How to link time and attendance and teleworking?

Since 2003, the European Parliament has required companies to monitor the working time of their employees. However, surveys showed that in Spain many employers only recorded official working hours, and not overtime.

The 2019 decree of the Court of Justice of the European Union was established precisely to improve the employee's working conditions and to ensure optimal time control on the part of companies. What does this decree change? The law now obliges employers to record the working hours of their employees by means of a recording system. A law that should also apply to teleworking.

Teleworking was certainly not very common before COVID-19 entered our lives, but the pandemic left us no choice but to adapt and adopt teleworking. Today, employees are not only teleworking a few days a week, but sometimes spend weeks at a time working from home.

So how do you implement remote timekeeping? Here are some tips on how to adapt your methods to teleworking.

1. Review telecommuting times

Encourage flexible working hours

The telecommuting law mentions the possibility for the employee to adapt his or her working hours at home, only if at the end of the day he or she logs the same number of hours as required by the employer.

Why flexible working hours? Your employee does not have the same rhythm of life when he/she is at home and can be disturbed by external factors, such as walking the dog, preparing lunch for the whole family, etc. In order for them to stay focused during their working time, we recommend that you give them the possibility to adjust their schedules to ensure their effectiveness. In addition, giving autonomy is the best way to give responsibility to the people you supervise.

Respecting the right to digital disconnection

If employees have to respect their working hours, the employer in turn has to respect their working time. From a distance, as we have access to our digital tools all the time, it becomes more difficult to disconnect outside working hours. Especially when employees have different working hours and do not respect each other's right to rest.

Respecting the right to digital disconnection, as stipulated by the telework law, is essential for health and for maintaining workers' professional and personal balance. To this end, we recommend

• Raise your employees' awareness of the psychosocial risks related to hyperconnection.
• Invite them to turn off notifications (instant messaging, emails, etc.) and create automatic responses outside working hours.
• Remind everyone that employees cannot be contacted outside working hours.
• Fundamental: monitor the schedules of all your employees and share them with managers so that they know how their teams are organised remotely.

2. Choose tools suitable for teleworking to control schedules

Methods based on self-reporting

At a distance, the people you supervise work in autonomy. So, we recommend that they record their working hours themselves. Providing the opportunity to work from home also means trust, and trust is the key to the success of your teams and your company. In the end, your role will only be to check the data and that will save you a lot of time.

How to comply with the 2019 decree in the context of teleworking? Here are two solutions based on self-declaration:

1. The spreadsheet: ask your employees to fill in a shared spreadsheet with their schedules, mentioning the time of their breaks. The downside of this method is that it is manual, the margin of error is larger than with an automated system and there is a risk in case of a labour inspection.
2. Time management software: this is the method most compatible with teleworking. Schedules are already entered and if for some reason an employee has to adjust them, you will be notified automatically. Also, managers can have access to the time sheets of all their team members.

The advantages of time management software

In addition to complying with the requirements of the law, a timekeeping software allows you to automate the entire process. The time savings are huge, for these reasons:

• There is no need to check employees to make sure they have declared their hours; the system alerts those who have not done so.
• If employees do not make any unusual changes, the timesheets are automatically validated without having to check.
• A good programme offers the possibility to export overtime and other variable items to appear on the payroll.
• In case of inspection, the records are simply downloaded for submission and archived for 4 years as required by law.

The employee also benefits from using timekeeping software. He can easily flexibilise his teleworking hours and inform his manager, who can then respect his right to digital disconnection.

For employees who are assigned missions (such as consultants), time management software allows them to enter hours spent per task and generate activity reports.

Finally, workers who record overtime are automatically identified. It allows the manager to review their workload and take corrective action.

Outside the context of teleworking, the principle of self-reporting is in any case key to engaging your employees: it helps them to assume their responsibilities.

It also saves time for HR teams by eliminating the most tedious and time-consuming tasks without adding value. Not just for timekeeping! It is a principle that can be applied to the declaration of holidays and absences, or to the preparation of an employee's onboarding for example, by managing all tasks through a simple and collaborative programme.

Would you like to discover our solutions based on self-declaration of data and time management? Create your free trial space on our website!