Deputy's Return to Work Toolkit Protects Workers and Enables Businesses to Track the Metrics that Matter Most
Employee wellbeing must be a top priority for employers as the U.S. begins to reopen and rebuild the economy.
SAN FRANCISCO - JULY 7, 2020 - As government restrictions begin to lift around the world, the focus for many employers and employees is on the reopening of the economy and the return to work.
It's critical that today's business owners recognize the significance that this period in time presents and acknowledge that it spans beyond just reactivating the economy. In truth, rebuilding an economy and successful businesses requires an understanding and adaptation to a number of evolved perspectives currently held by customers and workers on the new world of work.
Over the last six months, Deputy has released tools to help better monitor the wellbeing of employees and automate new workplace tasks — while remaining compliant with the latest policies — as companies pivot their strategy to rebuild and thrive in this new era of entrepreneurship.
Deputy's Head of Product, Deepesh Banerji predicts businesses that are disciplined and consistent will be the ones that will begin to advance in this new environment.
"Metrics will matter in this new world," said Banerji. "Small business operators will need to execute with the same diligence that large companies do, which requires democratization of business performance intelligence. Deputy is leading the way with this toolkit of new product features focused on protecting your people and driving sustainable business growth."
Protect and preserve employee well-being and rebuild your business intelligently with Deputy's Return to Work Toolkit below.
Return to Work Toolkit
Touchless Clock-In
When enabled, the Deputy Kiosk (iPad app & Android) uses facial recognition and voice commands to enable employees to clock in and out of work, as well as start and end breaks, without touching a screen.
- Employees experience a faster and simpler clock-in process, while also limiting exposure between employees during clock-in procedure and contamination of the device.
- Removes the worry and stress of verifying employees onsite and recording accurate timesheet data during a time of a lot of changes in shifts and rostering.
- Ties in with Deputy’s built-in compliance, accounting for overtime, breaks and stress profiles.
Video in News Feed
Allows managers and employees to record short videos on their phone or desktop device and post directly to the News Feed. Videos can be viewed and confirmed on all devices.
- Video allows rapid, more personal communication between employers and team members.
- Can be used for important visual walkthroughs of new procedures (such as stricter hygiene practices) or situations within the workplace.
- Introduce new team members remotely during times of social distancing and working remotely.
Deputy Stats Panel
An easy-to-interpret dashboard on how businesses are performing. With the right demand metrics, owners can make informed decisions when scheduling their teams and stay within budget.
- This includes daily summaries at a glance, enabling customers to instantly see daily summaries of wage costs and sales vs wage percentage.
- A daily snapshot of the variance between required staff vs scheduled staff is also included.
- The design suite got an upgrade, including improved graphs library (for better readability and option to visually illustrate relationships in the customer’s data), enhanced legends and improved accessibility of graphs and colors.
Area Based Pay
This tool enables companies - namely restaurants, food and beverage makers - who have had to shuffle roles to meet current government regulations and consumer demand to offer different pay rates based on skills, capabilities, and roles.
- Deputy’s Area Based Pay allows Premium customers to set different rates for specific areas of work.
- Adding Area Based Pay to the default pay rate will allow two different rates to be applied to the same employee. If a company has a default rate, but needs to pay an employee a different base rate for other jobs or for working in other areas, they now can.
- Most importantly, it's not just a single hourly rate. Area Based Pay can be used with any of Deputy’s existing pay rates (excluding Salary).
Shift Questions
This feature provides a critical first step for employees returning to the workforce. Business owners can enable questions to request confirmation that staff are healthy.
- The product has been designed to be fully customizable for business owners, enabling them to apply the latest local or state safety and hygiene regulations to the checklist.
- The employer-generated checklist appears as a series of questions employees are prompted to complete before and after their shifts.
- If an employee does not pass their health and safety check, management is notified immediately and the employee is no longer allowed to clock-in.
Open Shifts
Staffing open shifts is not a simple matter and it can be time-consuming and costly for businesses - especially when specific certifications are needed to fill a role.
- Deputy solves for this by enabling managers to ensure the most suitable employees are selected for a shift - effectively matching the right skill set for the position.
- Democratizes open shift policies, allowing all employees to request an available shift advertised by the manager.
- Helps to avoid unfair penalizations for those who were not quick of the mark to claim shifts.
Shift Questions - Employee Responses Report
A report that clearly displays all the employee responses to the shift questions that are asked when on shift.
- Understand which employees could potentially place others in the business and customers at risk.
- Prevent employees from working if they are found to be experiencing symptoms.
- Reduce business liability with a legally binding declaration stating that an employee is healthy.
Contact Tracing Report
Easily trace the people an employee that returns a positive result for COVID-19 has been in contact with during their shift via three different report views.
- All - populates the below table with any employee who has an overlapping timesheet with the selected employee in the selected period.
- Location - populates the below table with any employee who has an overlapping timesheet in the same location as the selected employee and period.
- Areas - populates the below table with any employee who has an overlapping timesheet in the same area as the selected employee and period.
Site Scheduling
New ability to capture geo-location clock in details for remote or site-based employees through adding addresses to an area of work.
- Businesses can better schedule their remote or field-based workforce, through allocating different shifts to different addresses.
- With geolocation clock in, employers also have peace of mind that employees are in the right place, at the right time (and a record of this).
- Employees have a clear idea of where they need to be for each shift, with a pin drop on how to get there.
- Employees have proof of being at the scheduled location at the time of clocking in.
Smart Scheduling
Drive down costs and ensure optimal schedule coverage with clear and accurate business insights. While easy and intuitive to use, Smart Scheduling surfaces powerful insights about business performance that can be used to make better business decisions
- Empower management teams with the guardrails needed to stick to budget.
- Businesses are able to better optimize and automate their scheduling operations.
- Data-driven insights replace gut feel and guesswork, with all the right guardrails in place to confidently empower managers of all levels to independently manage their teams to budget
With demand-based rules, Deputy will use unique business logic to effortlessly scale with changing demand, ensuring minimum coverage is always met.
