Is your company meeting the new time tracking requirements set by the European court?

On May 14, 2019, the European Court of Justice ruled that European member states “must require employers to set up an objective, reliable and accessible system enabling the duration of time worked each day by each worker to be measured.”

The ruling comes after a lawsuit by the Comisiones Obreras (CCOO), a Spanish trade union, against Deutsche Bank. CCOO requested the German bank set up a system for tracking time each day, to help ensure labor laws were being met. Deutsche Bank argued against recording time due to the fact that Spanish law didn’t require it.

Ultimately ECJ decided that, “…in the absence of a system enabling the duration of time worked each day by each worker to be measured, it is not possible to determine, objectively and reliably, either the number of hours worked and when that work was done, or the number of hours of overtime worked, which makes it excessively difficult, if not impossible in practice, for workers to ensure that their rights are complied with.”

This measure is essential to ensure the maximum weekly working time — including overtime and rest periods have been complied with. This protects both employers and workers by verifying whether those rights are complied with.

Now that employees are responsible for tracking their time, are you worried about how your team will comply? Timing is the ideal solution!

Timing helps employees track their in 2 easy ways:

  1. By tracking the time your employees spend working on their Mac, and
  2. By tracking their breaks and time away from their desk

Automatic tracking on your Mac

With Timing, the time your employees spend on their Mac is automatically tracked. To see a record of their time for the day, all employees need to do is look at their timeline — this shows exactly when they started and stopped using their Mac. This is much easier and less distracting than if you’d require your employees to start and stop timers whenever they are working.

In addition, your employees can create tasks to provide more detail what they were working on, or record breaks if they were not working.

Here are some best practices for assigning tasks to time spent on the computer:

  • At the end of your work day, press the ‘+’ button on the timeline record which project you worked on — Timing will associate that whole block of time with a project.
  • You can make this even faster by pressing the Option (⌥) key while clicking a suggestion; Timing will then immediately create a task without showing the “New Task” dialog.

This will give employees not only a record of what they worked on, but will help with project management as well — Timing will show how employees are best using their time.

Assigning breaks and time away

Let’s face it: Your employees are not working on their computer 100% of the time. They are pulled into meetings, on client calls, or simply taking a well-deserved break.

Luckily, Timing provides a solution when employees are away from their Mac. With Timing’s task suggestions, employees can account for the time they spend offline. This also ensures that employees are taking required breaks.

To assign time away from the computer, follow these steps:

  1. Click and drag on the timeline to select the time range when you were away from your Mac, or click one of the grey ‘+’ suggestion buttons. Then, enter what you were working (or not working) on. For example, “Lunch”, “Client Call”, and the like.
  2. Assign tasks to a project to subtract those breaks from the total time worked. For example, your “Lunch” tasks could be assigned to a “Breaks” project.

This is also a great solution for your employees to record times they did not work in front of their Macs — all ensuring you comply with The European Court of Justice ruling.

Exporting time reports

For easier compliance with regulations, employees can export their reports. These reports can be saved in a shared location, like a Dropbox folder, so there aren’t any surprises when it comes to the time recorded.

To create an export, employees simply click the Reports tab from the sidebar. There they’ll find plenty of default report export options. One of our favorite default reports is the Weekly Snippet  — that sends a weekly report of tasks, broken down per week.

Employees have many export options including: PDF, CSV, Excel and HTML. Read more about Reports and Exporting here.

Want to see more? Download a free trial and see for yourself!