I was recently surveying our competitors and saw something new – one of them was advertising a new feature that will add employee breaks automatically. This sounds great because we all know that employees prefer not to mark their breaks but… is this actually great for you?

Let’s start with why you care about employees taking breaks. An employee not marking their break has many costs for the business:

• Too many hours “on the clock”: An “on the clock” lunch costs you money. Assuming most people need to eat and they fully stop working to do that, this could be 30 minutes per day that gets added to their time worked.
• Impacts to overtime: If a break is not marked, that time becomes hours the employee gets paid for. If you are following the law, a missed break is paid at a higher hourly rate than the worker’s usual rate!
• Legal implications: Meal breaks are required in many cases. Have a look here to see if your state requires meal breaks. Even if your state is not on that list, there could be other local laws.

Reading that, automatically deducting breaks sounds like a good, money-saving plan. As a business owner, I definitely want that. BUT, as great as that sounds, it’s actually opening you up to some serious liability.

I’ve spoken about my father’s career before on this blog but my mother was a lawyer who worked on antitrust cases. That’s pretty complicated and she spent 40 years working to learn that, but the key insight for us is that if you have a system that is programmed to do something bad, it’s MUCH worse than the case where a human takes a bad action. In this case, the “bad” act is potentially marking that somebody took a meal break when they did not (either because their supervisor forbid it or they decided not to take it).

So, what to do? Some workers don’t want to mark breaks but you need them added to reflect the actual time but you also don’t want to get into trouble for it… Well, the best thing to do is to have a person add the breaks – that way it’s noted who did it and when. HERE IS A LINK FROM OUR PRODUCT TEAM ABOUT SOME GOOD SYNCREW FEATURES TO USE TO GET WORKERS TO DO THIS. SYNCrew makes it easy to add the missing breaks with a single click on the admin portal through worker time review.

Knowing who did it and when is critical to be able to claim these were decisions made by people and prevent you from needing somebody like my mom to defend you from lawsuits.

Now would be a good time to mention that we really encourage you to follow the laws regarding breaks and also encourage your workers to mark the breaks in the app.

If you have any questions about this or just want to talk, I’d like to meet you! You can email me at john(at)syncrew.com.

John