Thursday, March 28, 2024

Roster tool to help planning

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In the next six months DairyNZ will provide a software tool to help farmers develop a roster and easily plan staff hours.
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It will be an educational resource to help farmers build a suitable roster, while keeping within employment regulations.

The roster-builder tool will alert farmers if they are breaching minimum wage payments by calculating the number of hours staff are rostered on for, DairyNZ people and business product manager Cam Camilleri says.

The software had been under development for the past 12 months and was currently being tested onfarm, with the goal to have it ready for all farmers by the end of the year.

Rosters could be time-consuming and complex, with a range of options available to farmers, Camilleri said.

“There was a need for something to help farmers put together rosters. A good roster is a pivotal point to having a quality working environment.”

DairyNZ consulted with farmers about what they required from a roster tool. No farm set-up seemed to be the same and the end result had to work for the most complex farming system, he said.

The set-up process started by entering how many dairies there were in the business, because the roster-builder had the ability to roster staff who worked across multiple farms.

Farmers would then enter how many staff they employed, including how many hours each person worked. That gave farmers the opportunity to include part-time or casual staff through the season, as well as full-time employees.

Farmers could then set out shifts in the roster to create what a normal day would look like, by splitting tasks from milking to feeding out to calving.

“Hopefully it will allow you to play with different scenarios and what the cost would be to your business.”

At the moment, minimum wage was the hot topic and DairyNZ was concentrating on helping farmers meet those requirements.

The roster-builder alerted farmers if any staff members were about to work excess hours and be paid less than the minimum wage.

“Farmers can then make the decision to change a person’s shift or top-up their wages. It’s about facilitating those conversations so farmers have the information to make the right decisions.”

The tool was there to inform and encourage best practice, not to police farmers, however, he said.

If farm owners were still working 70-hour weeks themselves, the roster would alert them they were working excess hours, but it wouldn’t stop them putting those hours into the roster.

For more information on rosters visit www.dairynz.co.nz/people

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