New working contract type for floating days

[kevinpapst]

Customer wishes for a new contract mode, where amount of hours per week can be defined.
The working days do not matter.

The amount of hours for a full day off (e.g. vacation, sickness) should be configurable.

[EduNetEurope]

As flexible working contracts (e.g., time banks) become more common, it might be beneficial to move beyond a strict “hours per week” format and let customers define the timeframe in which a target number of work hours must be met. In our case, that timeframe is three months for some contracts, a year for others.

[kevinpapst]

I would always have to split the hours across all days, so being able to configure something like 20 hours in a year would be very complicated (to say the least).

All customers asking for such unusual contracts seem to be non-profits. I wonder why that is and if such contracts also exist in commercial companies.

Even more important: how are these contracts treated from a legal perspective?

For example the amount of vacation days, which is usually calculated from the amount of working days.
Lets's say someone has to work 300h in a year, are these 300 working days with 1 hour per day, leading to 28 days of vacation? Or are that 37,5 working days per year or 3 days x 8h per month and therefor 4 days of vacation?
What if someone gets sick?
Can there even be sick days if people are free to work whenever they want?

I have no experience with such contracts and cannot develop something if I don't understand the need correctly.

[EduNetEurope]

Hi Kevin,

there are legal frameworks in place ("Arbeitsrecht 4.0"; "Arbeitszeitkonto mit Ausgleichszeitraum", "flexible Verteilung der Arbeitszeit"). In our case, it is not the volunteers who have these contracts but the regular staff.

Team members have to work x hours in three months, but they have flexibility in how those hours are distributed. The average daily number of work hours is used when someone takes a day off or is sick. If team members have plus hours and are sick, the sick days are not recorded in their time bank or flex-time account.

I believe that these kinds of contracts will become more and more common with people wanting more and more flexibility.

[EduNetEurope]

If you’re considering implementing these more flexible schemes, you should distinguish among the following types of time off:

• Sick days
• Vacation days (a fixed amount per year)
• Compensatory / time-off / balancing days (used to offset accrued hours, typically announced in advance under flexible work contracts)