How are you handling rest days in time and attendance - France

Hi everyone,

We are currently implementing HiBob’s Time & Attendance and Time Off modules for our team in France, and we’ve hit a classic roadblock regarding weekend work, legal rest periods, and system limitations.

We are trying to figure out the most compliant and smooth way to handle this in Bob without creating a massive administrative burden.

The Situation & Legal Guardrails:

• Employees have a fixed Monday–Friday working pattern in Bob (reflecting a standard 35-hour week/annual day package framework).

• The CBA/Legal rule: If an employee works a Saturday, they must have a mandatory 35-hour rest period before returning (we ask them to take the following Monday off). Sunday work is generally avoided, but if it happens, it automatically disqualifies them from working Monday.

• The Compliance Requirement: Our legal counsel stressed that the timesheet must accurately reflect the actual days worked on the weekend for compliance tracking.

The HiBob Limitations We’ve Hit:

1. The Overtime Cycle Conflict: An employee can record hours worked on a weekend, no problem. However, because the cycle doesn't close until the end of the month, the system doesn’t allow overtime to be converted to Time Off in Lieu (TOIL) fast enough for them to officially book that immediate Monday off. 

2. The Overtime "Free Reign" Risk: If we turn on auto-balancing (overtime & undertime), employees might start tracking every miscellaneous extra 15 minutes during the week as "overtime," creating an unmanaged surplus of OT when that isn’t the point of their contract. 

3. The Missing Schedule Conflict: Because Monday is a pre-populated working day on their schedule, if they take it off to fulfill their rest period, the system flags their timesheet as being “incomplete”. Which means we would have to allow them to submit incomplete timesheets - another risk of data not being submitted accurately at the end of each month. 

The Options We Are Weighing:

• Option A (Informal): Have them not record the weekend work in the system at all, and informally take the Monday off (untracked). Cons: Defeats the purpose of accurate time-tracking and legal compliance.

• Option B (The "Rest Day" Policy): Create a specialised "Non-working day / Rest day" Time Off policy with a robust approval process.

  • Approach 1: Give it an unlimited balance; the employee requests Monday, and the manager manually checks it against weekend work to approve.

  • Approach 2: Keep the balance at 0; People Ops manually adds 1 day to their balance after verifying weekend work, then the employee requests it.

• Option C (Timesheet Overrides): We allow them to submit "incomplete" or adjusted timesheets. They would manually add the hours worked on the weekend, and then manually set their clocked hours for that Monday to 0 hours.

Our Questions for French HR Teams using Bob:

1. How do you allow employees to accurately log weekend work without throwing off your weekly/monthly overtime thresholds before the cycle closes?

2. If an employee works a Saturday and must take Monday off immediately, how do you visually reflect that "Rest Day" on Monday in Bob without using their standard Holiday/RTT balances?

3. For those using Option C, does overriding a scheduled day to 0 hours cause issues with your payroll reporting, or does it cleanly balance out the weekend hours within the same week?

4. Have you successfully used a custom Time Off policy or specific working patterns to solve this?

Would love to hear how other French companies or companies with similar CBA constraints have configured their workflows!

Thanks in advance!