hours. Next to nobody can survive on that income, and the ones that can are working 2+ jobs to do it, so they don't have that income. Conversely, they also don't have flexible schedules.
Third, it's not about total payroll costs. The magic figure is labor ratio. Some companies say "Keep your labor in line and don't let anybody work overtime". THey never say "Shave hours". Incompetent middle management shaves hours. Maybe others, I didn't read the fucking article. But here's labor ratio, in a nutshell:
Get out your calculator. Labor ratio is labor paid divided by gross sales. So if you have one employee who makes $10/hour work for four hours, your "labor paid" is $40 for those four hours. If you make $100 in sales, your labor ratio is 40%. Your ideal labor ratio is usually dictated by upper management, and frequently upper management doesn't care about overtime. They care about keeping your labor ratio in line. If it gets out of line, you're in trouble. Too high and it means you're working people when there isn't any work for them. Too low and it means you're not servicing your customers well because you're shorthanded. So if you say your ideal labor ratio is 15% (which is what I've defined for Texas Brand Barbecue), then that means you pay $15 for every $100 you make each hour. It doesn't matter if you distribute that between two employees, six, or give it all to just one. As long as you get all the work done, great. Labor ratio. That's all.
I've seen store managers shave employee hours in order to keep their labor ratio in line. I've threatened physical violence and taken the problem to upper management. I've organized employees with the intention of quitting if it gets done again. The problem has been resolved for me every time, but I've had to go to lengths to get it resolved. I've also seen store managers add some extra time when they knew the employee needed it. There's lots of good people out there in management. :)
And as we all know, anecdotes are the most scientifically sound method of determining widespread fact.
Just slightly more scientifically sound than just asserting the fact, as the parent poster did. ;)
And then what? What about when they don't happen? What do you do then? Send people home early? Great, until those people spend their extra time finding another job.
Can I ask you guys a couple of questions? How poor have you ever been as head of household?
Hmm, $1600/month gross with a wife and three kids. And that gross was before taxes, since I had to pay taxes on it separately, with $2k in self-employment taxes (just did my taxes for it a few days ago). Yeah, I'm getting a nice-sized return, thanks to EIC and Additional Child Credit. :)
Or, perhaps more realistically given the Slashdot demographic, how many single mothers with incomes less than 12,500 USD/year do you have working for you?
None, that I know of. I've hired for the start of the season, but as far as I know I haven't hired anybody with kids. A girl going through college who has no kids, and a guy coming home from overseas who also has no kids. I may hire more, but the nature of my new business venture is such that I'd prefer *not* to hire someone dirt-poor with kids. They'd be better off collecting welfare than working for me, since i"ll have to fire them in October anyway.
I mean, sure, no one is going to pay those fees. They will just pick up their kid, head home, and..... then what? Do you have any idea how hard it is to find child care for 5 PM to midnight? I won't even mention trying to find overnight care. The care provider has all the power in that situation, not the working parent.
True, all true. I've never looked for a care provider because my wife stays home with the kids. We'd rather be dirt-poor and take care of our kids ourselves. Besides, there's no way my wife working works out favorably with a daycare in the mix. Her monthly income would come out to just about what a daycare charges, so why throw all that money into a black hole? For the privilege of having someone else raise our kids? No way.
I hear you, though. I've worked alongside a lot of mothers just like who you're talking about. Daycare (or night care) wasn't even an option for them, they didn't have the money. State day care? Sure, there're daycare providers that get paid by the state instead. Ever seen the inside of one of those places? Doesn't work. Get your mother or someone to watch the kids instead. That's what the other women I've worked with have done, anyway. :) Not the best solution for some of them, but better than the alternatives, and they have to work.
And the next time the employer demands unscheduled overtime, then what? When the care provider drops them, then what?
It's a shitty situation, and it sucks to be in it. There's no easy solution, it's a hard life. It'd be nice to tell your employer "Can't work the extra hours unless you pay my late fees at the daycare." But that's not always an option. Look for another job? Hard enough getting this one! And so on and so forth. IN the '90s it was a different story, jobs were easier to come by. Mind you, those dirt-poor mothers could and frequently did work for fast food places, and jobs were aplenty in those days. Now we've got all these programmers clogging up the fast food places, food quality is going downhill, and employee complaints are at an all-time high.
The suits need to get the fuck out of the kitchen.
Bullshit. If things go wrong once in a long while, then fair enough. Sometimes you have to do some overtime to make it all happen in a crisis. If you have a 2-4 hour/employee crisis every week, you're just an incompetent manager with no planning skills.
Heh, bullshit yourself. Things go wrong all the time, especially in retail.
What do you do when your night guy calls in sick at the last minute? Well, you either run shorthanded and risk losing business because you don't have the people to handle it, or you have one of your day people work a few extra hours to compensate during the evening rush, then send them home. This has the effect of making the remaining night people stay a little longer themselves, and could add another 6-10 hours total that were not budgeted on those peoples' week, and could threaten to push them into overtime by the end of the week.
Car accidents? And so on and so forth. The more people you have working on any given day, the greater the likelihood that some one or more of them will have a problem that causes others to stay past their time. And that's stuff that's easily visible to the MOD.
How about when you have a busier day than normal (common, and not really possible to plan for) and you are unable to send people on breaks? While this is illegal in some places (WA state, for example), it still happens. That's stuff you really don't see until later, and can also add another unbudgeted 2-4 hours for each employee each week that could throw them into overtime by the end of the week.
And that doesn't even consider that the more people you have working for you for the week, the greater the likelihood that one of them will have a problem that pushes another into overtime.
I've even seen days where more people were scheduled because business was anticipated to be much higher than normal, and they still had to call someone on their day off and ask them to come in for a few hours.
Fact is, if your business is going to survive, you must expect at least a 2-4 hour time clock crisis each week, that means you've got business.
Now, this has the obvious counter "Just schedule everybody to work 30 hours, and you've got 10 to work with." That's great, until the store down the street starts hiring and they'll work you 40 hours and won't have a problem with overtime. Since you still have to be competitive in the job market, you would have to pay more on the hour, making overtime itself an even greater expense when it happens (and it will happen). Not to mention that many retail places, especially in larger metropolitan areas, are running in a permanent state of shorthandedness. When I flipped burgers, the place was always shorthanded. Fact was, people don't want to work in those jobs, and the quality of the workers isn't as good as you might expect (although I must say that some of the best workers and smartest people I've ever known flipped burgers for a living, and loved it). So you not only have more emergencies coming up, you also have higher turnover. People talk about how many in IT only work for a place for a year or so, and that's high turnover? Fuck that. Try hiring three people, starting them all within a week of each other, and none of them are left at the end of the month. And that's when you do pay overtime, gladly, and more on the hour than any other place in town.
That said, deciding to deal with the problem by editing people's hours isn't the solution either. ;)
When was the last time you dug in your yard to see whether there was a buried treasure there? I bet you haven't: you make the reasonable assumption that there is no treasure buried there and digging costs valuable time. Until you receive additional information, the cost is simply not worth the expected benefit.
Well, if some renowned physicist showed up with some excellent math demonstrating that there must be buried treasure in my yard, it's worth a day's work to dig it up and test his hypothesis. Wouldn't you say?
Interesting opinion, but you are just shuffling the cost off to later generations. Say for example gravity control comes out of discovering a error in relativity. Is that worth it?
I don't think that's what he was talking about. Instead, I think he was trying to explain why there aren't any venture capital funds to fund scientific research. Well, duh. If it's called "venture capital" that means it's used in "capitalistic ventures", and science is not a capitalistic venture.
Translation of parent post: "Since we can't use the math for string theory to build a bomb, we're not going to believe it until such time as we can use it to build a bomb."
(Correct me if I'm wrong, didn't Einstein get laughed at until the development of the atomic bomb?)
So what happend to Gravity Probe A?
In that one they put six gyros, and the damn thing just disappeared. Nobody's seen or heard anything of it in a very long time.
but what is frame dragging?
It's when you're watching a movie in xine, and you hover over the movie, click the left mousebutton, and drag the current "frame" to your desktop. Xine then automatically exports it to .png and saves it to your desktop.
This is a phenomena which some scientists believe they have observed, was predicted by Einstein, apparently, and which NASA has spent $700 million to make an attempt to measure.
Hey Taxi! Pad five, please.
I regularly drive long distances from Canberra to Sydney or Melbourne or even up to Rockhampton, and a lot of these trips are on superb roads, long and straight and flat.
Dude, you're on crack. As every American knows, all Australians drive 4WD vehicles that kick the ass out of anything we have in America, drive on windy dirt roads, and frequently have to wave their hands in some crazy longhorn pattern to get the livestock to move off the road.
Oh yeah, and they shave with their knives and can tell time by looking at the sun, with the latter power being one that works regardless of which hemisphere the Australian is in or grew up in.
The part that sucks is that sometimes the cruise control decides to gun the engine when going up a hill. It's unacceptable for a human driver to spike the tachometer to 4500 RPM near the top of the hill just because he's 5 MPH under his desired speed.
Actually, it's not that unacceptable. That's where the Honda motor's power peak is, after all, and for it to regain that 5 MPH that's what it has to do. In order for it to react in a completely acceptable fashion, it would have to be able to sense the topology and know that it shouldn't do anything if it's close to the top of the hill.
I don't use cruise control. :) When it's available, I sometimes set it, but then I spend a lot of time micro-managing it. Better off without it, I think.
The cruise control operates by measuring the actual speed, comparing it to the desired speed, and controlling the throttle. It can react to small changes in speed MUCH faster than you can.
Some can, but many (especially older ones and ones you might find on the bottom-of-the-line models) operate solely on engine vacuum, since engine vacuum is a somewhat accurate measurement of vehicle speed combined with certain road conditions, provided you don't switch gears, which would, of course, defeat the purpose.
Humans can anticipate. Cars cannot. Case in point: the automatic transmission. Try merging onto the interstate with a short merging lane while going uphill with an auto and see how fun it is.
Ever hear of what's called "Wide Open Throttle"? That's a handy little gadget, implemented on, hmm, let's see now, all automatic transmissions where when you push the accelerator to the floor, the tranny downshifts. That means you've requested more power for some reason (transmission doesn't care what) and it gives it to you. Older systems were vacuum-controlled, newer systems tend to have little switches. Both systems adjust timing and stuff at the same time to give you the most power from the engine they're capable of.
If you don't know that you can do this, you probably shouldn't be taking an automatic transmission on the freeway. Luckily most people discover this fact somehow anyway, early early in their driving career.
If you are putting the pedal to the metal and not getting the power you need, and the tranny is shifting, you have what's generally referred to as "runnability problems", and you should take your car in and have it checked out. I do not know of a car that was so poorly designed it couldn't accelerate up a hill when you put the pedal to the metal, although many older cars suffer this fate as a result of wear. But the feature you're looking for is already there.