So my employer has been going through some big corporate changes recently and there are many changes to work flow, expectations and now scheduling. I suspect money problems as HR has been nitpicking literally everything we do and are present in every meeting and department change we make. They're not there for employees support but seem to be running the show behind the managers, essentially puppeting them. We used to just work out the schedule amongst the department due to various personal needs and obligations and this has worked for years. The department was always covered and sure there was a short day here and there but productivity never suffered because I work with a bunch of bad asses. Recently in the last few schedules it's gotten muddied up with HR dictating to the manager what should be done and that the manager needs to get a hold on the schedule because they approved a schedule with a full day of no coverage despite being told by us in the department that we needed help getting some coverage. In these last few schedules they've also made it a first come first serve for shifts despite tenure and level of hours (FT, PT, PER DIEM), which pits us against each other to try to meet our own needs because if not you got all the left overs and weekends meaning you likely didn't have consecutive days off/on or a bunch of weekends. This has been creating some new tensions in the department that have never existed before. Skip to now. The upcoming schedule opened up for employees to put in there schedule. “Self scheduling” they call it. It's not “self scheduling' if it gets completely changed when the manager gets a hold of it and “adjusts” and by that I mean completely changed some people's week's and (minor) holidays entirely but, I digress… On this self schedule the manager completely changed all of the options for shifts to the same start time across the board but then also turned one into a night time shift. So the total number of shifts per day didn't change but the start times did. For the day shifts this was a change about an hour one way or the other. For most staff, not the biggest deal but the night shift had never existed prior to this. Essentially the schedule forced staff to sign up for evening shifts to meet their hourly requirements for the week. It feels very skeeazy to me and doesn't promote good feelings amongst our department and about our workplace. At this point I'm checked out.
I should also add that there's been no formal letter that they are trying to standardize start times and expect the existing employees to cover night sent out, only talk of hiring for the position.
My question to you all is how is this okay? Is it legal? Has anyone experienced this before?
As a side note I do not understand why HR is dictating as much as they are but this is the reality. Anyone with insight into this?