What can part-time work look like?
Part-time work can look quite different from case to case, because strictly speaking it is only an umbrella term. In principle, though, you can say this: in part-time work, employees work with a reduced workload. These four variants are possible:
- Five working days per week with reduced working hours
- Full working hours per day, but fewer working days in the week
- Reduced working hours per day and fewer working days in the week
- Block part-time: longer blocks of time off during a year, but full-time in the remaining months
As a way of adding flexibility, part-time work adapts to the needs of both the company and the employees. Employees gain more time for family or for caring for relatives. At the same time, employers can respond more easily to varying workload situations.
Part-time work and flexibility
As you can see, in some versions the part-time model is set up to be very flexible: employees who work part-time usually cannot be scheduled for eight working hours a day, five days a week. Instead they are more flexible with their hours and do not always have to work off their target hours evenly.
This working model is winning more and more supporters as part of New Work and greater flexibility in the workplace. Unfortunately, though, it also clashes a little with the obligation to record working time.
Because since September 2022, recording the working hours of all employees has been mandatory.
Some employees feel hemmed in and believe they now have to give up the flexibility they have gained.
How can absences work with part-time work?
Part-time work brings one more obstacle with it, though: working time cannot necessarily be assigned to particular weekdays. As mentioned above, this can have two origins: employees have no assigned working days, or no target hours are assigned to their working days (or both!).
In normal day-to-day work that is not a problem, but when it comes to booking and paying for absences, difficulties quickly arise: when do I need a sick note? When am I paid for a vacation day, and how many hours do I get credited then?
There are two simple but effective ways of solving this challenge:
Value model
In the value model, as in the classic 40-hour model, each working day is assigned a time value, depending on the target working hours per week. In practice that means: with a 20-hour working week, each day is assigned 4 hours of working time, even if, for example, eight hours are worked on Monday and Tuesday.
Employees therefore keep their flexibility: assigning the working hours does not have to mean that they are actually followed; it only serves absence management.
That has advantages and disadvantages: employees who want to work very flexibly and do not want to fix working days and times can carry on working in whatever way suits them best. However, it also means that on days when employees generally work more, only four hours are credited when they are absent.
In practice that means: Marie is a working student and works 20 hours a week. She would like to keep her week flexible and not fix any working days, so she is credited four hours on every weekday. Even so, she can also work six hours on two days and take another day off in return.
Marie requests vacation for a long weekend and would therefore like the Friday and Monday off. Every two weeks, though, she works six hours on Mondays, because in those weeks she can only work two hours on Tuesdays alongside university. But for her vacation she is only credited four hours per day. That means the two hours she cannot work on Tuesday have to be made up on another day.
This can also work in her favour, though: if Marie is ill on a Tuesday, for example, she is credited four hours even though she might normally only work two that day.
It is important to note: Marie needs a medical certificate for every day she is off sick, even if she might not have wanted to work that day at all.
Time model
The time method, by contrast, is meant to prevent what happened with Marie's vacation: here, specific days are set in advance as fixed working days. These days are assigned specific target hours. The advantage: when someone is absent, realistic hours can be credited. But the time method can also restrict employees' flexibility.
An example: Tim a father and therefore works 30 hours a week part-time. On Wednesdays he has to be home earlier for his children, and on Fridays his daughter does not go to daycare. Unlike Marie, he has fixed days and works eight hours each on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday and six hours on Wednesday. If he takes vacation or is ill on one of those days, he is credited those hours. That does not apply to the Friday, when he does not work. So, unlike Marie, he does not need a sick note for Fridays.
The right model for your company
The two models therefore lead to different results in different situations: if a public holiday falls on a Friday, Marie is credited four hours even though she works six, and Tim gets nothing. If the public holiday falls on a Wednesday, Tim gets six hours and Marie the four that she works.
Both models have their advantages and disadvantages. Which one works best for your employees and your company is something you should decide individually.
But take care: the Federal Labour Court (Bundesarbeitsgericht) has ruled that both methods are permitted. You do have to decide on one of the two methods, though, and apply it to your entire workforce in the interests of equal treatment!
Smoothing things over with the right time tracking
These working structures call for a flexible time tracking system. Employees have to be able to clock in at any time and sometimes even from anywhere, since they may even depend on working from home. Time tracking via chip systems does not allow that, because there you can only clock in on site in the office. Pen and paper are imprecise, error-prone and unreliable. After all, slips of paper have a habit of getting lost.
Digital time tracking, on the other hand, goes down very well here: you clock in via your phone, the browser or an iPad. Working hours, break times and rest periods are documented and stored in a cloud. That makes the system not only less error-prone and more flexible, but also real-time: as soon as the employee has clocked in (and the device is connected to the internet), their data is transferred to the admin. At the end of the month the system produces a finished timesheet from the collected data, and with the right integrations it can be passed straight on to accounting.
On top of that, the digital tool lets you manage your employees digitally. That means: for each employee you can enter in the system how many target working hours apply per day, on the different weekdays or per week. Employees keep track of the hours they have worked and the hours still open in the app. Which product are we talking about here? You will find all these features in clockin, and much more. Alongside time tracking, we improve your project work, project documentation and employee administration.
.avif)
.avif)