If your employees would like to or are required to work from home, this can be managed in the Absences area of Personio. The following are our recommended steps for reflecting remote work days in the system.

Company-wide home officing due to coronavirus? Visit our Personio Blog to learn how you can prepare your employees and which best practices exist to make remote work as effective as possible.

Setting Up home office as an Absence Type in Personio

Under Settings > Absences, use the plus button to add the absence type remote work. Then configure the settings. See the screenshot below for our recommended settings:

More details on the configuration:

• Category: With regard to calendar integration, if the absence category remote work is selected, the respective absence entries are not transferred to the personal calendar. This means employees in remote work will be displayed to their colleagues as available. They can also still be selected as substitutes for other absences.
• Requests for half days: Determine whether or not you want to allow half-day requests.
• Substitute request: A substitute is not required for remote work, as the employee is working as usual.
• Allow employees substituting for someone to request this absence: As remote work doesn't have an impact on a possible substitution during leave absences, we recommend applying this setting.
• Validity settings: Select the standard work schedule for your company.
• Consider attendance days during absence periods as overtime: Because your employees have normal working hours and do not work overtime, this setting should be deactivated.
• Enable accrual policies: If your employees have a certain number of remote work days available per year, you have the option to build and assign accruals.

Many companies currently fear that they will have to close their offices due to coronavirus and work entirely out of their remote work. We, therefore, do not recommend building accruals for the remote work absence type. This way, your employees can enter whatever time period in their Personio account they need.

Access Rights and Approval Processes

After you have configured the absence type, check the access rights of each employee role for Absences / remote work. If you would like remote work absences to be visible to the entire company, the role All employees should be assigned proposal rights at a minimum.

If, for example, a supervisor should confirm the remote work request, you should also set up an approval process under Settings > Approvals > remote work. Administrators can skip this part and enter absences directly for all employees.

Importing remote work Periods for All Employees

If in the case of a prescribed remote work period you would like to enter this absence type for all employees collectively, you can do this via a bulk import. Visit this Helpcenter article to find an import template along with detailed instructions.

Viewing remote work in the Calendars

So that your employees can see which of their colleagues are working from home, we recommend that you activate the notification in the general absence calendar. You can do this under Settings > Calendar > Absences.

To enable your employees to be able to see whether their colleagues are indeed absent or in their remote work, we recommend that you go to Settings > Employee roles > Calendar and assign global access for the absence type remote work to the All employees role.

Please do not choose the remote work absence type in the Company Calendar. Otherwise, remote work cannot be distinguished from the other absence types.

Activating Calendar Integration

To synchronize absence periods that have been entered and confirmed in the system with your company calendar, we recommend activating the calendar integration for absences. The absence category remote work is thereby an exception and not part of the integration. As employees working from home still need to be shown as being available to their colleagues, absence entries for the remote work category are not transferred to the personal calendar.