Scheduling with contract hours
Employees without Contract Hours
If an employee member should have an Agreed Contract Hours: this could mean they are on an Agreement with one or more Contract Hours rules, or there is a matching "Contract Hours Options" for their employment status and/or agreement, then they will not be able to be scheduled until they have an Agreed Contract hours that is valid for that date.
The schedule will also not be able to be published under these circumstances, which could result when Contract Hours are enabled for a period of time after the schedule has been created, but before it has been published.
Employees scheduled outside of their Contract Hours
When an employee is scheduled, and an Agreed Contract Hours is found that applies to that date, the shift is compared to the Contract Hours. If the shift falls "outside" of the Contract Hours, then this will trigger any rules that need to apply.
The shift will also be tagged as "Outside Contract Hours" in the Workforce Management.
Employees who are working outside of their Contract Hours are grouped with Unavailable employees and appear further down the list of employees in the "Employee Selection" dialog boxes.
When the schedule is published, the user is notified that employees scheduled outside of contract will receive a notification to agree to work this shift, otherwise known as an agreed variation.
Employees working less than the Minimum Hours
When an Agreed Contract Hours contains a minimum length (or the Agreement under which an employee is paid contains a Minimum Hours amount), then any shifts that fail to meet these minimum hours requirements is "topped up" to the largest matching minimum hours. That is, if an employee is employed under an agreement that indicates they are permitted to work a minimum of 3 hours, but their Contract Hours state they are guaranteed a minimum of 4 hours, any shift they work that is less than 4 hours would be eligible for a "top-up" payment as if they had worked the 4 hours.
This type of payment is shown in the Workforce Management interface. It may result in a shift longer than their worked hours being sent to a payroll system to ensure that the minimum payment is applied.
Top-up hours do count towards monetary values for the purpose of calculating KPIs but does not count towards number of hours for the same. That is, top-up hours affect Labor Cost Percentage, but do not affect Productivity.
Agreed variations
Most agreements that relate to Contract Hours have some concept of Variations. These are the mutually agreed non-permanent changes to Contract Hours for a single day. This enables employers/managers and employees to use Workforce Management to store their mutual agreement to the changed hours that an employee works.
An agreed Variation will change the effective Contract Hours on that day, for the purposes of Outside Contract Hours (or potentially the Minimum Hours to pup value, but this cannot reduce that value below the Agreement Minimum Hours).
Any subsequent agreed Variation on the same date will result in the existing variation becoming Superseded. It is still visible within the system (for auditing purposes) but will no longer affect shifts on that date.
Publishing schedules with Contract Hours Violations
When a schedule is published that has any employees who are scheduled outside of their contract hours, Workforce Management will first show a summary of these employees. The process of publishing the schedule will then result in the generation of a Pending Variation for each employee, allowing them to agree or decline to the variation. If they agree, it will alter the effective Agreed Contract Hours on that date, and potentially remove their eligibility for overtime.
Employees are under no obligation to agree to Variation, and if they fail to agree prior to the end of the shift, the effect is the same as if they had declined it.
Swap/Drop/Fill Variations
When a "Swap" is initiated by two employees using the phone app, this is taken to mean that both employees are requesting a variation for their contract hours on the day or days of the shifts. The manager agreeing to the swap is deemed to be the other end of the agreement, and both employees will have an Agreed Variation created within Workforce Management.
When a Drop or Fill is initiated, employees will be able to select if they agree to a variation on that date, and that data will be used to calculate the differences in cost for the shift. When the drop or fill is completed, the agree/decline status to the Variation will result in the creation of a Variation with the same status.