Protecting companies from hourly employees
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Hey all,
So I have a situation that should be a much bigger deal, even in IT, than it generally seems to be.
Management wants to keep hourly employees from working outside work hours. One way we did this was by not giving users webmail access, another was limiting the IPs that applications can be accessed from.
The IP access can no longer work from a whitelist aspect though because other, non restricted, staff are extremely mobile and require access from where ever they are. So now we need to move to a blacklist.
How do you, or how have you seen hourly employees managed considering our extremely mobile world?
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@Dashrender said in Protecting companies from hourly employees:
Management wants to keep hourly employees from working outside work hours.
There is one and only one possible solution to this: HR policy.
It's that simple. Nothing else you do matters, only HR Policy can make this work and nothing else is appropriate.
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umm, you don't.
You simply put it in company policy.
Something like, "Unless expressly told by manager, all overtime is not allowed."
Then if they try to work it say no?
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If they signed company policy and have no proof of being told, then they do not get paid.
Not your fault the company get to benefit from their work. They were told not to.
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@Dashrender said in Protecting companies from hourly employees:
How do you, or how have you seen hourly employees managed considering our extremely mobile world?
Policy. Without a policy, all of the time spent trying to connect to your services is billable. Just because they can't do useful work doesn't affect their ability to rack up hours. If you don't have an HR Policy against it, IT is just enabling them to run up overtime without actually working. If you have an HR Policy, then all of this is just wasting precious IT resources, wasting money and making people struggle to do their jobs well.
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@JaredBusch said in Protecting companies from hourly employees:
If they signed company policy and have no proof of being told, then they do not get paid.
Not your fault the company get to benefit from their work. They were told not to.
Right, it's not working at that point, it's volunteering.
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@Dashrender said in Protecting companies from hourly employees:
So now we need to move to a blacklist.
No, a blacklist will not fix your management issues.
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@scottalanmiller said in Protecting companies from hourly employees:
@Dashrender said in Protecting companies from hourly employees:
So now we need to move to a blacklist.
No, a blacklist will not fix your management issues.
Of course his management issues are the problem in the first place.
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Outside of actually fixing the problem, you can blacklist via your firewall, of course. This makes no business sense and just raises costs and encourages people to be inefficient. But you can do it. Not a big deal. There is no simple answer to it, though. You have to get the IP addresses from all of the employees and have them voluntarily provide them all the time, and since they change constantly you'll have no effective way to block cell phones, hotel rooms, McDonald's wifi, etc. You can block ranges, but you might block too much.
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Have you considered a time based policy? Make email or whatever only accessible to people during set hours? IP based blocking, even within the context of this bad idea, is a bad idea.
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@JaredBusch said in Protecting companies from hourly employees:
If they signed company policy and have no proof of being told, then they do not get paid.
Not your fault the company get to benefit from their work. They were told not to.
@scottalanmiller said in Protecting companies from hourly employees:
Right, it's not working at that point, it's volunteering.
Sorry, but that's not the way it works. You have to pay the employee for the hours worked. Then you counsel / discipline per the HR policy.
Not paying the employee can lead to much larger issues with the DoL.
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@JaredBusch said in Protecting companies from hourly employees:
If they signed company policy and have no proof of being told, then they do not get paid.
Not your fault the company get to benefit from their work. They were told not to.
luckily up to this point, those who have skirted the system haven't been trying to get more money. The boss is just trying to keep that at bay.
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@scottalanmiller said in Protecting companies from hourly employees:
Outside of actually fixing the problem, you can blacklist via your firewall, of course. This makes no business sense and just raises costs and encourages people to be inefficient. But you can do it. Not a big deal. There is no simple answer to it, though. You have to get the IP addresses from all of the employees and have them voluntarily provide them all the time, and since they change constantly you'll have no effective way to block cell phones, hotel rooms, McDonald's wifi, etc. You can block ranges, but you might block too much.
Exactly my point.
But even having a policy means policing the logs looking for people logging when they shouldn't be. So that's an additional time drain/money waste. If you prevent it because it's simply not accessible, then you don't spend any of that effort/capital. But I know we're beyond that today.
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@scottalanmiller said in Protecting companies from hourly employees:
Have you considered a time based policy? Make email or whatever only accessible to people during set hours? IP based blocking, even within the context of this bad idea, is a bad idea.
Yes, we've considered it. How does that work for OWA? Does the AD's login time apply to Exchange as well as Windows PCs logons?
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@Danp said in Protecting companies from hourly employees:
Sorry, but that's not the way it works. You have to pay the employee for the hours worked. Then you counsel / discipline per the HR policy.
Not paying the employee can lead to much larger issues with the DoL.
That's not correct. If you tell someone to go home and they refuse they are trespassing, not working. Not the same thing. But you have to have a policy that makes it clear that they can't do overtime without something in writing.
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@Dashrender said in Protecting companies from hourly employees:
@scottalanmiller said in Protecting companies from hourly employees:
Outside of actually fixing the problem, you can blacklist via your firewall, of course. This makes no business sense and just raises costs and encourages people to be inefficient. But you can do it. Not a big deal. There is no simple answer to it, though. You have to get the IP addresses from all of the employees and have them voluntarily provide them all the time, and since they change constantly you'll have no effective way to block cell phones, hotel rooms, McDonald's wifi, etc. You can block ranges, but you might block too much.
Exactly my point.
But even having a policy means policing the logs looking for people logging when they shouldn't be. So that's an additional time drain/money waste. If you prevent it because it's simply not accessible, then you don't spend any of that effort/capital. But I know we're beyond that today.
Why does it? Step back and ask yourself... why does IT need to police this if they are capped at their hours that can be worked? And even if they are logged in, it doesn't even imply that they are working. So what would you do with that data?
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@Dashrender said in Protecting companies from hourly employees:
@JaredBusch said in Protecting companies from hourly employees:
If they signed company policy and have no proof of being told, then they do not get paid.
Not your fault the company get to benefit from their work. They were told not to.
luckily up to this point, those who have skirted the system haven't been trying to get more money. The boss is just trying to keep that at bay.
And that's fine, that's volunteering. As long as they are not doing it in the office where workman's comp comes into play (physically you actually have to push them out the door) you don't have an issue as long as there is a policy saying that they cannot work extra (and that management cannot ask them to.)
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@scottalanmiller said in Protecting companies from hourly employees:
@Danp said in Protecting companies from hourly employees:
Sorry, but that's not the way it works. You have to pay the employee for the hours worked. Then you counsel / discipline per the HR policy.
Not paying the employee can lead to much larger issues with the DoL.
That's not correct. If you tell someone to go home and they refuse they are trespassing, not working. Not the same thing. But you have to have a policy that makes it clear that they can't do overtime without something in writing.
I think you've drifted into to things that may or may not overlap.
Telling someone to go home and get off the clock, yet they remain is tresspassing, written or not. If someone has a set work schedule that does allow for OT, I'm not sure where the employees ability to choose to continue working past the prescribed time window vs the assumed necessity of them to leave kicks in.
i.e. Jane's listed schedule is 8-5 with 1 hour for lunch unpaid Overtime as needed. Who gets to decide if and when she gets overtime? If the above is all that's listed, who gets to make that call? her? or her boss, or both?
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Keep in mind that an employee can claim to be working just for "thinking about" work or talking to someone about work. Or they can work on paper. Or make calls using a personal device. You can spend time arguing about if you need to pay people working when they are not allowed to work, and that will be up to a judge to decide. But access to company resources is not the determining factor, if they want to go over hours they can do it if you grant access or not.
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Just going to put it out there: this is a really strange question to ask. On so many levels.
