It’s an interesting process once you do it, generating database lists. I like it because it represents a barrier to most peoples thinking, a limit they just cannot go beyond. The idea that order is something you can think through in advance and not have to learn by trial and error. A list of everyone who was hired before Dec. 31, 2003, terminated during 2003 or was active on that date. Not so easy once you factor in that the data doesn’t really contain any information in that particular form. At any rate the W2s went out in record time, with so far only one error not our fault. I’ll take a little credit here, because by some weird coincidence in life, I’ve always met more than my share of people who where good at organizing repair work, but not so good at preventative maintenance. I’ll mention John Campbell and Gary Leblanc as examples of who I mean. Damn good and fast at fixing things. And even better at ignoring things until they needed fixing.
Also, it seems our little company is again the guinea pig for another main office experiment. Keep it up, IES and the tail may be wagging the dog. For some government reason, all workers must keep track of hours. In construction, the piece worker, or incentive worker is a given. Twenty percent of ours do seventy percent of the work. Well, it seems the government wants an hourly record, presumably to calculate workers compensation or other things not found in Nature.
It [the rule] sounds like something cooked up by a group of first year computer programmers. Take the total payment divided by the total hours, and add half the resulting hourly rate to each of any hours in excess of forty per week. Am I the only one who thinks this calculation doesn’t change anything for the incentive worker, that he is not going to get any more or less pay? Others seem to think so, that they will either lose incentive, or work longer hours at a slower rate to make more “overtime”. That’s not right thinking, the more and faster he works the more he gets paid. All we are doing is making faces with the figures.
I remember this from California. They had something similar, and I handled it in the same way. If the government insists you record the hours, then you have to vary the rate of pay, no choice here. It’s coming back to me, I think I stumbled across the actual overtime rule which says the overtime rate had to be a minimum of time and a half, but there was no maximum. If so, that was the answer, but remember in those days I did not work in the office, I worked in the field and have no idea what followed.
Today, the entire payroll staff was at the meeting, each person with a limited view of their own part. I say the system has to be quickly reviewed, and hard work expended to keep it simple. First step is to collect the data. It may not be as overwhelming as the extremes some people think of. Today I redesigned the report form so the hours are reported as well as the piecework. Next, I design a spreadsheet form to make any calculation they want. Human resources is adamant that there is no hourly rate, so I’ll use it anyway, just not print it out. Why are we not selling this to IES? I don’t see a steady stream of improvements coming our way from Houston, like.
