HR Payroll Issue Resolution Summary

Freeset works with communities coming out of desperate poverty. As a result, getting our wages paid consistently, on-time and accurately is of huge importance to us. We want to make sure we honor our commitment to our staff. Also, when we do mess us, we have to resolve it fast because the impact to our women is immediate and considerable. Below, we have noted some resolved issues and some open issues pertaining to wages and payroll at Freeset.

1) Development of productivity based overtime

• We have developed our overtime policy for all units, maintaining the standard Indian Labour Act and policies of the Govt. of India.
• An HR survey revealed that our employees are satisfied with the new overtime policy.

2)  Systematic payroll for financial year 2019 – 2020

• After our new head of HR joined the company, we introduced a Human Resources Management System (HRMS) along with fingerprint bio-metric devices for all employees.
• This new HRMS provides error-free tracking of leave and attendance.
• In January 2018 we added two qualified employees to our Human Resources team for flexibility and transparency in building our systematic payroll management software. Also, our accounts team took on the role of payroll management, greatly reducing errors, which typically take 3-5 days to resolve.
• Our HR department are taking extra care in recording all details (date, reason etc.,) regarding any salary issues.

3) Delays in formal assessments and pay increases for middle-management

• Freeset had struggled systemically with ensuring pay increments were executed on-time, due to lack of a consistent wage cycle. Since introduction of the HRMS and overtime policy, we have improved on the arrears paying part.
• This issue impacted about 10% of our staff, who had increments due outside of April (when we do reviews and wage changes for the majority of staff).
• Starting in 2017, we instituted partial increments to all off-cycle staff to bring their assessment cycle to April, in line with the broader company.
• HR policy is now for all staff to be on an April assessment cycle.

4) Errors in staff records on government registry & policies

• Our new Head of HR discovered significant errors in records and government registrations for roughly 85% of our staff.
• Rectifying these records is well under way, with approximately 75% of cases now correct. The remaining cases are on track to be rectified within the 2019-20 financial year.
• In particular, we are in the process of correcting our Provident Fund KYC records (basic employee identification documents) with the West Bengal Provident Fund Commission.
• As per the Indian Government Factory Act 1947 we have formed an Anti-Harassment policy which is monitored by a committee. The committee members include an external professional law consultant, an external auditor and several members of our organization (elected by higher management).
• We have migrated the business’s Excel-based record keeping to a dedicated HRMS platform.