The obligatory working hours register (which came into force the 12th of May) makes it vital to implement flexitime, explained Gloria Villar, Head of Mercer’s Employment Division. She was speaking at a Round Table on the new legislation. The event was held by ESADE Alumni in the ESADE Forum auditorium. “Compliance with the Act is simple but it will bring overtime to light and companies must find ways of tackling the issue”, added Enric Blanco, Sales Director of Robotics and the person chairing the Round Table.

Francesc Farnell, President of ESADE Alumni’s People and Organisational Management Club chaired the Round Table. He noted that the new Act has sparked great interest, explaining why over 200 people were attending the event. According to Spain’s latest Active Population Survey (EPA), 48% of workers do not record overtime and therefore do not get paid for it. The purpose of the Royal Decree-Act (which came into force on Sunday) is to unearth this overtime so as to encourage the hiring of more workers. As Lara Vivas, Employment Partner at Cuatrecasas [law firm] and lawyer explained, “Legislators believe that bringing hidden overtime to light will boost employment. Yet I doubt whether the new Act will bring more jobs.”

Nevertheless, Vivas agreed with Villar that the new legal requirement to record working hours is a chance to foster flexitime and “undermine Spain’s corporate culture of endless working hours”. Villar considered that “The recording of working hours will lead to corporate adoption of flexitime. That is because failure to do so would force firms to scrap overtime.”

Here, Villar noted that “flexitime not only gives flexibility as to when workers start and end work, it also provides flexibility during the week, month, and even the whole year”. “Forty working hours a week is only the average. The greater the flexibility, the more companies can justify longer working hours at busy times”, she added. Blanco stressed that flexibility in the workplace is one of the things sought by ‘Millennials’ and ‘Generation Z’, which now make up 35% of workers worldwide”.

Flexibility and digital disconnection

“Digital disconnection is the other side of the coin when it comes to flexibility”, argued Villar, recalling that new technologies “mean that employees no longer disconnect from their jobs”. In this respect, she noted that if we do not ensure workers ‘digitally disconnect’ from their work, “we cannot show how many hours they really work”. To support her argument, Villar cited a report by Mercer, which reveals that 65% of Spaniards say they work outside office hours, a figure that rises to 90% in the case of directors and middle-managers.

Here, Vivas noted that directors’ working hours must also be recorded under the new legislation: “It is a legal requirement that the company must meet — there is no way round it”. The lawyer at Cuatrecasas [law firm] went on to review the details of the new Act and the implications of judgements delivered on the matter and their relationship with other legislation, such as Spain’s Data Protection Act (L.O.P.D.).

Effective working hours

Vivas saw the need to record effective working hours, although she acknowledged that it would be hard to do so with the kind of register set out in the Act. “Culturally speaking, we are ill-prepared to ask workers to leave their personal mobile phones in a locker when they enter work. One has to assume that the time workers spend answering WhatsApp messages and the like is not effective work time and so it would be worthwhile recording it”.

She also saw the new system’s scope for reducing accidents at work. “If an employee works until eleven at night, the system must stop him or her starting the next day at eight in the morning”, argued Vivas.