Does home office have an expiry date?
You all know the feeling: the sun is shining on your desk, the news is on television and maybe the washing machine is still running in the background. For programmers, game testers, web designers and many other fields in particular, digitalization makes the ideal working environment possible: the home office.
But what does the home office have to do with the ECJ ruling? The ruling of the European Court of Justice (Europäischer Gerichtshof, EuGH) requires all employers to document their employees’ hours precisely – in other words, complete working time tracking. Because only complete records ensure that employees can defend themselves against unjustified overtime. Will it then still be possible for your employees to work from home? Or is the popular home office dying?
Is the time clock coming back?
These days only very few people can imagine driving to work every morning, having their card stamped and repeating the same procedure at the end of shift. Many employees fear that this could become part of their day-to-day work again. The Süddeutsche Zeitung even runs the headline: ”The time clock is the opposite of freedom, trust and responsibility.”
Take the home office as an example. In this form of work, employees organise the working hours they owe under their contract on their own responsibility from home. In practice that means flexible work without long commutes, but also without complete time tracking. Work is done on the basis of trust, without fixed hours and clearly regulated attendance requirements.
For commuters and for employees with families or relatives in need of care in particular, the home office creates attractive working conditions, because it lets them combine private life and working life easily. It also keeps employees with the company who would otherwise have handed in their notice or had to cut their hours long ago. Flexible working hours ultimately make an employer more attractive and help with recruiting. Of course this is not possible in every industry.
In some industries, fixed working hours can make unproductivity at the workplace an issue again. Precisely because employees can no longer decide flexibly when to start work, the risk is very high that they sit out their time instead of working productively. This is shown again and again by studies on productivity gains.
The new EU rules – a step forward!
In the current debate about the ECJ ruling, people keep arguing about whether it is a step forward or a step backwards. Freedom and self-determination are set against time tracking systems.
The current debate is completely unfounded, however, and is running off in entirely the wrong direction, because the ECJ does not require a time clock. It only requires complete working time tracking – how you record it is up to you. Freedom and self-determination and complete working time tracking are not mutually exclusive!
Looked at more closely, working time tracking and flexible work are not a contradiction. Quite the opposite! With the right time tracking, your employees can carry on working flexibly: whenever they want and wherever they want! At the same time, no more hours fall through the cracks and no additional effort arises for anyone involved.
The solution is: digital time tracking.
With this kind of time tracking you, as a business owner, would still have the option of recording your employees’ working hours, just as before. And all of that without any extra effort! It is therefore not a step backwards but a step forward. Because modern working time models stay in place, employees can carry on working from home, and at the same time no more hours fall through the cracks. You can find out how that works right now!
ECJ-compliant with one click!
With clockin, flexible work is made easy. Your employees need not worry that they now have to turn up at the company every day in order to sign in for work. Your employees download the clockin app onto their smartphone or tablet and sign in easily with a few clicks, and working time tracking starts straight away. At the same time the hours are available to you directly in the office. All of it without any extra effort! With clear charts, tables and reports you keep an eye on your employees and their working hours if you want to – but thanks to automated processes you can also do without.
The size of your business and your industry make no difference here. clockin adapts flexibly to every company and makes a completely new experience of office management possible! Discover all features of clockin now!
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