Why You Need to Track Time Off In Lieu/Comp Time Online

Ensuring your business has a way to track Time Off In Lieu (TOIL) or Compensatory Time Off (Comp Time) is a must-have for businesses that use this, whether your staff are in the office or working remotely. Using an online HR software solution can help your managers track TOIL/Comp Time with ease.

What is TOIL/Comp time?

Time off in Lieu (TOIL) or Compensatory Time Off (Comp Time) (depending on which side of the Atlantic you’re on) is a concept adopted by businesses that compensates their employees for additional hours worked by giving it back as time off. 

TOIL or Comp Time can be really beneficial to employees who may be required to work additional hours or even days, as they are rewarded with the time back to take as holiday. Giving people this benefit can increase employee engagement and productivity by helping out with that all-important work-life-balance, which in turn has been theorised to lead to corporate growth and increased profits. 

Why TOIL/Comp Time needs to be tracked accurately

Incorrectly tracked Comp Time can have negative impacts on both employees and the business. If you do not have an audit trail of additional hours worked, you are probably unaware of whether a team is under-resourced and under-motivated. Teams or individuals may be working more hours than the regulation 48 per week (according to the EU Working Time Directive), which can have a knock-on effect across the whole business. If all the members of a team have accrued a week’s worth of TOIL, they become ineffective when they inevitably want to take those days off at the same time; when the workload eases off. Additionally, if TOIL is being regularly given out but not tracked, employees may become complacent and start taking slightly longer to complete each task, in the hope they will earn some time off by working longer than necessary. 

Additional working hours aren’t something that is ideal for today's workforce - 61% of employees already feel burned out. But if you implement a system that tracks the additional hours, you can ensure your employees are not working so hard that it negatively impacts themselves and the business. 

If you’re not accurately tracking TOIL, you may not be aware of how under-resourced your teams may be. If you do not know that the team has racked up an incredible amount of TOIL, you may be unaware that you need to think about hiring another teammate to help alleviate the stress and avoid burning your employees out.

How Appogee HR can help you track TOIL or Comp Time Online

So how do you go about tracking this additional time properly and how do you know it’s accurate? Of course, spreadsheets are always the answer when it comes to keeping note of numeric data, but this can come with its own challenges. Manually adding data into spreadsheets can encourage all kinds of human error, especially if multiple employees have access to it. On top of that, how do you manage an approval process?

Employees can submit a request to claim their TOIL or Comp time amount within the same system that manages their Annual Leave and Sickness Requests. The TOIL claim will follow a pre-configured approval flow to ensure it always goes to the relevant department heads or team managers in order to highlight the additional work that has been done. Once approved, employees can bank that time to be taken as time off, for that all-important break from work. 

Using the Appogee HR system, all TOIL requests are logged in one place and easy to report upon. You can see at a glance who has worked outside their normal hours and whether there are trends among specific employees or teams. Using this, you can accurately plan your recruitment and resourcing, ensuring you always have enough employees to get the work done. Additionally, the system calculates all Comp Time requests in hours, so it’s simple to find out whether anyone has worked more than 48 weekly hours and therefore needs compensating for that work. 

You can track TOIL or Comp Time online with Appogee HR. Try us out, completely free for 14 days.