There are certain principles, or rules, that your company follows in regards to how employees are scheduled and paid. For example, as a general rule, salaried employees do not receive overtime pay, and employees under the age of 16 can only work a certain number of hours per week. If you have a union at your property, there are specific rules dictated by the union, and if you have several shift times, you might give premium pay to employees who work the 11pm-7am shift. Work rules are used to address these complex issues.

Work rules can also be configured to address processes that have multiple steps and variations within steps. A process might have three steps: A, B, and C. In step A, all employees might be be affected the same way. In step B, there might be variations that only affect subsets of employees. And in step C, there might be another variation that affects a small subset—possibly just a few employees—of the subset from stage B. 

Work rules are designed to provide this flexibility in functionality.

In UniFocus 

RMS

 and

Time & Attendance

 software, you can configure work rules to apply these principles to several employees at once. Work rules are applied at the following levels:

• Property
• Employee set
• Individual employee

For a detailed description of the Work Rules screen, see Work Rules screen.

Elements of work rules

To understand work rules, you need to understand how the UniFocus software identifies the parts of work rules. 

There is an order to work rule configuration and behavior:

Rule Type → Rule Sets → Rule Items → Rules and Parameters

UniFocus provides various work rule types. For each type, you can provide your own rule sets, which can contain one or more rule item. Each rule item is based on one work rule—which is at the core of configuring work rules—and these work rules are defined by parameters.

Rule Types

Types are how rules are organized. Think of rule types as the types of processes that you typically perform. For example:

• Paying employees for the lunch breaks 
• Configuring benefit accruals
• Setting earning rates

Rule types are provided by UniFocus and allow you to create your own rule sets and rule items. 

Rule Sets

Rule sets are the different possibilities for what might be chosen during the given step of the process. For example, in the Schedule Lunch work rule type, you would create different rule sets for the different variations of lunch schedule that could be assigned to specific employees. Rule sets can be useful in the case of unions. For example, when calculating overtime (OT), the United States Federal Government mandates that for nonsalaried employees, a minimum OT is required if employees work more than 40 hours in a single workweek. However, some employees might belong to a specific union in which employees also receive OT if they work more than 8 hours during a workday. In this example, there are two variations of how OT is paid—and they require two different rule sets to address the OT requirements of the groups.

Rule Items

Once you have established the rule sets for the different types of classifications, you can determine the rule items that are associated with each rule set. Rule items are are the specific steps that needs to be processed for the rule set.

An example of rule items would be the case of shift premiums for unions. During the shift calculation phase, there's a step to calculate the he shift premium on shift differentials. You create different rule sets for the unions. You might have Union A and Union B or Salaried and Hourly. Then you create rule items for each set. The Union A rule set might include a rule item called Night Pay that checks to see if the shift is entitled to night pay. You might have another rule item called Paid Break that checks to see if the employees working the shift get a paid break. These possibilities are what you configure as rule items in the set. In this example, the rule items would be all the different things you have to calculate for shift premiums—all the shift premiums to be calculated for each group. 

The type of work rule type that you select determines if the included rule sets can contain one of more rule items. At the core of rule items are the work rules and parameters that define them.

Work rules and parameters

Work rules and associated parameters determine how rule items behave. A work rule provides the details that determine the calculation. Parameters are the configuration variable that define the work rule.

For example, in the case of an OT rule, you might have a work rule called Weekly OT. That work rule contains a parameter called OT Limit, with which you specific the limit (for example, 40 hours) for paying OT.

Work rules and parameter are provided by UniFocus.

Example 

The table below displays an example of a Schedule Lunch work rule type.

In this example configuration:

• The Schedule Lunch type contains two work rules: Standard Lunch Rule and Starter Ranger Lunch Rule.
• Both work rules in this example contain three parameters: Lunch Adjust End Time, Lunch Simple Adjustment, and Lunch Start Time and Length.
  • Work rules do not always contain the same parameters, and parameters with the same name may have a different effect depending on the work rule. For detailed explanations of work rules and their parameters, see Work Rule types.