Related Solution
HCG HR Solutions
hunel · JaDE · talenx — we propose the right HR solution for your organization.
Solve Complex HR Challenges with HCG
Talk to our experts
Insights
Ahead of the 52-hour workweek's implementation, more companies have been upgrading their existing attendance systems or introducing dedicated management solutions.
Companies with 300 or more employees applied new attendance systems starting two years ago, and workplaces with fewer than 300 employees have been refining their work and operating processes to fit the character of their business — and introducing matching systems — from late last year through this year.
Existing attendance systems mainly focused on managing exceptions outside the planned working hours, so many companies only managed things like vacation requests at most. Overtime work was authorized through requests, but actual working hours beyond the request were not precisely measured — a loose form of management. Some companies also routinized the bypass of paying actual overtime through the comprehensive wage system. The comprehensive wage system is supposed to be strictly and limitedly recognized only when working hours are difficult to measure, but cases where overtime hours could be measured and yet additional pay was not paid for hours beyond a fixed overtime allowance were not uncommon.
To support the fundamental purpose of the 52-hour workweek — shorter working hours, work-life balance, and changes in how work is done — various systems and solutions are being introduced and used. These accurately calculate working hours, decentralize attendance management away from central control toward the department level, and actively use flexible work arrangements and compensatory leave through new programs and operating processes.
Above all, accurately calculating working hours has become important to keeping working hours within 52 per week. Attendance is managed by electronically recording start and end times, excluding breaks and vacation from working hours, and adding the time for business trips and field work — when a clock-in record is not possible but actual work is being done — to calculate and confirm working hours in real time. Break times are automatically excluded; vacation and similar items are reflected through requests and approvals; business trips and field work are treated as agreed working hours (request and approval); and when work goes beyond the standard hours, the supervisor's approval is required for the time to be recognized.
Generally, dedicated attendance management solutions are widely used. Because they need immediacy, mobile usage is far more convenient. This is even more true for sales staff or production workers who have difficulty using a PC.
Some companies also use access-control devices to record clock-ins and clock-outs. In this case, requests in the groupware and the planned work records have to be compared and judged, which can increase the attendance manager's workload — but if there is little overtime and most employees work at fixed times and locations, it is not a serious issue.
Forcibly limiting PC use through PC-OFF solutions is also possible. But if you only manage PC-OFF — without PC ON-OFF management — only the time the PC turns off is fixed, and there is no limit on when it turns on. This can create awkward situations where people come in at dawn or take their laptops to a PC bang or café to work after the PC has shut down. Even so, from the company's and the practitioner's standpoint, it is a clear and easy way to cut things off.
The biggest difference under the 52-hour workweek is that authority over attendance has come down to the department level.
Field attendance management used to happen only at the level of production line foremen, while existing attendance and HR managers ran central control over the entire company's work records. But to verify that hours stay within 52 a week, the department head has no choice but to manage the actual workload and work patterns of the department's members. The introduction of flexible work arrangements means that individual employees can adjust their hours, so closer-range management is needed. Pre- and post-approval of overtime and judgment on compensatory leave have also emerged as important roles for the department head.
Department heads are given the ability to see and manage their members' planned and actual clock-in/out records, approval of overtime, and warning signals about working hours. Many feel considerable stress about workload that seems to have suddenly grown, and about the company's policy of reflecting attendance management in evaluations. But you can also hear cheerful concern in the conversations about the increased dialogue with members that had been neglected, the encouragement to take vacation that had not been given for various reasons, and the search for solutions.
The selective working-hours system allows employees themselves to decide their working hours within an average of 40 hours of base work per week and an average of 12 hours of overtime per week, over a settlement period (within one month). It can be split into partial selective work — which has core hours — and fully selective work, which has no core hours and is even freer. Many companies opt for partial selective work because of inter-departmental collaboration.
Companies that had recorded clock-in/out through access-control systems often consider PC- or mobile-based clock-in/out for more accurate time management when adopting selective work. And even within clock-in/out hours, time when employees are not actually working is treated as "non-work time" — personal tea time, going to the bank or hospital, and so on — and can be recorded, enabling more flexible work and more accurate logs of actual work time.
Under such systems, attendance violators who fail to meet mandatory working hours can also emerge. Operational finesse is needed for the new system to take root: the team's attendance information should be shared so that members can build mutual trust and check on each other, and the department head's management ability to encourage members is also needed.
This system allows working more than 40 hours per week within a unit period (within 2 weeks or within 3 months), as long as another week is below 40 hours so that the average comes out to 40 hours.
Even when working beyond 40 hours, a particular week cannot exceed 48 hours under a 2-week adjustable system or 52 hours under a 3-month adjustable system. On top of this, with 12 hours of overtime per week added, you can work up to 64 hours per week within a 3-month period. Of course, in this case, additional overtime pay has to be paid for the 12 hours that exceed the planned base work of 52 hours.
While this is a very flexible work pattern, the 3-month adjustable system requires daily working hours to be set in advance and to be agreed in writing with the workers' representative. So unless your industry can plan working hours in advance, it is actually not easy to operate. Reaching written agreement every time a work schedule changes is not realistically simple.
Manufacturing — where there are large seasonal swings in working hours — is the most natural fit for adjustable work. But order-driven manufacturing finds it hard to adopt because pre-planning working hours is difficult. That said, it is useful for cases in manufacturing where lines cannot be left empty and weekly hours exceed 52 due to substitute work.
As mentioned, this is not a widely used system, but in the system, the daily base working hours can change, and overtime hours can also be included — so you cannot just plan clock-in/out times. Base work and overtime have to be planned separately.
If overtime has been worked, overtime pay must of course be paid — but for companies, the rise in labor costs compared with before the 52-hour workweek is a real challenge to face.
To address this, similar but distinct programs like compensatory leave, holiday substitution, and substitute holidays are being introduced and operated. Compensatory leave is the practice of granting leave instead of paying overtime, night, and holiday pay. Holiday substitution is the practice of having an employee work on a day designated as a holiday — with prior notification or consent — and granting them another day off as a holiday. The original holiday no longer carries holiday work pay, but if the substituted holiday is worked, holiday work pay must be paid.
For compensatory leave, many companies settle and accumulate it monthly and let it be used like annual leave — deducting from it during a specific period (such as 3 months). The fixed overtime hours under a comprehensive wage system have to be excluded from overtime (including night and holiday work) when calculating, and it is good to operate a system where requests can be made by the hour.
Also, when annual leave is being used, if compensatory leave is left over, forcing it to be used first can mean that almost no overtime pay arises. Some companies also set the maximum (within the year) period over which compensatory leave can be used, with the goal of fully using it up.
Since the 52-hour workweek began two years ago, we have received many large and small inquiries about attendance management and solutions, and have met with many companies. Some companies had been faithfully managing the 52-hour workweek for a long time with attendance systems that fit their operations and their own systems, while others — surprisingly — had a lot of room to refine and improve their programs and operations.
Now that this year the system is being expanded to workplaces with 50 or more employees and a one-year guidance period has been granted, it is time to prepare ways to use this for our own organization — grounded in essence and reality, not as a system for the system's sake.
Identify the work patterns that fit your company, and define the detailed requirements for management. Set the appropriate management scope, prepare and share processes that can run flexibly. If we have to reduce working hours, change how we work, lift work productivity, and improve work-life balance, then we need an attendance management solution that fits us.
However, no matter how good a solution is, the employees who have to apply, learn, and use it — and the practitioners who have to train and support them — inevitably feel fatigue. And if you become so fixated on "doing it right the first time" that you over-leverage the solution, it can actually create inconvenience for both users and managers and end up as homework left undone.
Technology and solutions should be used for our convenience.