This article explains how you can add break rules to the work schedules stored in your account and how such policies impact your employees and supervisors.

What Are Break Rules?

Break rules, i.e., definitions of how long breaks should be if a person works a specified number of hours per day, can be added to any work schedule. If such a policy is defined, employees and approvers are alerted when they enter or are asked to approve insufficient or excessive breaks in their time tracking.

Break rules serve purely informative purposes and do not result in the defined times being automatically entered. Employees are therefore not prevented from entering or approving working hours with breaks that don't comply with the defined policy. 

Creating a Break Rule

Do the following steps to create break rules for an existing or new work schedule:

1. Go to Settings > Work Hours & Absences > Attendance > Working hours.
2. Select the Yes option for the question Inform about incorrect breaks?. The Add required breaks section is shown next.
3. Define when (i.e. after how many hours) employees should take a break and how long the break should be. You can store two break rules per work schedule.
4. Next, click on Save Work Schedule. The break rule is applied immediately for any hours to be approved from that time.

Please note that the working hours take into account the daily and not the weekly hours. The time tracking function only adds up the individual break times per day, but does not store mandatory breaks: If, for example, 6 working hours are recorded at once, Personio does not automatically ask your employees to take a 30-minute break.

The Impacts of Break Rules

1. Impact on Time Tracking

When employees enter breaks that are outside of the time frames defined in your policy, the following alert is displayed in their attendance calendar:

You may ignore the alert or adjust the working hours.

2. Impact on Approving Hours Worked

If an employee registers a time entry with a non-compliant break, this will be flagged on the Time Tracking Approvals page accessible through the main navigation bar.

In the Time Tracking Approvals page, click on the filters beside the Approval all button to display only the non-compliant attendance requests. The non-compliant attendance requests are those which have triggered a warning due to not being compliant with your attendance settings (example: a time entry which was registered outside the working day in the working schedule, or a time entry which doesn’t follow the break rules).

The employee responsible for approving the hours worked can then either accept the times as entered, or decline to approve the times entered for the particular day and send them back to the employee.