Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
The Affordable Care Act May Broaden the Marketplace for Workforce Management Solutions
Workforce management software is used for a variety of reasons in the contact center. It’s critical to schedule building, allowing contact centers to forecast call volume using historical and other data, to predict what kind of coverage they need, setting employee schedules to ensure that all or most calls into the contact center have someone ready to pick them up.
It’s possible that soon workforce management solutions will be in demand for another reason: ensuring that part-time workers don’t exceed 30 hours per week, due to the provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). Sometimes called “Obamacare,” the federal legislation will require, among other things, that companies with more than 50 employees provide health insurance to full-time workers. For the purpose of the legislation, full-time is defined as 30 hours per week or more. Companies failing to provide this coverage will be penalized at a rate of $2,000 per employee.
Call centers often employ part-time agents to help fill in gaps or meet call spikes. Today’s workforce management solutions often feature automated schedule bidding or swapping, allowing both part-time and full-time agents to request days off, make changes to their schedules, and even over-time. In the past, company policy usually dictated whether part-time employees were offered benefits. This will no longer be the case beginning next year.
With the advent of the mandatory health coverage provision in the Affordable Care Act (it goes into effect in January 2014), many contact centers will finding themselves being careful not to allow their part-time employees to reach that critical 30 hour per week mark that will transform them to full-time workers and therefore entitled to health care coverage according to federal law. This is where workforce management is likely to come in.
It’s possible that workforce management software may find uses outside the contact center. According to the labor rights Web site Labor Notes, Walmart is already using scheduling software that warns managers when workers are approaching enough hours to make them eligible for health care benefits, and it seems unlikely that the mega-retailer will be the only company to do so after January 2014.
So while workforce management solutions were once largely the provenance of contact centers, we can expect to see more large companies that use part-time workers investing in it as a way of controlling workers’ hours, ensuring they don’t cross that 30-hour per week threshold.
Edited by Ashley Caputo