With the recent news around Brexit and its negative impact on the economy, there are still positive policies being passed to attempt to create new jobs and boost the wage of the average worker. In a creative approach to incentivize employers to help out the average worker in the U.S., the Obama administration recently finalized its overtime rule on May 18th that will go into effect on December 1, 2016.
This new rule increasing the eligibility for overtime, will impact salaried employees making less than $47,476 (as opposed to the previous rule of those making under $23,660), allowing an additional 4.2 million employees to potentially benefit from overtime pay. Currently, 1 million out of the 4.2 million employees work more than 40 hours. So what does this mean to the average American worker? Employees will have to respond by either paying this whole new group of workers with overtime or alternatively limiting their overtime, potentially creating additional jobs to fill this void. As a result, it is estimated that this job vacuum can result in approximately 100,000 new positions added to the U.S. market in 2017.
Moreover, the “Obama Overtime Rule” will require a lot more overtime compliance by employers in which timesheet technology will be at the center of this new ruling, facilitating companies through this process. Especially for national and multinational organizations, overtime regulations can get quite complex as Human Resources departments struggle with managing them as they change from state to state and country to country. The right timesheet solution will provide companies with the means to create multiple timesheet templates to support different categories of employees (e.g. exempt and non-exempt workers) to facilitate the tracking of varying overtime and HR policies across an organization. Furthermore, the better timesheet solutions will ensure compliance to existing and changing labor laws.
Although typically, timesheets are seen as a necessary evil by many employees, the average U.S. worker may start changing their tune when they realize timesheets can become their biggest advocate in ensuring they get the “extra change” that they’re due. More importantly, timesheet data captured by companies will be able to shed light on the savings of reducing overtime pay and hopefully create new jobs to fill those vacant hours of work that need to be completed.
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About the Author: Neil Stolovitsky has over 15 years of IT experience with end-user, consulting, and vendor organizations, along with extensive expertise in business development, software selection, and channel strategies. He has published numerous white papers and articles covering Professional Services Automation, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) for service industries, Project Portfolio Management, IT Governance, and New Product Development to a global audience. Neil currently holds the position of Senior Solution Consultant with Upland Software.
To learn more about Upland Software’s Enterprise Timesheet offering, go to: www.timesheet.com