Labor law noncompliance can be a very costly mistake and distraction for employers. Often, employers are unaware of the infraction by a supervisor, while in other cases, they simply don’t have the tools to ensure supervisors and employees stay in alignment.

Whether it’s enforcing FLSA, ACA, FMLA, state, union or other company policies, the requirements are significant, as are the penalties. And with the Department of Labor (DOL) increasing its staffing and efforts to enforce labor violations, the challenge for employers only increases. The good news, however, is that today’s technology allows for a great deal of automation of these policies. Using a solution like TimeSimplicity, an advanced scheduling software from 941Timekeeping, employers can minimize their compliance risk.

As an example, here are few ways TimeSimplicity can automate compliance efforts so that owners and supervisors can worry less and get more work done.

Limiting Scheduled Hours for ACA

The provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) require that employers with 50 or more full-time or full-time equivalent employees offer affordable health care to full-time employees over 30 hours per week or 130 hours per month. If not, the penalties can be severe. The challenge, however, is that employee staffing and changes are dynamic. Prevent employees from unintentionally creeping into full-time status by setting min and max limits on employee hours. When unexpected change occurs, this will be the easiest way to avoid putting the company at risk.

Verify Scheduled to Actual Hours Worked

Creating schedules is a time-consuming endeavor, but the nature of employment means that unintended change will occur. Whether it’s on-call hours, sick time or seasonal increases in work hours, it is critically important that your scheduling solution can also verify the hours worked. With TimeSimplicity’s timekeeping integration to TimeWorksPlus and other timekeeping systems, your supervisors and owners can have peace of mind knowing employee scheduling can be validated or audited.

Auto-Enforce Company Policies

Labor policies come from many sources, whether its internal, union, state or federal. With TimeSimplicity, you can automate many of these provisions. For example, you may choose to enforce a policy or receive a notification if an employee is scheduled to work six or seven days consecutive. For meal breaks, if you require employees must work a certain amount of hours to qualify for the break or that the break is a certain length in time, you can also simply automate this policy. Take advantage of automation to simplify and limit your risk.

Consistent Policy Enforcement

One of the most important challenges for employers is to ensure that you are consistently applying your policies across the organization. Without automation, however, this task is very difficult. Take advantage of affordable tools that will solve this challenge.

Compliance is important, and enforcement is rapidly increasing as technology is empowering government agencies to investigate and audit employer practices. Contact 941 Timekeeping to learn more about how an advanced online scheduling can help your organization minimize compliance risk.