Surprising Results from BLR’s Recent Poll on the DOL’s New Overtime Regulations

BLR^®’s FLSA New Overtime Regulations Survey has just closed today, and the results are a little surprising. For example, with less than one month to go before the new overtime regulations, our survey has found that over half (53.1%) of respondents have not informed their workers about the change in overtime laws.

The result that more than half of the respondents have not informed their employees of the new change comes despite the fact that 48.9% said that the changes will have a moderate impact on their business operations and 27.6% said the changes will have a significant impact.

A full set of results will be released once our poll is written up, but we at BLR^® wanted to share with you some of the most interesting highlights from the survey now.

1. More than half of respondents (53.1%) say that they have not told their workers about the change.
2. Just under half of survey takers (48.9%) say the change will have a moderate impact on their organization, and 27.6% say that it will have a significant impact.
3. A majority of respondents (60.3%) answered that their employees have not been asking about the change—perhaps because so many have not been told.
4. Of the 35.9% of survey takers that said their employees have been asking about the change, the major concern (61.3%) was by currently exempt employees disliking the prospect of having to punch a clock.
5. 7% of employees who have been asking about the new rules say they feel like they are being demoted.
6. The majority of communications about the changes to come are reminders that these are federal regulations, not discretionary company decisions (65.9%) and that their reclassification is not a matter of their performance (61.2%).
7. Most of the respondents (64.8%) say they will reclassify affected employees as nonexempt, but limit overtime hours as a strategy. 56.0% say they will train affected employees to use timekeeping methods in order to prevent them from working unauthorized overtime.
8. One fifth of respondents are not auditing their employees to see who has been misclassified as exempt. Of those that are, 28.1% found misclassified employees.

Thanks for looking at some of these early results from our just completed survey on the new overtime regulations that will go into effect on December 1^st.

Jim Davis is the Editor of the HR Daily Advisor.