Flexitime vs Overtime#

The difference between them and how they work

Flexitime - the ability to make sure that personal life can happen within one’s work life, and vice versa.
Overtime - the hours above your weekly working hours, which are subject to compensation.

Everyone is eligible to work under the Flexitime model, which requires diligent time tracking. The purpose of tracking this is to help employees maintain a fair work/life balance, and for us as the company to proactively assist where overload may occur. It can also help to prioritize one’s time in the day.

Accumulated Flexitime hours will only be paid out to those where Overtime compensation is required.
Any overtime payment would only be upon leaving the company, if the hours have not been able to be used up in advance, with exceptions.
Overtime compensation is given back as TOIL 1:1, and in the case of payment upon termination there may be some wage supplements.
All Overtime is considered voluntary, unless specified in writing and agreed by manager in advance.

Switzerland has an additional layer on this, where the additional hours between 40-45 in a week are considered voluntary Flexitime, and over 45hrs is considered Overtime. These Overtime hours should be pre-approved by a manager, and used within 14 weeks.

Overtime compensation	Countries
Required (exemptions made for executive management)	Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Australia New Zealand, Italy
Not required (employees are exempt due to salary status, seniority or contract)	United States, South Africa, United Kingdom, The Netherlands

Your Flexitime (and thus Overtime) hours should not accumulate excessively - a person requires a certain amount of rest and down time, and as an employer we have the duty of care to ensure that this rest time is allowed. BizOps will keep an eye on time tracked and raise flags on excessive hours across weeks.

The flexitime tracking sheet is run every Tuesday by BizOps. All data is overridden each week, so time logs can be backdated within each quarter. Data will be run one week into a new quarter, unless additionally requested.

The idea is that your flexitime balance should remain within a healthy range close to zero. Accumulated hours (both positive and negative) are rolled into the next quarter’s tracking sheet one week into the new quarter, and a flag is raised on excessive accumulation.

Using Flexitime and Overtime

The balance is tracked in a sheet and made visible in a sheet available to each Workstream
Hours are not loaded into BambooHR as not all reclaimed time needs to be requested
- Some weeks you might just work 1 hour less, and the next an hour more
If you are planning on using 4hrs+ of reclaimed time then we do ask that you request this in BambooHR to be signed off
- This is a courtesy to your Lead and your Team
- In this case, follow the standard OoO procedure with blockers in your Google Calendars, Jira planning, Slack status etc
Use Jira ticket: IOO-21 - Getting issue details... STATUS
- Plan the time on Jira in advance, and log the time on your return

Note

It is not required to log your Reclaimed Hours in Jira - as this essentially duplicates hours already worked. These hours are therefore ignored in the time tracking sheets, and is the reason we do these calculations outside of Jira.