Deputy announces 'Break Planning' to facilitate compliance for meal and rest breaks

Deputy, a workforce management software platform, released its newest feature, Break Planning, available across all devices. With a strong compliance focus, Break Planning enables businesses that employ shift-based workers to easily schedule, manage and track both paid and unpaid meal and rest breaks, helping them to navigate the intricacies of compliance requirements.

“Meal and rest break compliance is complex, and the lack of transparency around how this time is managed, accounted for and paid makes it even more difficult,” said Derek Jones, vice president of enterprise solutions, Americas for Deputy. “Deputy solves the issue upstream by providing tools to easily manage meal and rest break compliance for both the employee and the scheduler. Businesses of all kinds benefit from Deputy’s forward-minded solution to navigate an increasingly complicated regulatory workplace environment.”

States like California, New York, Oregon, Washington and Massachusetts now demand tougher restrictions with mandatory meals breaks and multiple rest periods. Deputy’s Artificial Intelligence-driven platform enables businesses to craft ideal schedules, with built in measures to help make compliance easy. It also provides transparency to employees around their entitled breaks and rest periods.

The Break Planning feature includes:

• Multi-break scheduling: Schedule multiple breaks, both paid and unpaid, in a single shift
• On-site break management: Enhanced employee break management with custom break enforcement and attestation
• Break tracking: All break details, including start and stop times, captured in Deputy, providing an accessible, ongoing attestation record
• Break enforcement: Prevents early clock-in and early break return.
• Break templates: Pre-created shift templates for business in areas with strict break laws
• Break attestation: Provides records showing compliance.
• Proactive risk management: Automatically receive a timesheet that flags an employee who misses or takes a short break to proactively manage compliance risk
• Complete visibility for employees: Eligible breaks are visible by way of pre-built templates that account for geographical jurisdiction

"I didn't open my business to worry about compliance and labor laws. Deputy makes it easy to provide my employees with predictable schedules and make sure they take their appropriate breaks, all while ensuring I have appropriate coverage to run my business," said David Zelinger, co-owner of the Snack Shack.