In Germany, introducing a system capable of monitoring employee behaviour or performance requires the agreement of the works council. Rostering and time recording are squarely within that. A vendor who says “that is a matter for you and your Betriebsrat” has just handed the customer the hardest part of the project.
We attended 14 co-determination processes last year. Twelve concluded with approval, two with conditions we then implemented, and one service decided not to proceed. Some patterns from those rooms.
The questions that get asked
Can management see where I am?
The honest answer for our geofence check-in is: it records that a check-in happened at a permitted location, not a continuous position. We show the actual data record rather than describing it. Councils have consistently accepted the distinction once they see the field list.
Can lateness be used against me?
The system can produce punctuality reports. Whether they are used, and how, is a works agreement question. We now come to meetings with a draft Betriebsvereinbarung covering exactly this, which our customers' councils have amended and adopted in most cases.
How long is this kept?
Retention is configurable, and councils almost always want it shorter than the default. We set it to whatever is agreed and show the deletion job running.
What made the difference
- Attending in person. Two meetings on average, at our cost. A data sheet does not answer a question asked in a room.
- Bringing the field list, not the brochure. Councils want to know what is stored, not what it is for.
- Offering to disable features. Twice we turned off punctuality reporting entirely as a condition of agreement. Neither customer has asked for it back.
- Not arguing about the law. Where a council reads §87 more broadly than we would, that is their prerogative.
The fastest approval we have seen took five weeks. The slowest took eleven months. The difference was almost never the software.
For providers starting a tender
Bring the works council in before the shortlist rather than after the signature. Every project that ran badly in our experience did so because approval was treated as a formality at the end. Ask each vendor directly whether they will attend meetings, and get the answer in writing.