HR News: 20 Feb, 2017

1.

Get your PF money in 3 hours

EPFO is all set to embrace technology in a major way, enabling online withdrawal of PF funds and quicker settlement of claims.

It used to be quite a task to settle and get money from a PF account, especially for employees in the private sector. It was so cumbersome that people would prefer to give up on the money while changing jobs or companies because every new job meant a new PF account.
Now, the Employee Provident Fund Organisation plans to make PF withdrawal an effortless exercise. It plans to go online and promises to facilitate PF withdrawal in merely three hours. All employees will need to do is link their Aadhaar eKYC with their PF account.
It’s a dream come true for employees across the country. EPFO is all set to embrace technology in a major way, which will not only enable online withdrawal of PF funds but also bring down the time required to settle claims. The organisation is in the process of integrating its complete IT infrastructure, connecting all the 123 field offices spread across the nation with one central server, for instant verification of the claim and for allocation of the funds to the respective bank accounts within three hours. It is learnt that already 50 of these field offices have been connected with the central server.

2.

Ex-Uber employee opens up on how HR ignored her sexual harassment complaints

Former employee, Susan Fowler, wrote a blog accusing HR at Uber of mishandling her situation.

All eyes are on Uber Technologies Inc. now as it has been accused by one former employee of ignoring her sexual harassment complaints. CEO, Travis Kalanick, has launched an ‘urgent’ investigation into allegations of a toxic workplace culture, after former employee, Susan Fowler, wrote a blog post outlining how HR at Uber mishandled her situation.
In her blog, Fowler made allegations of sexual harassment and discrimination at Uber, claiming that management repeatedly ignored her complaints, protected a repeat offender and threatened to dismiss her for raising concerns. This may also be clearly seen as another reason why there are less women in Silicon Valley’s technical ranks.
“On my first official day rotating on the team, my new manager sent me a string of messages over company chat. It was clear that he was trying to get me to have sex with him, and it was so clearly out of line that I immediately took screenshots of these chat messages and reported him to HR,” she mentioned in her blog.
In response to her complaint, “I was told by both HR and upper management that even though this was clearly sexual harassment and he was propositioning me, it was this man's first offense, and that they wouldn't feel comfortable giving him anything other than a warning and a stern talking-to,” she stated.
In addition, she was told by the upper management that he "was a high performer" (i.e. had stellar performance reviews from his superiors) and they wouldn't be at east punishing him for what was probably just an innocent mistake on his part.
She was also told by the HR that she could either move to another team or if she decides to stay, she would have to understand that it could affect her performance ratings. “One HR rep even explicitly told me that it wouldn't be retaliation if I received a negative review later because I had been ‘given an option’,” she says.
So, as the only feasible option, she moved to another team and to her surprise, discovered that there were other women, who had similar experiences in the past and even their complaints went unheeded. Also, to her surprise, some of the women shared stories about reporting the exact same manager, which meant that the HR was lying about that being his first ‘mistake’.
 “When I joined Uber, the organisation comprised over 25 per cent women. By the time I was trying to transfer to another engineering organisation, this number had dropped down to less than six per cent,” Fowler wrote.
“When I asked our director at an organisation all-hands about what was being done about the dwindling number of women in the organisation, his reply was, in a nutshell, that the women of Uber just needed to step up and be better engineers.”
Kalanick replied to the blog post by saying “what she describes is abhorrent and against everything Uber stands for and believes in. It’s the first time this has come to my attention so I have instructed Liane Hornsey, our new chief human resources officer, to conduct an urgent investigation into these allegations.”
“We seek to make Uber a just workplace and there can be absolutely no place for this kind of behaviour— anyone who behaves this way or thinks this is OK will be fired,” he said.

3.

How to frame a remote work policy?

Outside of Europe, there are no international-level agreements specifically focussed on teleworking or working from home.

Despite the rising trend of working anytime, anywhere, apart from The European Framework Agreement on Telework, there is no other legal instrument with an exclusive focus on telework or ICT (information and communications technology)-mobile work on international labour standards.
A new report by Eurofound and the International Labour Office (2017), ‘Working anytime, anywhere: The effects on the world of work’ states that outside of Europe, there are no international-level agreements specifically focussed on any of the T/ICTM (Telework/ICT-mobile work) arrangements.
With increasing use of digital technologies, such as smartphones, tablets, laptops and other gadgets for work at home and elsewhere, the remote-working trend has been on the rise. However, the policies for encouraging remote work exist only at the local level — national governments, national and sectoral social dialogue—and at the company or workplace level. Surprisingly, the topic has hardly been addressed at an international level, the report suggests.
Since most existing initiatives are related to formal, home-based telework, problems seem to be more recurrent with informal, occasional T/ICTM work. Having said that, since there isn’t a universal norm on how organisations and workers can collaborate best for efficient teleworking or remote-working, it is important to note a few things before designing a policy around the same. Taking cues from the report, here are a few things that policymakers should consider/implement:

1. Aim to accentuate the positive effects of working remotely and reduce the negative ones— for example, by promoting part-time teleworking or ICT-mobile working, while restricting informal, supplemental T/ICTM, or highmobile T/ICTM involving long extra working hours.
2. Address the issue of supplemental T/ICTM, which could be viewed as unpaid overtime, and ensure that minimum rest periods are respected. For instance, the EU Working Time Directive provides for minimum periods of consecutive hours of daily rest (11 hours) and weekly rest (35 hours).
3. Fully harness the potential of T/ICTM and improve the working conditions of the employees involved. Training and awareness initiatives are needed for both employees and managers on the effective use of ICT for working remotely, as well as the potential risks, and how to effectively manage the flexibility provided by this arrangement.
4. Promote inclusive labour markets and societies, as remote working opportunities benefit certain specific labour markets, and teleworking or ICTM can play a significant part in policies that facilitate this. Examples of some countries in the report indicate that it increases the labour market participation of certain groups, such as older workers, young women with children and people with disabilities.
5. Pay attention to governmental initiatives and national or sectoral collective agreements, as these are important for providing the overall framework for a T/ICTM strategy. This framework should be able to provide sufficient space for developing specific arrangements that serve the needs and preferences of both workers and employers.
6. Adopt some foresightedness with regard to new and emerging risks in occupational safety and health associated with ICT and work location by 2025. This will help policymakers address these challenges.
7. Last but not the least, as organisations find it quite challenging to apply OSH (Occupational safety and health) prevention principles and health and safety legislation to T/ICTM is the difficulty in supervising working environments outside the employer’s premises, for which a project by the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA).

As telework becomes more prominent, so too has the need to disconnect in order to separate paid work and personal life, with France and Germany beginning to look at arrangements at the company level, and at existing and new legislation, such as the ‘right to be disconnected’ (le droit à la déconnexion) in the most recent revision of the French Labour Code. In the future, this may result in concrete measures to make working life less pervasive, such as shutting down computer servers outside working hours in order to prevent emails during rest times and holidays, which is already happening in some companies.