Labor Management. NOW Simple.

During a recession, businesses and consumers alike are more likely to analyze where they spend their money, so you have to work hard to earn their business. Here are two major ways to get new customers stepping through your doors and coming back for more.

1) Use Non-traditional Marketing
Direct marketing is nothing new, but businesses are increasingly turning to non-traditional media because it’s less expensive than traditional advertising mediums (like television and radio) and can be tailored to reach a small or large target demographic. Direct marketing campaigns like fliers, street advertising, promotional letters, coupons, customer appreciation events, and direct selling have become very popular among businesses during the recession.

The more clever your campaign, the more likely it is to succeed. For instance, PETA’s 2009 Super Bowl advertisement was banned for being too sexually explicit. It is widely presumed that PETA intentionally made the ad overly explicit with the intention of creating word-of-mouth publicity, which is even more valuable than airtime during the Super Bowl. The supposed “plan” worked – PETA’s commercial was spoofed on television shows like The View, and copies of the video floated around the Internet virally for months. PETA also avoided the $3 million it cost in 2009 for 30 seconds of Super Bowl air time. By understanding how the marketing world works, PETA earned almost free major national publicity.

2) Use Technology
Social media sites and text messages are great ways for you to keep in touch with your employees (TimeForge offers great schedule notification options through social media and sms), but technology can also offer huge pools of potential customers. Advertise online and make sure your business has professional accounts on sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and LinkedIn.

Check reviews of your business from the Better Business Bureau, Company Name Sucks, and Angie’s List. Be proactive with review information and use it in your next staff meeting to improve your product.

Make sure your company’s website is accessible and interactive so customers will return, and consider offering an online newsletter or blog with coupons or other incentives.

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Communication is key in the fast paced environment of your business.  Communicating with staff can be frustrating, whether you’re attempting to inform them of policy changes or just trying to fill a shift for this afternoon.

Miscommunication among staff members, or between staff and management, can leave you frantically trying to fill a shift only minutes before it begins, calling employee after employee, ultimately ending up short-handed, an hour behind on your managerial tasks, and pulling your hair out.

However, with TimeForge‘s unique messaging feature, those days are gone.

To send a message, select "Messages" under the "Schedules" tab, then click "Send a Message"

TimeForge’s labor management software offers a convenient communication feature (similar to e-mail or text messages) within the TimeForge system to make staff communication convenient and time saving. Now, rather than taking the time to call employees while on the clock, you can send messages specifically to the person, people, or groups you need to contact. You can choose to send the message to selected staff or management members, unscheduled or scheduled employees, the entire staff, or just certain positions or departments.

When sending a message, select which staff members you want to send the message to.

TimeForge even takes care of the “I didn’t get the memo” excuse, so you don’t have to worry about staff members failing to check their TimeForge messages (or to answer their phones). All TimeForge messages are also sent to the recipients email, and an audit log is provided inside of TimeForge for users who view the message in TimeForge, ensuring that they “get the memo”.  Messages also show up inside of Facebook, on mobile devices like Android phones and iPhones or iPads, and through an RSS feed.

TimeForge’s messaging feature helps you spend less time managing labor and more time ensuring that the business runs smoothly, saving the company money and reducing turnover by increasing communication among the staff and management.

Sign up for a free trial today and see what TimeForge can do for you!

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As a manager, your main value to your company is your influence. Good managers influence their company far more than average employees by trickling ideas both down and up the ladder. Mary Kay Ash once said, “People are definitely a company’s greatest asset. It doesn’t make and difference whether the product is cars or cosmetics. A company is only as good as the people it keeps.”

If people are the greatest asset of a company, then a good manager is invaluable. Here are four ways to help you be the best manager you can be:

1. Pay attention to improving your company’s competitive advantage. Remind employees that the first law of business is “take care of the customer”. Encourage your employees to innovate and create to prevent your competitors from having better ideas than you. In the hospitality industry, it’s easy to get caught up in the mundane repetitiveness of day-to-day activities. Spice it up by incorporating a “new ideas” segment into weekly staff meetings. Quality of product, quality of service, and overall quality of experience must be exemplary in the hospitality industry in order to prevent loss of your customer base to a competitor. Ensure rewards for employee efficiency.

2. Diversify! To make sure your company has a solid ladle of the melting pot, hire people of every age range, race, ethnicity, and gender. By 2060, half of the American population will be made up of ethnic and racial minority groups. Also, familiarize yourself with global cultures, especially if your company plans to expand internationally. It is important to diversify your employee pool in order to not only keep up with your customer base, but also to ensure the organizational strength of your company by maximizing the diverse contributions that you will only get by having a diverse employee pool.

3. Technology is your friend – use it! Spending on retail software will exceed $20 billion by 2014. Technology has transformed industries and changed the very nature of business. Minimally, e-business practices will reduce your cost of communication. If used effectively, e-business technologies can have a far greater positive impact on your profit margin through accelerated decision making, broadened communication, expedited handling of employee and store issues, more thorough hiring practices, and the many benefits project and employee management software can offer. If you incorporate the right management software in your business, scheduling, tracking, communication, and hiring employees can be faster, easier, and considerably more efficient financially.

4. Don’t forget yourself. While managing in the fast paced hospitality industry, it can be easy to compartmentalize your life – home life and work life need not intertwine. This can be beneficial to your sanity, but it can make you feel like two different people. When making decisions at work, be sure to remind yourself who you are and what your ethics dictate. In today’s high pressure climate in one of the most competitive industries, the need to meet quotas and deadlines can leave you facing some major ethical dilemmas. Consider the implications of your decisions, and whether the decision fits into your life plan. Be sure that your company’s culture fits your compass of ethics, as it can be difficult to juggle bosses, subordinates, your daily workload, and two conflicting sets of rules.

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In many states, employees receive paid or unpaid break periods and meal periods according to the law. The TimeForge Breaks Module allows management to enter rules which manage employee breaks and meal periods, letting you easily control and track breaks for on-duty or scheduled employees. After enabling the Breaks Module, you’ll be ready to customize your break and meal period options so they are tailored to best suit your company’s needs.

Scheduling Breaks:

You can add your state, federal, or company mandated “Break Rules” or “Meal Period Rules” and delegate whether the break is paid or unpaid, optional or required.

After adding the necessary breaks, TimeForge can automatically place employees on the schedule and will stagger the breaks to keep employees from all taking the breaks at the same time.  Alternatively, managers can specify each break individually.

When using TimeForge Breaks in conjunction with TimeForge Scheduling, you can:

• Specify breaks based on hours worked, position, or duration of work scheduled
• AutoScheduler™ can quickly stagger breaks for each scheduled shift
• Schedule and manage both paid and unpaid, and optional and required breaks
• Print break reports and worksheets to track employee signatures

Taking Breaks:

Employees can begin or end their breaks with the click of a button.  You can set options to allow employees to take breaks based on the scheduled break settings, specify all breaks as a certain type, or staff can select what kind of break they will be taking (paid, unpaid, optional, required).  If preferred, you can print out the break worksheet and capture employee signatures for any waived or new breaks.

By using TimeForge Breaks in conjunction with TimeForge Attendance, management can:

• Track employee breaks (paid, unpaid, optional, required) for labor reporting
• Automatically take breaks based on the schedule if staff forget to break in or out
• Simple one-click conversion of unpaid breaks to paid breaks (and vice versa) in the “Edit Attendance” module
• Real time web and mobile view of labor and tracking of which staff members are on break
• Alerting and Reporting with TimeForge automatically staggers employees breaks when you add them to the schedule, so your business is always covered by capable staff.

Because the reality (attendance) is often different from the scheduled breaks, you can also see a display of employee breaks based on the employee’s scheduled hours with our Break Report, and track breaks that employees have taken, or should take, based on the employee’s scheduled work hours with our printed Break Worksheet Report. Our detailed and comprehensive reports make it simple and organized to view employee habits and work histories.

You can opt to be alerted via text, e-mail, or TimeForge message if staff members do not take their scheduled breaks after a certain number of minutes. For example, if you set the alert to notify you after 15 minutes of a missed break and an employee was scheduled to take a break at 1:00 pm, but has not taken a break at 1:15 pm, you’ll receive a notification via e-mail or text message directly to your phone or computer.

TimeForge is a best-of-breed employee management system, and our online application of the program allows for constant software updates and improvements live to your system. With TimeForge’s innovative online management software, you are always at the top of your game. TimeForge completes tasks like managing breaks in a matter of minutes – saving your company valuable capital.

TimeForge’s do-it-all program makes the headache of managing employee breaks a thing of the past. Sign up for a free trial today!

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Lately, everyone has been going crazy for “going green”. While some business owners are dismissing the rapidly growing trend as a fad, many savvy business owners are learning how to capitalize on the environmentally-conscious movement among younger workers. It is important for businesses to recognize that Generation Y is particularly sensitive to Green efforts, and (as our Marketing to Generation Y blog mentioned) is spending $150 billion dollars annually on expenses such as food, drinks, and entertainment.

Changes to make your business more environmentally friendly will:

• Improve your employee retention rate of environmentally-conscious Gen Y (and older generations’) staff members
• Allow you to capitalize on the 70 million individuals looking to spend their money in “Green” establishments. According to a recent study by Forrester Research, nearly 40% of Gen Y-ers are willing to pay more for products or services that are environmentally friendly.

When you are ready to take the next steps to make your business Green, the Green Restaurant Association (GRA) is a national non-profit organization that provides a convenient and cost-effective way for restaurants, manufacturers, distributors, and consumers to become more environmentally responsible. According to case studies by the GRA, businesses that they have assisted have had the following savings:

• After only one year since their GRA certification, The Draft House reported a 54% water reduction and a trash reduction of 50%.
• GustOrganics, the first certified Organic restaurant in New York State received free publicity from The Today Show, Telemundo, CNN, The New York Times, Financial Times and more after becoming GRA certified.
• Boston restaurant Taranta eliminated almost all garbage with recycling and composting program, and enjoyed savings of $1,300 per year by switching from paper towels to an energy-efficient hand dryer.
• “I realized about a 45% return on my investment in one year and cut approximately $1200 off my annual operating costs. Not only am I pleased with the financial results of my decision, I also know that my association with the GRA has inspired employee morale.” – Jim Solomon, Fireplace Restaurant.

Going Green will help your business save money, reduce employee turnover, generate positive publicity and increase your sales. For more information on going Green or getting your restaurant GRA certified, click here.

TimeForge can help your business take the first step to becoming green with our online labor management products.  Our software will help you dramatically reduce the amount of paper required for you to run your business by removing the paperwork overhead needed for common HR needs.

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Management Philosophy 101 for dealing with staff turnover: The best way to reduce turnover costs is to reduce turnover.

The real cost of employee turnover is difficult to fully quantify because it is based on many variables but it is always more than you think it is.

In the restaurant, retail and hospitality industries, turnover is especially high – but, TimeForge, a labor management solution, can improve staff morale and efficiency in order to effectively reduce turnover and improve your bottom line. One way to find the cost of turnover at your business would include the following, some of which are hard to measure:

1. Lost productivity – Other staff members will have to pick up the slack of a missing employee, which reduces everyone’s overall productivity.
2. Temporary cost of replacement (i.e., contractor wages) – Some positions can be filled by others picking up the slack, resulting in no incremental expense. However, if this is a frequent occurrence, morale can suffer — leading to more turnover. Other positions will need to be filled with temporary or contract workers, which results in additional cost.
3. Recruiting/hiring expense – This is the literal cost of filling the position and can include search fees paid to agencies or headhunters, referral fees paid to employees, ads in newspapers, job board posting fees, etc.
4. Management time – Time management has to spend going over resumes, scheduling and conducting interviews, evaluating candidates and making job offers. TimeForge can slash the time spent collecting and storing a new hire’s documentation, but interviewing and evaluating applicants is a time-consuming skill that remains unavoidable.
5. Training costs – This includes all the costs associated with ensuring that new staff members have all the skills and tools they need to do the job.
6. Learning curve – The time it takes the new employee to perform at an optimal performance level.
7. Knowledge replacement – This is impossible to measure. Employees leave with accumulated knowledge that is hard to quantify and even harder to replace.

For an even more accurate and comprehensive determination of costs, include the following where appropriate:

1. Calculate the cost of training your company has invested in the employee leaving. Include internal training, external programs and external academic education. Include licenses or certifications the company has helped the employee obtain to do their job effectively.
2. Calculate the impact on departmental productivity because the person is leaving. Who will pick up the work, whose work will suffer, what departmental deadlines will not be met or delivered late?
3. Calculate the cost of department staff and include discussion on their reactions to the vacancy.
4. Calculate the cost of losing customers that the employee is going to take with them, or the amount it will cost you to retain the customers of the sales person or customer service representative who leaves.
5. Calculate the cost of drug screens, educational and criminal background checks and other reference checks, especially if these tasks are outsourced. Don’t forget to calculate the number of times these are done per open position, as some companies conduct this process for the final two or three candidates.
6. Calculate the cost of the various candidate pre-employment tests to help assess a candidate’s skills, abilities, aptitude, attitude, values and behaviors.
7. Calculate the cost of supervisory time spent in assigning, explaining and reviewing work assignments and output. This represents lost productivity of the supervisor. Consider the amount of time spent at seven hours per week for at least eight weeks.
8. Calculate the cost of coworkers and supervisory lost productivity due to their time spent on bringing the new employee “up to speed.”
9. Calculate the cost of mistakes the new employee makes during this elongated indoctrination period.
10. Calculate the cost of bringing the new person on board, including the cost to put the person on the payroll, establish computer and security passwords and identification cards, business cards, internal and external publicity announcements, telephone hookups, cost of establishing e-mail accounts, costs of establishing credit card accounts, or leasing other equipment such as cell phones, automobiles, pagers.
11. Calculate the cost of a manager’s time spent developing trust and building confidence in the new employee’s work.

Research continues to show that real turnover costs can run anywhere from 25% to 150% of the position’s salary and benefits, depending on how many of the above costs are applicable to the position.

TimeForge can help reduce your turnover by providing staff and management a superior means of communication, keeping everyone “in the know” at all times. TimeForge reduces turnover by:

• No more confusion! Keeping employees from being scheduled at times they are unavailable, and communicating schedule and availability changes to staff and management alike.
• Easy communication! Making online shift swaps, pickups, and time off requests a one-click process (with manager’s approval where necessary, of course)
• Easily Accessible! Web-based, text message, facebook, and printable schedules, time cards, and upcoming shift reminders.
• And much, much more!

The number one reason management-level staff members resign is the time, pain and high rate of error that comes with their job including constructing employee schedules – an issue that TimeForge makes obsolete. As opposed to inefficient and cumbersome Excel spreadsheets and paper logs, TimeForge will save management hours and virtually eliminate errors each week in various HR duties, including documentation/certification creation, storage and sending, schedule construction, and all of their various employee management tasks.

Money spent proactively on employee training, staff morale, career development, staff-management communication and other benefits can have significant return on investment when it leads to reduced turnover, and TimeForge reduces the time and cost associated with accomplishing these vital employee hiring and retention techniques.

TimeForge makes building schedules, tracking attendance, exporting and approving payroll and much more a fast, easy, point-and-click process. With TimeForge, your staff will communicate better, work more efficiently and eliminate costly mistakes associated with human error.

Additionally, our software makes your business more environmentally-friendly by drastically reducing paper usage, which has been shown to elevate staff morale and improve employee retention rate – employees feel good about being associated with a company that’s environmentally-conscientious.

Sign up for a free trial of our labor management software, and start improving your bottom line today.

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The number one reason managers quit a restaurant job is because of frustration associated with scheduling. After dealing with all the employee requests and working around personal schedules, managers invest large amounts of time and effort into a schedule which inevitably fails to make everyone happy. Some managers employ a “if the schedule doesn’t work for you, too bad” attitude to reduce their frustrations. This definitely reduces a manager’s stress, but according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, this directly increases turnover rates, which cost your business money. Whether managers are accommodating to employees or not, the frustration of scheduling reduces managerial job satisfaction, ultimately resonating through the ranks to all employees.

According to retensa, 94% of turnover is preventable, so money spent proactively on employee training, staff morale, career development, and staff-management communication can have significant return on investment by resulting in reduced turnover. TimeForge reduces the time and cost associated with accomplishing these vital employee hiring and retention tasks. TimeForge makes building schedules, tracking attendance, exporting and approving payroll and most other management duties fast and simple, which makes managers and staff happy!

Instead of dealing with inefficient and cumbersome Excel spreadsheets and paper logs, managers who use TimeForge are less inclined to feel negatively about scheduling. TimeForge saves management hours and eliminates errors. TimeForge handles HR duties, including document and certification storage, schedule construction, and most labor management tasks.

With TimeForge, your staff will communicate better, work more efficiently, and eliminate costly mistakes associated with human error. Additionally, TimeForge helps make your business more green by drastically reducing paper usage.  Being a green business has been shown to elevate staff morale and improve employee retention rate – staff members (especially Gen Y employees) feel good about being associated with a company that’s environmentally conscious.

Click here to sign up for a free trial of TimeForge and start improving your bottom line today.

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According to the National Retail Federation, turnover within the restaurant, retail and hospitality industry has been approximately 60%-200% over the past five years. Low pay and young staff members are major contributors to the problem, but what can businesses do to improve their turnover and, thereby, their labor costs? Employers should improve their recruiting strategies and their ability to retain employees. TimeForge’s labor management products can assist with strategies to hook the enthusiastic and hard-working Gen Y-ers, in addition to keeping them happy, informed, and fulfilled by their work.

Using college and high school campuses to recruit talent is an excellent way to reach Gen Y-ers in their element. Individuals who are part of Generation Y are especially peer-influenced, so recruiters should be close to their age, and advertisements should appeal to their interests. It’s important to highlight your businesses philanthropy and responsibility during recruiting, because, as we mentioned in Part One, Gen Y-ers are especially concerned about the environment, social justice and various conservation and humanitarian issues. It’s important to contribute toward (and emphasize to prospective employees and the community) the kind of charities that hit home with Generation Y.

An understanding of Generation Y’s appreciation and attachment to technology will help you better recruit and manage members of this demographic. The online and interactive labor management TimeForge provides is easy to use and appealing to Gen-Yers, who have grown up comfortable with computers. In addition to the appeal of online schedule viewing, shift-swapping, training/certification reminders and more, when it comes to applying for jobs, Generation Y prefers to submit their resume/application online. TimeForge’s applicant tracking systems make it easy to compile and store online applications with our applicant tracking systems, which will have you onboarding the most qualified applicants with minimal time and effort.

The amount of retailers accepting online applications has increased exponentially within the past 5-10 years, so if your business isn’t offering a digital application process, it’s likely that you’re losing out on potential job candidates. In a 2007 pilot program, McDonald’s installed computer kiosks to accept employee applications in 40 of its restaurants. The number of applicants at those restaurants jumped by as much as 100 percent. At one McDonald’s in College Station, Texas, the employee turnover rate also was reduced by more than 20 percent, according to an article by Andrew Tilin. By using TimeForge, your business could enjoy similar turnover reduction and employee retention.

Gen Y-ers appreciate the ability to apply quickly, easily, and impersonally while in casual clothes. Offering online application and resume submission also eliminates a great deal of the necessary paperwork that comes with accepting applications and hiring new employees, which not only makes things simpler for management and corporate (where applicable) but it’s a start towards Generation-Y-luring “Green” initiatives. TimeForge can drastically reduce the need for paperwork with our online products that feature document/certification uploading and storage, employee on-boarding, and employee management to assist in a transition to a more “Green” company.

It’s also important to recognize that more Gen Y-ers have goals of opening their own businesses one day, than in previous generations. Learning what they need to know in order to accomplish this is another intangible benefit your business can offer to Generation Y (and other) staff members, and TimeForge’s labor management system is a great way for inexperienced individuals to gain experience and understanding of what managing people is like. In order to find future entrepreneurs, recruit and advertise near hospitality-geared high school classes and university colleges (ex: Texas Tech’s Restaurant, Hotel and Institutional Management college,) and give your Generation Y employees as much room for education and higher placement as possible, in order to allow for growth and continued interest.

TimeForge can help your business better appeal to Generation Y, which can help increase your number of applicants, reduce your turnover, and allow you to better manage your entire labor staff, regardless of generation.

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Generation Y has become a challenging market for many businesses in the restaurant, retail and hospitality industries – and most other industries, as well. Generation Y is very different from previous generations, and, to successfully market to them, you must find ways to appeal to their unique needs and wants. TimeForge’s online, digital products are especially easy-to-use for this demographic.

Generation Y consists of those born between 1980 and 2000 and are between the ages of 9 and 29 (BusinessWeek). With over 70 million individuals, they make up 25% of the population – that’s a big piece of the pie your business could be profiting from!

Generation Y is more ethnically diverse, socially-conscious (green/organic marketing is very successful with them — making TimeForge’s paperless, eco-friendly quality appealing to them) and more accepting of alternative lifestyles than past generations. They spend $100 per week on disposable spending (money spent on wants, not needs) which accounts for $150 billion dollars annually! For the older Generation Y individuals (who enjoy the majority of this spending money,) that’s money spent primarily on things like food and drinks — the vast majority of their money is allocated towards entertainment that the restaurant, retail and hospitality industries provide.

In order to successfully market to Generation Y, you must first understand their appreciation and attachment to technology. According to a study by Forrester Research, Gen Y-ers are estimated to spend 20 Billion dollars online per year. The ability to order out, make reservations and check out a new restaurant/retail establishment online are of vital importance to Generation Y. If you business doesn’t offer this kind of online interactive capabilities, you could be losing out on a lot of potential customers. Additionally, is you don’t have an online system for employees in place, you could be losing out on a large number of Generation Y employees, who prefer the ease of features like text message reminders before shifts, online availability editing, shift-swapping, schedule viewing from their PCs or internet-enabled phones, and more. 90% of Generation Y-ers have a personnel computer, 50% of 12-17 year olds have cell phones, and 45% of 18-24 year olds have internet on their mobile devices, and as those numbers increase, their dependability of these devices does as well.

With this technology, Gen Y-ers base their decisions for making purchases on different criteria that the generations before them. Social media such as facebook, MySpace and twitter play a huge role in Gen Y-ers’ lives, and how they interact with their friends and family, which is why TimeForge is accessible from mobile phones, facebook and via text message. Not only will having pages on sites like these and integrating with social media and mobile phone capabilities increase your relevance to Generation Y, but Gen Y-ers are notorious for publicizing every aspect of their lives. If you have an easily linked-to facebook page or Web site, it makes it easy for Gen-Yers to tell their friends/followers about your business, and the experience they had. And, as demonstrated by the Forrester study below, clearly Gen Y-ers (as well as other generations!) are responsive to tips from friends.

As the chart above demonstrates, nearly 60% of Gen Y-ers often tell their friends about products and places that interest them, indicating that word-of-mouth or “buzz” advertising is effective with this age group. Additionally, nearly 50% of Gen Y-ers as well as Gen X-ers agree that price is more important to them than brand names.

As the Forrester study below demonstrates, Generation Y has a dramatically higher percentage of “Creators,” or trend starters, meaning that they enjoy being the first to discover new places, trends, and more. Generation Y’s percentage of “Joiners,” or individuals who hop on the trend band-wagon, is more than double that of other generations. This means that Gen Y-ers are not only eager to discover and patronize new establishments, but they’re excited about being involved in a marketing “buzz.” Where earlier generations were skeptical of marketing ploys, Gen Y-ers enthusiastically embrace and assist them.

Generation Y-ers care about the “cool” factor. Companies like Apple and Target (click the links to see ad examples) are extremely successful in marketing to Generation Y (particularly Gen Y’s “Joiners”) because they focus on marketing their brands as young, hip and fun. They use trendy indie or popular music in their advertisements, tout their green (which a paperless labor management system can help start) or philanthropic initiatives and make their brand relatable to people in the Genera ion Y age group.

Online Social Ladder

So, what does all this mean for your business? It means that in order to successfully market to Generation Y, and to create and maintain customers within Generation Y, your business must institute:

1: Social media pages in order to connect with and inform Generation Y. In addition to a facebook page for your business, TimeForge is accessible from facebook, keeping your Gen Yers in-the-know, in their element.

2: Integrate with online technology as much as possible. (Ex: Online ordering and reservations.)

3: Put as much online buzz-worthy marketing out there as possible. If you post it, they will re-post/re-tweet etc.

4: Give your brand a “cool” factor. Your business should seem young, hip and fun. TimeForge manages Gen Yers in a way they can understand and relate to, more than ever before, which will boost staff morale and your employees’ opinions of the business (which this generation is enthusiastic about repeating to others.)

5: Last, but not least: Tout your Green or philanthropic endeavors. If you don’t have any, getting some should be a priority. By simply adding TimeForge to your business’ labor management, our Green product will virtually eliminate the need for paperwork and give your company something Green to add to your list of Gen Y-approved qualities.

To learn more about how TimeForge can help you get Gen Y-ers in the door, click here to learn more or sign up for a free trial today. Also, continue on to Part Two of our examination of Generation Y to learn how to recruit, maintain and satisfy Gen Y employees.

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The pre-hire and on-boarding processes for bringing on a new hire can cost managers and business owners hours of valuable time. Most businesses must go through the process of collecting resumes and cover letters, applications, assessments, background checks, I-9 and W-4 documents, payroll documentation, insurance forms, staff availability, and other necessary documents such as copies of certifications and previous training verification.

In addition to the time spent collecting these documents and other demographic information, there can be costly legal repercussions for failing to keep records on file and properly documented.

TimeForge HR can reduce all of this paperwork hassle into a simple and fast point and click process. Getting a new employee ready for scheduling or tracking time is as simple as entering the employee’s basic information within TimeForge’s innovative labor management software.

Managers can set up any number of prehire and onboarding documents that must be on file before the new hire is allowed to clock in or be scheduled to work. This innovative process allows you to define a standard employment process for your organization – ensuring that new employees have all of the necessary documents before they are scheduled, or clock in.

TimeForge HR documents can include relevant dates and any employer notes, and you can also scan and upload documents directly into TimeForge – no more searching for relevant paperwork!

Store Documents, Demographics, and HR Information

Additionally, if you enter an employee’s email address into TimeForge, the software will automatically email the employee instructions on how to login to TimeForge, check upcoming schedules, enter requests for time off and much more – greatly speeding up the onboarding process within your organization.

Our easy-to-use online product, TimeForge HR, allows managers and business owners to add an employee, change their availability and submit documents to TimeForge in seconds, making the onboarding of new personnel faster and more convenient than ever. For a free trial of TimeForge, sign up here and see how TimeForge is making labor management woes a thing of the past!

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