Hourly employees, though they make up a significant portion of the American workforce (61% of whom are female), often don't get the benefits they need or deserve.
Not so for these six best-practice companies, who made the selective cut in Working Mother's inaugural list of Best Companies for Hourly Workers.
For the winning companies, hourly employees really are the backbone of the organization as they averaged 87% hourly workers. Impressively, the average of minimum hours to work to be eligible for benefits was 24 hours per week.
"Companies can turn everybody into part-time workers and deny them benefits, but if you go all the way down to 24 hours a week and give benefits for that, that's a really big deal," emphasizes Carol Evans, Working Mother president.
Last June, Marriott International, which counts 84% of their employees to be hourly, announced that employees receiving health care coverage would not lose it if their hours were reduced, because they felt that a reduction in hours was not the fault of the employee, but rather of the economy.
Another featured company, CCLC, allowed employees to decide how to divide up hours. Further, they could volunteer for fewer hours or express the need for more. It is an "interesting and creative solution for fewer hours," Evans notes.
"One of the things that was highly valued and available was the opportunity to be able to know your schedule a month in advance and be able to ask for flextime a month in advance - all of those things that the managerial class takes for granted," she says.
All of the organizations that made the cut offer some type of flextime, compressed scheduling or backup care.
UNM hospitals in Albuquerque, New Mexico, has generous leave programs set up for its 5,561 workers, 92% of whom are hourly. Each year, employees can convert minor sick leave into vacation leave or into their major leave bank (for catastrophic coverage) or cash, if they have more than 24 hours in their minor sick leave bank.
According to Cindy Paulsen, UNM hospitals' benefits manager, this policy causes people to use less sick leave - on average four days of sick leave a year. "Most people try and use their leave very judiciously," says Paulsen.
In addition, they can donate vacation leave directly to other employees who are having a catastrophic event, and the employee in need can get a maximum of 480 hours donated for their serious illness event (or their family's).
They can also donate four hours of vacation leave each year to the medical crisis leave bank, where participating employees can use up to 240 hours of leave for their or their family's serious illness event.
Education and training
UNM also offers rich education and training programs - at the beginning of an employee's career with UNM, they spend a full half-day discussing their benefits.
Training continues throughout employment, and employees attend skills development, professional development, and/or management development courses conducted by in-house personnel.
There are also optional classes available for money management, understanding mortgages, retirement planning, preventing ID theft and various work-life topics offered during work hours.
The clinical advanced program is for registered nurses to increase their pay by getting a higher education, certifications, and for participating in such activities as teaching and community events. Also, there is an ESL program.
"Our future leaders are working here. If we don't take the time to develop them, how are we going to take advantage of those latent skills that they have? So it's very important that we continue to augment their skills with new skills," says Paulsen.
Offering the 'intangibles'
At CCLC, an early-learning company in Portland, Ore., leaders believe that "standard benefits like competitive salaries, vacation time and health care are certainly important to our employees. However, our employees have also shared that the 'intangible' benefits are what truly differentiates CCLC as an employer of choice," says Melinda Rogers, vice president of HR.
These "intangible" benefits include empowerment - giving employees the chance to make their own decisions about how a center is run - and customized curriculum, which gives workers the flexibility they need to run a classroom while making them feel heard and appreciated.
At University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics, a teaching hospital where 73% of the workers are hourly, "one of the core parts of our mission is scholarship, so it only makes sense to translate that to our current employees," says Janice Bultema, senior vice president of HR.
For this reason, they provide tuition reimbursement, in-house classes on team building and computer skills, as well as specific courses that focus on those with the lowest education and the lowest pay, all held on paid time. Some employees even teach courses in wellness, as one instructs her coworkers in yoga.
With turnover at 8%, clearly the hospital is doing something right. "We have great employees who really care about what they do, and the very least we can do is invest in them," says Bultema.
Supporting diversity
"In our workplace, women comprise over 50% of our total workforce and are essential to our success," says Nina Madoo, senior director of the workplace strategies, workforce effectiveness and diversity department at Marriott International, Inc.
"As an employer, it is critical that we have benefits such as child care discounts, elder care locator and discounts, lactation supports, and a supportive workplace for scheduling and flexibility needs in order to retain and engage this workforce," she adds.
Marriott also believes it's crucial to its organization and employees to offer further training and education programs, like all the other winners of Working Mother's best companies list. And like others on the Working Mother list, they have very low turnover as a result, the lowest in the lodging industry.
"In a workplace as diverse as ours, with more than 50 languages spoken around the world, the ability to communicate is essential for advancement within the workplace and communicating among colleagues and guests," Madoo says. "We introduced the Global Language Learning program as a tool to bridge this communication gap that may occur."
