Work life balance for travellers to Germany

[Former Member]

Hello Friends,

We have a requirement from our client. This is in combination of Time management with Travel & Expenses.

Travelers travelling from, say USA to Germany should record their working hours just to ensure they have not over worked and thus sticking the German regulations on the Work life balance.

I know this can be handled via Time management, but that will be applicable if the employee moves to Germany (like an organizational change)

However, in our case, the employee is just travelling to Germany for a brief period of time, say for a business meet or a summit.

At the moment, negative time is being used just to record the deviations and want to go ahead with the same. Payroll should not be impacted.

Do you know if standard SAP has delivered something to suffice this?

Appreciate any input.

Regards

Pranitha C

[Former Member]

HI Pranita,

first, there is no integration between SAP on-prem Travel Management and Time Management whatsoever, so don't expect any help from there.

You'd have to solve it purely in Time Management and find a way to determine there, whether a person is in Germany.

However:

who made up this funny requirement?

To begin with: the working time regulation in Germany is the EU working time directive, so, if such a rule for visitors exists in Germany, then it would be the same in all EU countries. Sure, most EU rules are ignored in countries like Spain or Italy, while followed more rigorously in Germany or Sweden (and the UK follows them even more rigorously, unless the got an exemption.), but that doesn't make things in Spain less illegal than in Sweden.

Leads me to the next point: IF such a rule exists, your organisatiin would probably be the first in the world to actually enforce it. As far as I am aware, this is relevant for people employed in the country or working there on a longer term basis.

Wich rule are they talking about?

Breaks? Just tell people to take their breaks and pay them, as if they take them.

8h days? This is 8h per weekday (=48h per week) ON AVERAGE within. 6 months period. They won't stay that long.

10h per day? exceptions are acceptable on biz trips or emergencies. Just tell yourntravellers to be sensible.

Please, please,please don't bend the system into an unrecognisable moster to perform a management task. If line managers can't keep their people alive, HR has a much bigger problem: they hire and promotenthe wrong people to become line managers.

But seriously, this sounds to me like someone on Germany with half a knowledge or a weird sense of humour is trying to pay the Americans back for something. I know my compatriots: they always think Germany is soooo special and everything is sooo right - almost as bad as Americans and I can so see the smug face of the person, who threw this requirement at you.   Trying to build sth in the system for this problem, is overreacting massively to sth that's a communication issue, not an IT issue.

good luck

Sven

[Former Member]

Hello Sven,

Thanks for your input.

The requirements always seems silly when we first hear them until we understand why they need it.

For us who set up the system and leave to the users, we don't really know how much of the tedious tasks they have to do everyday. So, if it makes their life little easy to let the system handle even a little bit, then I think we should go for it, of course considering the risks and other potential issues during upgrade etc.

And regarding the requirement from my customer, our client needs it from compliance perspective.  And when it comes to compliance we cannot really put our steps back.

Thanks for your points.

Regards

Pranitha C