December 2008 - Working Towards Working Time Directive Compliance

RosterWise, the latest addition to the Softworks suite of Time & Attendance / Flexitime solutions is an

advanced computerised rostering module that can help hospitals in the move towards Working Time Directive compliance.

The Working Time Directive is now a major factor to influence hospital rosters, making it necessary to ensure junior doctors work an average 48-hour working week. With more and more pressure on hospitals to put steps in place to introduce family friendly work policies, reduce working hours and ensure staff take the required minimum rest breaks to comply with the directive, RosterWise helps ensure that staff levels can be easily anticipated and that rosters and shifts are allocated correctly.

A proactive management tool, RosterWise delivers more accurate information than paper based schedules and reduces time spent preparing weekly shifts and rosters, reducing costs and overtime.

Integrated with our Time & Attendance solution, hospitals have access to one of the most powerful tools available for recording and analysing hours worked. By building a clear picture of employee time through detailed data and reports on attendance, absenteeism, overtime, flexi-balances, rostering and holiday leave, managers can easily keep track of actual hours worked compared to rostered hours. In this way, steps can be put in place to reduce overtime and ensure compliance with the WTD.

The Softworks system helps simplify some of the administrative nightmares associated with the Working Time Directive as the easy to use module stores all the parameters of the directive and is updated as new legislation comes into place. Our workforce solutions highlight actual or possible future violations in terms of the directive and its powerful knowledge base automatically generates reasons for infringements.

For Beaumont Hospital, prior to the installation of Softowrks workforce solutions, it was difficult to manage the complex shifts, pay rules and regulations of staff at the hospital. As a result, considerable time was spent calculating payable hours and errors often occurred. Our workforce solutoins, in conjunction with management policy, has introduced an accurate means of calculating payable hours and has significantly reduced administration and paperwork for the hospital.

Many organisations in Ireland have installed the Softworks systemin order to ensure compliance with the Directive. In fact, for Heineken Ireland the WTD was the single primary motivator for introducing an automated Time & Attendance / Flexitime system