Fair Workweek is a comprehensive set of laws that governs how workers’ schedules should be set and distributed. An ever-growing number of locations in the US have been rolling out these complex laws that are extremely difficult to manage manually. These regulations have large-scale impacts that enforce some or all of the following based on your workplace location:

1. Ensure workers have a predetermined schedule well in advance of their shifts
2. Require signed and documented consent from workers for a range of schedule changes
3. Calculating a variety of pay penalties for those applicable schedule changes

With regulators in the US now handing out fines that are in the millions, it’s important to make sure your workplace is covered and Deputy’s new Fair Workweek offering is the easiest way to begin this journey.

When is this going live and how can I become compliant?

In line with the City of Los Angeles enforcement date of September 28, Deputy’s Fair Workweek offering will start to be available before then:

• September 1 - Pay premiums for New York Fast Food and Los Angeles - other cities coming soon
• October 1 - Regular schedule and employee consent for regular schedule changes
• November 1 - Trigger and gather employee consent for working schedule changes

If you’d like to get on board with the full solution as early as possible or just find out more - please get in touch with your regular Deputy point of contact or sign up for our beta program.

Sign up for Beta

The Deputy Fair Workweek Solution

The Deputy solution can be broken down into 4 easy-to-use parts that will keep your workplace compliant:

1. Auto calculation of Fair Workweek pay premiums

Designed to streamline your payroll process, Deputy will ensure you comply easily on a city-by-city basis with the following new features:

Accurate Fair Workweek Calculations: Deputy goes beyond basic calculations by factoring in complex elements such as shifts, overtime, breaks, and predictability pay. Now, you can ensure that your employees are compensated fairly in accordance with labor regulations.

Predictability Pay Integration: Keeping up with the intricate requirements of predictability pay is now effortless. Deputy identifies shifts subject to predictability pay and automatically includes them in the calculations, eliminating errors and saving you valuable time.

Clopening Consideration: Clopenings can be a challenge, but not anymore. Deputy recognizes these instances and ensures that employees receive the compensation they deserve for working consecutive closing and opening shifts, promoting fairness and employee satisfaction.

City-Specific Tailoring: Each city has its unique labor laws. Deputy offers city-specific pay rates for both New York City Fast Food and Los Angeles, adapting to local regulations seamlessly while alleviating the complexity of compliance. More cities to come, including San Francisco, New York Retail, Chicago, Philadelphia and Oregon - stay tuned!

2. Trigger and gather employee consent for schedule changes

Stress less about having to understand and remember the huge amount of schedule change scenarios that require an employee's consent alongside needing to manually document them. 

Your Deputy schedule will now be able to integrate city-specific Fair Workweek consent laws and bear the burden of helping you comply with them.

Depending on your location, we’ll have the right setting configuration for you that both triggers consent for any schedule changes where required, as well as documents them in a reportable, auditable way:

• Adding or reducing hours
• Work schedule variance with regular schedule exceeding 15% (NYC Fast Food only)
• Clopenings (i.e. back-to-back shifts across two work days)
• Other schedule changes (e.g. location, breaks)
• Timesheet attestation (starting and ending shifts that vary from scheduled hours)
• Schedule change compliance warnings to keep managers informed at every step

3. Create regular working schedules (Good Faith Estimates)

A cornerstone of the Fair Workweek laws is that employees have a mutually agreed upon, predictable schedule which remains as similar as possible each work period. Deputy’s regular schedule enables you to:

• Build a repeating schedule for each of your employees
• Request and record employee consent for any changes
• Use Deputy’s auto-schedule feature to roster your whole team in a single click. 

4. Auditable Reporting

With complex laws, rules and premiums that have to be paid to employees, it’s important to have easy visibility on how these laws have been applied to your schedule (especially if the regulators ask) and also what impacts the premiums have on your bottom line. Deputy’s Fair Workweek reporting out of the box will provide:

1. Pay premium reporting - Understand how much pay premiums from Fair Workweek mandated penalties are costing
2. Schedule change history reporting - Have easily auditable compliance to keep Fair Workweek regulators happy

I’m already compliant with Fair Workweek by using Deputy - how does this impact me?

If you are a Deputy customer who is already Fair Workweek compliant, these new features will not change your current solution and there is no action to take. Your Deputy point of contact will work with you to identify a migration path as well as a timing that suits you to ensure you always have the latest Fair Workweek compliance solution as we continually invest in this space.

What's New? ✨

The brand-new leave engine is now able to calculate pro-rata leave entitlement for new joiners, designed to streamline the process of determining holiday allowances for new employees based on their hire date. This feature ensures that businesses remain compliant with UK employment law and provide fair and accurate leave calculations that align with an individual's start date.

Why is this game-changing for my business? 🏋🏻‍♂️

• Deputy now automatically calculates leave entitlement based on an employee's start date, ensuring accuracy down to the day and in compliance with the UK Gov Holiday calculator. Say goodbye to manual calculations that can lead to errors and inconsistencies 👋🏼
• You no longer need to manually adjust leave balances for new joiners, saving time and reducing administrative burden.
  
  

How do I use this? ⚙️

Example 1: Sarah joins a Deputy business on May 15th in a full-time capacity, which is midway through the leave calendar (1st January - 31st December). With this new feature, her annual leave entitlement will be calculated based on the remaining months of the year. For instance, if the business has a holiday entitlement of 28 days per year, Sarah will automatically get 19 days of holiday. 

Example 2: John starts his new role on September 1st in a part-time capacity, working 3 days a week. The leave year for his business starts on the 1st of April (UK Financial Year) and provides a statutory entitlement of 33 days every year. Upon joining, John will automatically receive 10 days of holiday. 

• To use this feature, simply turn on the “Pro-rate leave entitlement for team members that join throughout the year” checkbox in the Leave Policy Builder for a given policy.
  
  
• Once this leave policy is assigned to a new joiner with the provided hire date in their profile, Deputy will automatically calculate their leave entitlement and deposit the balance in their leave balance bank for the first time.
• Note that this setting is only available for “Fixed” yearly and “Based on agreed hours” accrual schedules.
• This feature is now available to all businesses using Deputy's new leave policy builder and accrual engine.
  
  

Help or Feedback 📣

• A new help guide has been drafted on how this feature works and can be found here.
• Love this new feature or think it could be better? Go to Deputy > Help > Give us feedback 

We keep improving how salary costs are calculated to better suit your business needs.  

What's new?

Most of the salary costs were calculated week by week. With the upcoming improvements,  you could easily set up salaries to be distributed either from Monday to Sunday, or Wed to Tues etc. as a week, for either some particular employee or groups of employees from the same location.

• For employees who have been set up with agreed working hours,  salary will be distributed based on their Agreed Working Hours' week start day.
• For others who have no agreed working hours setup, salary will be distributed based on the employee's primary location's settings - Week Start Day.

It will improve the accuracy of the salary costs involved in Business Insights or any other costs-related reports.

When will I get it?

This will be rolling out to all of the accounts in the next few weeks.

Help or Feedback

Want to read more on how to set up salary costs for an employee? Read our help docs here for a full guide.

Love this new feature or think it could be better? Go to Deputy > Help > Give us feedback 

✨ What’s new? 
We are thrilled to announce that Deputy Hire now comes equipped with a cutting-edge feature that generates Job Descriptions within seconds using the power of AI.  

By simply inputting the job title, location, and job type, our AI technology will work its magic and produce comprehensive JDs in no time. 

Say goodbye to the hassle of manual creation and hello to efficiency and accuracy!

⏰ When is it available?
We're pleased to announce it's now live ✅ and available to all Hire product customers.

💪 What's next?
We are committed to further enhancing the AI Job Builder by introducing a feature that allows you to choose a preferred tone of writing, including options like Casual, Professional, or Conversational. This enhancement will provide you with even greater flexibility and customization in creating job descriptions.

Sign up to Hire (Beta)

Create robust and flexible leave policies for your business and assign them to team members ⚙️

• Set and customise automated accrual for different leave types
  • Hourly accrual: Accrue leave based on hours worked.
  • Fixed release: Accrue in advance or release a fixed leave balance amount according to different frequencies (weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly)
  • Accrue based on agreed hours: Accrue pro-rata leave based according to employee’s working hours and working days
    
    
    
• Calculation of UK Holiday Pay for zero-hour workers: Calculation of average working hours based on shifts worked in the past (e.g. 52 weeks)
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Have more control over balance settings such as:
  • Max balance: Set an accrual threshold for leave balance to cap leave amounts.
  • Rollover leave: the entire balance from year to year, reset, or roll over part of the balance to the next leave year.
    
    
• More advanced leave rules like:
  • Future leave year balances: Leave requests from the next leave year will deduct from next year’s balances!
  • Accrual leave while on leave: paid leave, unpaid, all leave types, or only on specific leave types!
    
    

How to use it ✨
Please note that to access the new leave management experience, you will need to run a one-time migration process.

The migration opt-in will be available to Premium customers from 19th June onwards. We will be looking to migrate everyone over by the 1st of August (non-opt-in).

Some UK customers have already been using this new experience but if you are in the UK and still using the old experience it's time to migrate over to the new experience. More information about how to migrate can be found out here.

What's coming next 💪🏼
We will continue to add more features to the leave policy builder such as:

• Pro-rated leave balance for team members joining part way through the year
• Tenure-based and seniority rules
• Waiting periods
• Calculation of average hourly pay rate alongside average working hours to determine holiday pay for changing pay rates.

Always hiring? Hire, Onboard and have new staff ready for their first shift all within Deputy.

Get ready to experience a whole new level of hiring efficiency with Deputy's All-in-one Hiring and Onboarding platform with exciting new features such as:

• 📹 Screen Candidate Videos — assess personality upfront
• 💬 Fast, text message based communication — the way hourly workers prefer
• ✨ Professional Careers Page for your business — stand out to candidates
• 🧐 Custom screening questions — screen based on your criteria
• 🎬 Job board integrations with leading job boards (coming shortly) — attract more candidates

I'd like to try the Beta, how do I sign up?

Be the first to experience the power of Deputy Hiring by joining our exclusive beta program. Gain early access and have a strong voice on what we build next.

Sign up now to be part of the BETA program: 👉

Sign up for Hire Beta

⚡️ But wait, there's more! We're also thrilled to announce that a HR Document Management offering is coming soon to Deputy. Go completely paperless with Hire, Onboarding and Document management.

Don't miss out on the opportunity to supercharge your hiring process with Deputy HR. Sign up for the beta program today and unlock a new era of hiring success!

What's new

Importing Deputy Forecast data into Manager Forecast is now under your own control.

- While you are editing any metric's Manager forecast data in the editor,  Deputy forecast data will not be auto-populated into Manager forecast any more.

- Instead, you can click the button "Import Deputy Forecast Data",  Deputy Forecast data will be populated and over-writing your Manager Forecast as your request.

- You can keep adjusting the data after the Deputy forecast data is populated into your Manager Forecast as usual

- Apply the changes by clicking on the "Save" button at the end.

Why 👈 

Instead of auto-populating Deputy Forecast data,  manually importing Deputy Forecast data into Manager Forecast with simply one click can ensure:

1. Deputy forecast data is only imported into Manager Forecast under your needs.

2. No unexpected accidents happened any more for Deputy Forecast over-writing Manager Forecast data automatically.  It is all under your control to decide when you need to import Deputy Forecast data to overwrite Manager Forecast.

3. A better user experience for less confusion. Your Manager Forecast data is always consistent between the Summary and Metric Editor in Business Insights especially when you set one day's Manager forecast data as $0 in Summary View, while before this changes,  inconsistent more than $0 was shown in Metric Editor because of the auto-import which created tons of confusions.

Leave us Feedback

Love this new feature? Think it could be better? Go to Deputy > Help > Give us feedback 

Introducing a fresh, new look for the clock-in & clock-out experience on our iOS and Android apps! 

We’ve given the Shift Details a repaint, making it easier for team members to understand and record information about their shifts. 

What's new 

⏱️ Uplift to the clock-in, clock-out and on-shift screens

Information about your shift is now better organised to help you get on with your day faster.

Here are a few aspects of the new experience that we’d love to highlight: 

Viewing information in-depth 

Whether you want to know where your shift is located, or you'd like to read your manager's note in detail, we've got you covered. 

Editing shift details

It's now easier to update timesheet information while you are on-shift or ending your shift. 

Answering shift questions and leaving comments

There is now a separate screen to answer shift questions if they have been set up as part of your clock-in or clock-out experience. The comment box is now tucked at the bottom of this screen. 

Want to learn more? 

Check out what's coming soon in this 5-minute overview! 💥 

When and how can I get it?

This will be rolling out Premium, Timesheet or Scheduling only accounts starting on May 8th. The rollout to Enterprise accounts will start later this month. 

You should ensure your iOS or Android app is updated to the latest version to get this new experience. 

Feedback

Love this new feature or think it could be better? Go to Deputy > Help > Give us feedback 

We are excited to announce our new, redesigned news feed with reactions to create a more engaging communications centre in your workplace! Now, team members can react to each other's posts or comments on web and mobile.

What's New?

Reactions to posts or comments

Users can now choose between 5 reactions to comment with on any post or comment. You can also view the list of reactions and who reacted on your post.

Redesigned for a better user experience

Introducing the new look of news feed on desktop and mobile, including image attachments in full width:

Ability to disable comments on specific posts on mobile

Just as available on desktop, mobile users now can disable comments on posts that are meant to be a one-way message, such as for announcements.

When will I get it?

This will be rolling out all premium accounts starting today and to Enterprise accounts starting next week. Please update your iOS device to version 11.0.0 and Android device to version 10.21.0 or newer to get the latest news feed on mobile.

Help or Feedback

Want to read more on how to use the new news feed? Read our help docs here for a full guide.

Love this new feature or think it could be better? Go to Deputy > Help > Give us feedback