Time tracking when working from home: what must you record?

In many Belgian companies, working from home has become a fixed arrangement: two days at the office, three days at home, or a team that works fully remotely. The question that keeps coming back is: do I have to record the hours of my homeworkers, and if so, how?

The honest answer: it depends on the employee's status and on the working time arrangement you apply. For one employee a general agreement is enough, for another a watertight record really is mandatory. Below we set it out in practical terms.

Homeworking changes nothing about working time limits

First principle: an employee who works from home remains an employee with the same working time limits as a colleague on site. The average weekly working time, the daily limits, the minimum rest periods and the rules on overtime all continue to apply.

What is different: collective labour agreement no. 85 (structural telework) provides that the teleworker in principle manages the organisation of his own work, within the framework of the working time that applies in the company. For occasional telework, a similar logic applies via the Workable and Agile Work Act.

That is not a free pass. It means you do not have to direct someone minute by minute, but it does mean that:

• the contractual working time must be respected;
• work beyond the limits still counts as overtime, with the corresponding compensatory rest or premium;
• as an employer you must be able to demonstrate that you comply with working time legislation.

And that last point is impossible without some form of recording, or at the very least a clear work schedule in your work rules.

When recording is genuinely mandatory

In Belgium there is (as yet) no general legal obligation to log a daily start and end time for every employee. But there are a number of situations in which you must — and those situations occur more often than employers think.

1. Part-time employees. For part-time work the schedule must be known and any deviations from that schedule must be traceable. Does your part-time employee work from home at times other than those planned? Then you need a deviations register or a time tracking system that captures those deviations. This is a classic pitfall: with homeworking, hours shift all too easily.

2. Flexible (sliding) working hours. If you work with flexible hours — core time plus sliding windows in which employees choose for themselves — then a time monitoring system is mandatory. That system must be able to show, per day, the start and end of the work and the breaks, and the employee must be able to consult his own balance. In practice many homeworking arrangements are a flexible working hours system without being labelled as such. So check carefully what your work rules actually say.

3. Overtime, compensatory rest and time credit. As soon as you work with recovered hours or overtime balances, you must be able to demonstrate how many hours have been worked. A balance without an underlying record will not hold up in a dispute or an inspection.

4. Separate sector-specific or situation-specific obligations. Think of certain forms of attendance registration, or subsidy files in which work has to be justified per project or per client.

For a broader overview of the documents and agreements around telework — telework agreement, expense allowance, place of work — read on in telework registration obligations in Belgium.

What do you record in concrete terms?

In practice, a workable homeworking record contains four types of data:

• Start and end time of the work, per day. Including interruptions that last longer than a short break.
• The place of work: office, home or another agreed location. That is not just administratively useful: in the event of a workplace accident during homeworking, it helps that the place and time of the telework were agreed in advance.
• Absences and leave: illness, statutory holiday, compensatory rest, short leave for family reasons. A home working day that was actually a half day of leave must appear correctly in your records.
• Deviations from the planned schedule, with the reason where relevant.

What you do not need: screen time, mouse movements, screenshots or permanent logging of application use. Which brings us to an important point.

Recording is not the same as monitoring

Time tracking and surveillance are two different things, legally as well. Working time records exist to apply working time legislation and pay correctly. Software that continuously measures what someone does on his laptop is a monitoring measure — and stricter rules apply to that: proportionality, transparency, a legitimate purpose and proper information to employees. For monitoring electronic online communication data there is also collective labour agreement no. 81, which imposes a clear framework and a duty to inform in advance.

The practical translation: choose a system in which the employee himself records his start, break and end, and in which the manager validates the hours. That is enough to meet your obligations, and it keeps trust intact. Trust is, incidentally, the strongest quality control in homeworking: you assess output, not online status.

The right to disconnect is part of the story

Since 2023, companies with 20 or more employees have had to make arrangements on the right to disconnect — via a collective labour agreement or via the work rules. Those arrangements cover when employees do not have to be reachable, how you deal with e-mails and messages outside working hours, and how you handle training and awareness.

Time tracking and disconnection reinforce each other. If your records show that a team is structurally processing e-mails after 9 p.m. or systematically going above contractual hours, you have an objective signal instead of a gut feeling. That is exactly the kind of insight you need to do something about it — see also is your staff working the planned hours or too much overtime?.

Paper timesheet versus digital tracking

Many companies start with an Excel file or a monthly timesheet that the employee returns by e-mail. That works — until the moment you have fifteen homeworkers, part-time schedules, compensatory rest and a question from your payroll office about a balance that does not add up.

The weak points of a manual timesheet for homeworking:

• filled in afterwards: on Friday someone reconstructs what he did on Monday, with all the rounding that comes with it;
• no link to the planning: you cannot see at a glance the difference between planned and actual hours;
• no audit trail: in a dispute or an inspection you cannot show when a line was entered or amended;
• double work: everything has to be retyped for payroll processing.

With a digital system the employee clocks in via smartphone or browser, including from home. The hours automatically appear alongside the work schedule from your planning, deviations stand out, and approved hours flow through to your payroll and HR administration. For mixed teams — permanent staff at the office, homeworkers, and for instance flexi-jobs or student work at peak moments — you keep one consistent file instead of three parallel systems.

How to tackle it in five steps

1. Define the framework. Fixed schedules or flexible working hours? Set it out correctly in your work rules and in the telework agreement.
2. Identify who must be recorded. Part-timers, flexible hours, employees with an overtime balance: that is where you start.
3. Choose one recording method for everyone. Home or on site makes no difference to the way hours are recorded — that avoids arguments about double standards.
4. Explain why. Make clear that this is about working time, pay and protecting the employee, not about surveillance. State explicitly what you do not measure.
5. Follow up monthly. Review deviations between planned and actual hours, discuss structural overruns and adjust the planning where needed.

In closing

Homeworking does not require heavier administration, but it does require more conscious administration. As long as you know which employees fall under a recording obligation, use one method for everyone and keep recording separate from monitoring, homeworking is perfectly compatible with Belgian working time legislation.

And anyone already recording digitally today will be in a stronger position as time tracking obligations are further tightened in the coming years. More about that in our article on digital time tracking.