Working time
What counts as working time for remote teams?
Time during which the employee is working or at the employer's disposal counts, wherever they are. Statutory rest intervals are excluded; short incidental breaks are generally included. Being contactable outside agreed hours is a grey area in India and one worth settling in policy rather than leaving to assumption.
The traditional test asks whether the person is working or at the employer's disposal, and it does not depend on location. A remote employee working from 09:30 to 18:15 with a 45-minute break has worked 8 hours, exactly as they would have in an office. Statutory rest intervals come out; short incidental breaks generally stay in as paid working time.
Remote work introduces two complications. The first is fragmentation — a day split across school runs and evening calls is still a working day, but a single clock-in and clock-out describes it badly. Recording discrete sessions handles this naturally, and produces a more accurate hours total than a pair of timestamps ever could.
The second is availability. Time spent merely contactable — not working, but expected to respond — is treated differently across jurisdictions, and Indian law does not resolve it cleanly for office employees. Employers running on-call rotations should define in policy what counts as working time, what counts as standby, and how each is compensated, rather than leaving it to be argued about later.
Cross-border teams add a third: an employee working from another country may attract that country's working-time rules, which can be stricter than India's. EU-based staff, for example, come with daily rest, weekly rest and 48-hour average limits that need to be reflected in scheduling.
Where this comes from
- §State Shops and Establishments Acts — hours and rest interval provisions applicable regardless of work location
- §Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020 — working hours and records
- §EU Working Time Directive 2003/88/EC — where team members work from the EU
General information, current to August 2026, not legal advice. Labour rules vary by state and the Labour Codes continue to roll out — confirm your position with your compliance advisor before acting.
How Workclave handles this
Workclave records a day as the sessions it actually contained, from wherever they ran, so fragmented remote days total correctly and the working-time record is the same shape for office, home and cross-border staff.
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