Analysis: Work it all out for yourself

WORK pressures caused by year 2000 and the euro mean that IT managers may have underestimated the impact of the European Commission?s employment directive on working time, writes Colin Barker.

Pressure of business is not the only culprit. The UK government has been slow to spell out legislation in this area while other countries, such as Ireland, have already applied the law.

Officially, the legislation outlined in July by Peter Mandelson, the Secretary of State at the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), came into force in England last week, even though it will not be fully implemented for another two years. But human resources (HR) departments need to start dealing with this now, since the legislation will have a major impact on IT in two quite separate ways.

First, and most obvious, many IT departments will, as of last Thursday, be technically in breach of the law because many software developers, systems analysts and project managers work more than the officially-sanctioned 48 hours per week.

It could be, however, that many people in these groups will fall outside the terms of the legislation.

The outline proposals from the DTI contains a catch-all list of workers who will be excluded ? ?workers whose work time is not measured or pre-determined? or can be determined by themselves.

This means that anyone who decides their own hours of work is excluded. This will include managing executives and teleworkers. But if a project manager may be a managing executive and be excluded from the regulations, does a group leader fall into the same category?

One HR director, who asked to remain anonymous, said: ?One of the problems of this law is that a lot of it is still uncertain ? we just don?t know what applies.?

While the stress caused by long hours is acknowledged to be a growing problem in the IT sector, many doubt that the working time directive will do much to help.

Earlier this year, the HR professionals? body, the Institute of Personnel and Development, argued in a written submission to the DTI that ?there is no doubt that work intensity and long hours are currently real issues in the UK. However, there seems little evidence that the directive will do anything substantial to deal with the issue.?

Whatever the real impact on working hours, IT managers will almost certainly need to create new systems to accommodate the legislation.

?The key is record keeping,? said Terry Byrne, IT manager at Irish reseller Grapevine. His company is one of the first to develop software to deal with the legislation.

Grapevine?s Regulator32 is based on Cachi?s object database. At its heart lies a system that takes time-keeping information and links it to relevant HR packages.

?There has to be an accurate record of hours worked by employees covered by the scheme and this data has to be modelled,? said Byrne.

This is not a problem for companies that have employees who clock in or operate flexi-time schemes. But for other companies, data entry may be a real problem.

?Every company will have to have a clock system or a security system that records when employees come into a building and when they leave it. Otherwise this information will have to be processed manually,? said a major company?s HR director, who asked to remain anonymous. ?In our case we are bringing in a security system that will log the hours that people are actually in the building.?

?We are looking at links to security systems and clocks. But the idea is to get the information into a system as quickly as possible,? said Byrne.

He points out that it is not just a matter of recording hours worked. ?You need to see the exceptions and you need to model the data to make sure you are in line with the law,? he says.

All of which adds up to a lot of work for most IT departments. The irony is that a new project such as this is perhaps the last thing an over-worked IT department needs right now.