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Flexitime - in depth#

A more detailed explanation on how Flexitime works

Note

đź‘Ť A Tooling Rule of Thumb

  • BambooHR is for approvals
  • Jira is for tracking
  • Google Calendar is for planning and visibility

Flexitime basics#

Using Flexitime is simple

  • One day you might work an extra 30mins over your daily required hours, then next day you might work 30mins less - it balances out
  • One week you work 2hrs extra, and then the next week you might go to the dentist - it balances out
  • Over a month you might work 5hrs more, and not have had the opportunity to balance it out - this appears in the Flexitime sheet, which can then be used as Reclaimed Hours

Reclaimed hours and BambooHR#

  • Your flexitime balance is not loaded into BambooHR, as this changes regularly, and not all time needs to be approved
  • If you are balancing an hour or so here and there, you don’t need to request this time off
    • You need to manage your day and week yourself, and communicate to your team if you are taking an early afternoon, or an extended lunch break
  • We do ask you to request reclaimed hours in BambooHR for longer periods of time - e.g. half a day or more
    • This potentially has a bigger impact on your availability and hence your team
    • It is a courtesy to your Lead to submit this request
    • When taking longer periods of using Reclaimed Hours, we expect team members to follow the standard OoO procedures (e.g. with blockers in your Google Calendars, Slack status etc)

Reclaimed hours and Jira#

You don’t have to log Reclaimed Hours in Jira, but you can

  • If you are taking an hour here and there, you don’t need to log any time - your worklogs will just show a slightly shorter day
  • If you take a half or full day - and have requested it in BambooHR - it is recommended that you log the time to the Reclaimed Hours ticket - IOO-21 - Getting issue details... STATUS
    • This is so that weeks later, when you or your lead look back at your timelogs, you can easily understand why there is a big gap in your logged hours

The Flexitime Sheet#

An explanation on how it works

  • We export the data from Jira into a spreadsheet every Tuesday morning
  • It picks up the logged hours from the start of the current quarter until the past Sunday evening, to calculate up to the last full week
    • Each time we export the data, we update all timelogs for the period - so if you miss a few days and go back to add your hours, these are then pulled into the sheet
  • The sheet looks at the hours you logged vs the hours expected of you for each whole week
    • It shows your overall weekly balance, not daily
    • If you logged nothing for an entire week, you will get all the expected hours reflected negatively in the calculations (i.e. a standard 40hr week would reflect -40hrs)
    • If you log hours on only one day, the rest of the week still shows a negative value (i.e. you log 8hrs to Monday, and nothing the rest of the week, your balance would be -32hrs)
  • The hours for each week - both positive and negative - are tallied up and your flexitime balance is then shown
  • At the end of each quarter, we will look at the month-end balances and carry these over to the next quarter as a starting balance
    • (We run one sheet per quarter, else we will break Google Sheets!)

Expected working hours#

The sheet is set up with the expected hours for each person in each week, taking into account:

  • Standard weekly working hours - 40hrs for most locations
    • 38.5hrs in Austria
    • 38hrs in Australia
  • Public holidays
  • A lower workload - e.g. 80%
  • Public holidays in conjunction with lower workloads
    • e.g. You work 80% and a standard week for you is therefore 32hrs.
    • If you have agreed that Fridays are your day off and a public holiday falls on a Friday, you still have 32hrs that week
    • If you have agreed that you will spread the 80% and work 6.4hrs every day and a public holiday falls on a Friday, you have 25.6hrs that week
  • Your workload changes through a quarter
  • Jira does not take workload change history into account
  • So if you go from 100% down to 80% workload, Jira puts you at 80% for all time, so your historical weeks will show you to have worked over hours
    • This is one of the reasons that we do the flexitime tracking outside of Jira
  • So if your workload changes, we will update the expected hours in our sheet, but you will need to ignore the past months of timelogs and focus on the current week and current workload

Info

If you have any questions about how Flexitime tracking works, please reach out to #team-bizops-help