Proactive compliance – The changing workforce landscape

Want to know how Ento makes compliance easier & the impact it will have on your business?

Ento is an Australian, cloud based workforce management platform that empowers businesses to be proactive in tracking, monitoring and reporting on staff compliance.

This article highlights six areas where organisations can manage compliance through Ento:

1. Onboarding & Workflows
2. Qualifications & Licenses
3. Award Compliance Engine
4. Time & Attendance
5. Reporting & Auditing
6. Demand Driven Rostering

As you explore these compliance features you can ask yourself whether they provide an opportunity to de-risk and automate your current business processes.

Unique features Ento customers find most valuable include:

• Our fully customisable award configuration can handle real-life complexity, such as ‘What if?’ analysis on cost & compliance for shift swaps and critical decision points
• Business rules and live alerts are configured to your needs and displayed in the roster when an award rule is triggered (Overtime, Fatigue and many others)
• Custom role and location based permission levels across all modules help to de-risk at scale; a good example is blocking rosters from being published by managers lacking the appropriate permission level
• Fully integrated data gives a real-time view of potential compliance issues before they happen; for example, qualifications are captured using Ento Workflows, stored in CoreHR, then used to validate whether a person is qualified to work a shift, all without double handling of data
• Customisable reports and audit trails allow each leader to review the data most important to their team
• Multi-break capture using Ento’s Time and Attendance Kiosk allows staff to take more than one paid break, in turn allowing the business to accurately capture all breaks and ensure Award conditions have been met

 

Onboarding & workflows

Ento Workflows can add automation and structure to almost any repeatable business process that requires interaction between managers and staff. HR Managers frequently use Workflows to distribute policies, forms, notifications or reminders for all manner of compliance related tasks.

When staff members or prospective candidates are run through an Ento workflow, the progress is tracked, reminders are sent, and ultimately the milestones are met. Different workflow stages are used to share information and content, capture data, and manage approvals – milestones are used for progress tracking and reporting.

Workflows allow businesses to reduce the backand-forth that comes with collecting complex but vital information from your employees. Update and distribute your policy documentation en masse, mandate sighting and signatures, and prevent lapses in coverage.

Want to prevent your staff from working a shift before they sign their induction manual? At any time, managers can dictate that a workflow must be actioned prior to staff being able to access Ento, or subsequently accepting their shift.

Designed to be completely customisable, workflows can be used for most if not all of your business processes, including;

• Onboarding new staff
• Managing contract renewals
• Delivering training content
• Sharing (and recording acknowledgement) of documents such as policy and procedures

 

Qualifications & licenses

Qualifications and licenses can be managed with granular detail to ensure only currently-qualified and compliant staff are ever working.

If your workplace has roles that can only be performed by staff with particular qualifications, the qualifications feature in Ento is a great way to manage visibility. Easily add qualifications & licenses, assign them to roles/shifts as prerequisites, then set their expiry dates on staff profiles – ensuring you only ever roster compliant staff.

There are any number of qualifications or licences an individual may need in order to undertake a particular role. These include, but are not limited to:

• Qualifications such as First Aid, Working with Children, Diplomas, etc
• Security licenses
• Gaming or liquor licenses for bartenders
• Gun licenses for security or corrections staff
• Forklift licences for warehouse staff
• Working visa details

Centralising this data in Ento proactively keeps your rostering managers compliant. As they roster shifts for roles with qualification & licence requirements, the system will warn them if the staff’s qualification is expired for the date the shift falls on!

Organisations can collect qualifications using Ento’s Onboarding & Workflows, enabling helpful features such as:

• Employee self-service where individuals can upload their latest qualifications any time through their app
• An audit trail of historical versions
• User-friendly qualification collection including prompts for expiry dates & options for uploading document images (like a smartphone camera)
• Optional approval levels so that managers can easily view staff qualifications to approve or print as evidence
• Ability to enforce a limit to hours rostered for employees with specific visa restrictions

 

Award Compliance Engine

Real-time pay, fatigue & compliance interpretation runs seamlessly in Ento. Proactive compliance checks throughout the rostering process alert rostering managers when they are at risk of breaching compliance rules.

Ento’s award interpretation engine has the flexibility and power to support thousands of unique and complex rule scenarios simultaneously, while being fast enough to support real-time, on-the-fly optimisation and decision-making.

We’ve successfully automated Award and EBA interpretation for hundreds of businesses across a wide range of industries including healthcare, hospitality, retail, facility-management, security, construction and many more.

All of this is visible in Ento rosters and Time & Attendance via:

• Cost calculation and assignment of rostered and authorised hours to pay rate categories
• Compliance rules that enforce set restrictions on the way staff can be rostered
• Real-time on-roster cost vs budget management and approval thresholds
• ‘What if?’ analysis on cost & compliance for shift swaps and critical decision points
• Cost reporting and history including full audit logs on every shift
• Annual salary benchmarking to ensure your annualised staff salaries are compliant
• Data compiled and formatted for direct integration with leading payroll systems

 

Time & Attendance

Using Ento’s app-based biometric Time & Attendance results in accurately capturing actual time worked. It enables real-time visibility, reporting and notifications on time worked to help managers stay on top of compliance.

Ento has developed the most intuitive and easy-to-use Time and Attendance system on the market – for both staff and managers. At a glance, managers are able to see all non-compliant behaviour of staff: who’s late, who should’ve gone home, who is not qualified to work.

Multiple methods of time capture are available in Ento: a Time Clock kiosk is common for stores/warehouses/offices, or staff can clock in and out using their smartphone via the Ento Employee App. GPS location data will allow managers to validate that staff were on-site. For maximum ease, SMS clock-in is also available, so staff will never have a reason to not clock in/out.

All recorded staff clock in/out times can be configured for manager or admin review and approval prior to going to payroll for maximum auditability.

Some key features include:

• Facial recognition, GPS & traditional pin/methods available
• Live data syncs to/from pay rules engine, rosters & Employee Self Service
• Deep handling of TOIL, exceptions & compliance requirements
• Exception prompts to capture notes from staff in the event of triggered rules (overtime, variance to roster, etc) for complete auditability
• Multi-approval tiers & post-shift reallocation of costs
• Complete auditability of shift states (eg: forecast vs actual)
• No bespoke hardware: App-based Time & Attendance runs on iPads, smartphones, POS, laptops & any device with an internet connection
• Break and multi-break capture

 

Reporting & Auditing

An extremely customisable reporting interface can be run live through the Ento platform, exported via CSV on an as-needed basis, or scheduled and exported to the relevant cloud environment.

Ento has a UI-based export template builder which allows for custom built .CSV reports, including field selection and a drag-and-drop column reordering capability. These templates can be saved for future use and (where permitted) are accessible via other user accounts. Dashboard reports are also supported and consist of visualised charts that can be filtered.

Detailed audit logs on day-to-day account activities are available to users (with the appropriate level of access) via the Ento user interface for:

• Shift history (full audit)
• Leave balance history (full audit)
• Roster publish (user, time, date)
• Unavailability history (approver name and date)
• Leave history (approver name and date)
• Data import history (what was imported, by who, date and time started)
• Report export history (name of report, who exported it)
• Timesheets (full audit)

Additional audits are stored in our database.

Ento is highly configurable and able to suit specific business rules through system-accessed settings and permissions. As a general rule, only select users are able to access the settings area, enabling a controlled environment and ensuring only those who have been granted the appropriate permissions can make changes.

 

Demand Driven Rostering

Leverage highly accurate demand forecasts in industries with legislated ratios, such as childcare.

Ento’s Demand Driven Rostering can help navigate complex service ratios and has been used to great success in the highly legislated childcare industry.

Ento can empower businesses to effortlessly maintain compliance through the following automation and visibility features:

• Attendance forecast algorithms consider historic ramp up/down each day, historic no-show rates and future bookings so that managers can be much more confident in knowing how many children in each age group will attend
• Customised view in the roster that will show you whether you’re achieving child-to-educator ratios in each room
• Visibility of whether you’re meeting qualification requirements, such as Diploma and ECT ratios at any given time
• A recommendation of how many float shifts are required at any given time to ensure compliance during breaks
• Re-calculating ratios every time a shift is changed or filled to ensure compliance is still being met

 

If you have any questions, comments or want to know more about how Ento can help you drive workforce success, don’t hesitate to contact us via the details below:

560 Church St
Richmond, 3121
Victoria, Australia
ento.com
03 9982 1915
contact@ento.com