What should you do to be in compliance with the new overtime pay rules? Leading HR experts inside and outside the industry offer their best strategies.

1. Analyze Your FLSA Exemptions: Look at all your job categories and make sure you have the correct designation for each job, advises Melissa Rearick, senior manager of HR shared services, total rewards and talent acquisition at PCNA (asi/78897).

2. Determine Salaries: Once you confirm the jobs are classified correctly, Rearick says, you can elect to adjust the salaries for exempt employees to keep them exempt or you can elect to move them to nonexempt status and follow overtime payment rules.

3. Periodically Review Compensation: “We continually adjust our salaries and benefit packages to make sure we keep our quality staff and can add quality staff,” says Rob Dubow, CEO of Dubow Textile (asi/700107).

4. Pay Attention to Federal Salary Levels: Don’t forget about applicable state and local wages and hour laws, as some states like New York and California have higher salary thresholds, advises Kathleen McLeod Caminiti, partner in the New York and New Jersey offices of Fisher Phillips, a labor and employment legal firm.

5. Put HR on the Task: Have HR personnel dedicated to staying on top of regulatory changes. HALO Branded Solutions’ (asi/356000) HR and legal team constantly monitor the state, local and national landscape to ensure they’re not only compliant in adhering to the rules and regulations when passed, but as proactive as possible, says Sean Radford, EVP, Chief Human Resources Officer for the Top 40 distributor. Dubow Textile has a full-time and part-time HR team to handle compliance. “It isn’t a job that’s passed down to the person who draws the short straw,” says Dubow.

6. Keep the Lines of Communication Open: “Communication, both with impacted individuals and the organization, is key to the success of implementing any rule or policy change,” says HALO’s Radford.