Effective California Meal Penalty management using Time Clocks in PeopleSoft

Wage and Hour legal requirements in Calfornia necessitates that all non-exempt employees should get 30 minutes of uninterrupted meal break after working for 5 hours. If there is a violation of this law, employers are supposed to pay a penalty to the employee. It is a common requirement to encode this rule into PeopleSoft Time and Labor for CA based implementations. We have seen instances where employees get around this rule by cleverly clocking in 2 or 3 minutes prior to the 30 minute meal break period (that is, taking a meal break for 27 or 28 minutes instead of 30) and thus getting entitled for the meal penalty payment. For companies with a significant non-exempt population, this can amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars in payroll leakage. An effective way in which we have reduced the abuse of this rule is to take advantage of the capabilities at the time clock level. In PeopleSoft Time and Labor implementations with an integration to a Time Clock (or a Time Collection Device in PeopleSoft parlance), we have got the time clock vendor to put a restriction at the clock side to prevent employees from clocking In from their meal breaks prior to 30 minutes. This means that if an employee tries to clock in after 28 minutes of meal break, the clock will issue an error message to the effect that 'You have not completed your 30 minutes of stipulated meal break' and prevent the employee from clocking in. If there are scenarios where it is required by business urgency for the employee to clock in, we can designate a supervisor who can override this restriction.
When you are designing your Time and Labor system, make sure that all potential areas of Payroll leakage is being addressed and an integrated system solution can surely help prevent these costly leakages!

This post is authored by HRoi Consulting - The PeopleSoft Time and Attendance experts

Which city has the maximum Peoplesoft projects?

I installed Google Analytics on this blog last month - it is really fascinating to see the amount of data the tool provides free of cost. The metrics provided include - number of visits per day, source of visitors, key words used to search for the site, language, browser, time spent by a user on the site, navigation pattern etc. Out of all the metrics, one that really interests me is one called 'map overlay' - this gives the geographical location of the visitors. Now, I've been thinking whether I could look at the data on the map overlay metrics to arrive at the places around the globe where maximum Peoplesoft activity (read projects) happens. Here is how the metrics look as of today -
The number of visits are directly proportional to the darkness of the green on the map. So undoubtedly the USA is the place to be as far as Peoplesoft is concerned - within the US, California sent in maximum visitors followed by New York. India, Canada and the UK follow suite. There was considerable activity from South American countries like Brazil, Chile and Columbia as well as from Asian countries like Vietnam, Philippines and Singapore. These countries represent a viable alternative to traditional outsourcing centres like India and the South American activity is especially significant in this regard. The geographical proximity to the US and the growing Hispanic population in US should make South American countries an attractive 'near-shoring' alternative. It will be really interesting if other Peoplesoft bloggers and especially the ivy league PS bloggers like Grey Sparling and Jim Marion could share the visitor profiles on their site as it would give a more realistic view of Peoplesoft activity from across the globe. But in the mean time, keep those clicks coming!