If you have employees that are travelling between cleaning locations you need to have a company policy for paying travel time. Once you decide on your policy, add it to your employee manual, and then go over it with each employee. Don't let your employees tell YOU how they expect to be paid for travelling.
The first thing to keep in mind is that you are not required to pay travel time for the employee's time spent travelling from home to work and from work to home, unless they travel to a different location every day. You are however, required to pay your employees for any travel time between jobs. If your employees are allowed to take a lunch break during the day, you will need to create a policy as to whether they will be paid for this personal time.
Keep your policy simple and consistent for all employees. Travel time adds up, so the easiest system is to pay them from your location and job-to-job as soon as they're on the clock. If you introduce a separate payment system for travel and one for cleaning you are opening the door to a bookkeeping nightmare.
Know the mileage and time your employees should be travelling. Either do your own tracking of the time it takes to travel between homes or use a mapping tool like
www.mapquest.com. Just keep in mind that estimated travel time on Mapquest may be wrong depending on traffic conditions. You could also invest in GPS devices to track travel.
Plan your employees' routes instead of letting them decide which route to take. Not all will be efficient with their time and may take a longer route than necessary.
Consider cleaning in teams of two or even single maids in order to keep travel time to a minimum. One or two people take longer to clean a home than a group of 3 or 4 people, so they won't be travelling to as many homes each day. When you have 3 or 4 people travelling together to several homes a day you have to pay each one for riding in the vehicle.
The EU ruling on travel time only applies if the employee is travelling to clients different locations at the start of each day where there is no fixed starting point.
The ruling states: “The journeys of the workers to the customers their employer designates is a necessary means of providing their technical services at the premises of those customers. Not taking those journeys into account would enable a company to claim that only the time spent carrying out the activity of cleaning falls within the concept of working time, which would distort that concept and jeopardise the objective of protecting the safety and health of workers.”
It adds: “The court takes the view that the workers are at the employer’s disposal for the time of the journeys. During those journeys, the workers act on the instructions of the employer, who may change the order of the customers or cancel or add an appointment… The court considers the workers to be working during the journeys.”
