Time And Attendance - The Organisation of Working Time Act is in place since 1997 and its full impact is now only becoming clear as companies wrestle with the practicalities of complying with it.
The EU directive on Working Time required member states to introduce national legislation that would reduce working time to a weekly average of 48 hours in a year. The 'Organisation of Working Time Act, 1997' has transposed the EU Directive into law in Ireland. This new law has impacted on the dependence that enterprises can have on excessive overtime working. It also reduces the maximum number of hours that employees are allowed to work.
The Organisation of Working Time Act sets out statutory rights for employees in respect of rest, maximum working time and holidays.
·A statutory limit on average weekly hours of work (48 hrs)
·A legal entitlement to paid leave
·New laws on rest breaks
·Night work and shift patterns.
The Minister for Labour Affairs, Tom Kitt, requires all employers to verify the working hours of every employee, including contract and part-time employees. The onus is on managers to ensure that employees keep within these limits.
It will no longer suffice to have vague records of the hours worked and rest periods taken by employees. Employers are required to keep records of time worked for 3 years. These must capture all hours worked by every employee, including managers, supervisors and operational staff.
One of the main ways in which employers have had to respond to the impact of the WTD was to improve their systems of record-keeping of working hours, as well as changes in working time, such as more shift and part-time working, introduced to cut down on long hours of work due to overtime. Employers have also taken steps to introduce greater variability in staff scheduling to share variations in workload more widely through the workforce as a whole.
Violationsof the Act
Violations of the Act put you at risk of being fined by the Department of Enterprise Trade and Employment and being sued by your employees. Incomplete records of employee hours worked also put an organisation at risk; employers must be able to prove that employees have not violated the Act.
Violations put companies at risk of being fined up to Euro 1900 and not to mention, an extra Euro 630/day for continuing offences. Employers may also face compensation claims of up to 2 years of an employee's salary for breaches of the act.
Time and Attendance Software
Complicated calculations and a staggering pile of paperwork is often the result of administering statutory rights under the WTD. One of the most efficient and indeed simplest ways to collect and record this information is by using a computerised Time and Attendance system where essentially the employee inputs the data into the system.
The trick is to install a piece of software that keeps track of the movements of your employees, not just one that simply tells you they are on the premises.
How can the Softworks Working Time Directive Module help an organisation to comply with the WTD?
The rules of the directive are input onto the Clockwise solution as an extra set of parameters under which an employee must work, if s/he works too many hours, the system knows that s/he has violated the rules. These violations will be highlighted to a supervisor through a series of comprehensive reports, which can be automatically emailed to the supervisor. It also automatically generates messages detailing reasons for violations of the Act (i.e. insufficient rest periods between shifts etc). ClockWise will also highlight those employees who have not violated the directive and thus are available for overtime.
Although the usual way to register that the employee is present is by means of a clocking terminal, Softworks have developed an 'honour' based system or exception-based computerised timesheets which presumes that an employee is at work unless told otherwise, or alternatively, a PC/web terminal log-in facility. For employees that are not usually on the premises, a fully web enabled version of Clockwise will allow them to log on/clock in from anywhere in the world. The system then compares the time that the employee registered to work verses the rule that governs the employees' working hours.
This intelligent solution will also report on those employees who have not violated the directive and are thus available for overtime, and for people not familiar with the requirements of the directive, there is a knowledge base, which automatically generates reasons for infringements.
If you require any further detailed information on the Act, visit www.entemp.ie.
For further information on the Time and Attendance software, visit www.softworks-computing.com
We bought the above system in work.Hi Guys,
Just some general information that may be usefull to you readers, i have used many different systems out there and am currently using the Biometric hand clock by www.Timeworks.ie i find it very good, reliable and the price was resonable, maybe its the recession.
Most inportantly it has stop staf clocking each other in and out big plus!
Anyway
We bought the above system in work.
It was a total disaster.
It broke after one month. The company wanted €300 to send an engineer out to come and fix the machine that was only a few weeks old.
They said that we broke the machine, by being too rough with it and it was not covered under their agreement.
Was this the system that was put into Mountjoy, but then couldn't be used by all the staff?Hi Guys,
Just some general information that may be usefull to you readers, i have used many different systems out there and am currently using the Biometric hand clock by www.Timeworks.ie i find it very good, reliable and the price was resonable, maybe its the recession.
Most inportantly it has stop staf clocking each other in and out big plus!
Anyway
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