Since our company employs fewer than 300 workers, the 52-hour workweek system will take effect from January 2020. Most of our employees are engineers, and perform their duties outside the workplace; therefore, I don’t know how to verify their working hours or how to implement the new workweek system when it is introduced. How can we manage the working hours of engineer employees?
For companies with fewer than 300 employees, the 52-hour workweek system will indeed come into effect in January 2020 as you note. Accordingly, most companies are thinking of introducing flexible working hours according to the duty or working hours.
For your company, you can consider introducing the “Recognized Working Hour System.” This is a system that is deemed to reflect contractual working hours if it is unreasonably difficult to calculate the working hours provided by the employee who is performing all or part of the work outside the workplace, including due to business trips.
There are two main conditions that must be met in order to introduce the Recognized Working Hour System. Firstly, employees carry out all or part of their duties outside the workplace. Secondly, it is unreasonably difficult or impossible to calculate actual working hours. In the second condition, the work start and finish times outside the workplace are determined by the worker; additionally, the number of working hours are determined at the worker's discretion or working conditions.
If these requirements are met, this system of working hours can be introduced. There are three types of working hours that can be considered. The first type is where the contractual working hours between the workers and employer within the range of standard working hours are considered to have been worked. Even if the actual working hours on any given day are shorter or longer than the fixed working hours, the company only has to pay wages for the fixed working hours. The second type is when it is necessary to work beyond the specified working hours in order to perform the task, the time normally required to perform the task is recognized as the standard. However, there is a great possibility of conflict over “normally necessary time.” In order to reduce the possibility of such conflict, the recognized working hours can be set by written agreement. The third type is putting the working hours into a written agreement. Therefore, if a written agreement is made with the worker representative, the time set in the agreement can be regarded as the time normally required to perform the work.
In your situation, you can determine the amount of time that has been worked if the work characteristics meet the requirements above. In most cases, the first type of working hours, within the given working hours, is deemed to have been "working hours." When there are frequent business trips, whether abroad or within Korea, the number of business places to be classified and the “deemed hours by written agreement” can be decided.
For example, the employee's usual workday is considered as 8 hours, but labor and management can agree that four extra hours will be granted if the employee is returning to Pohang from Seoul on a one-day business trip.