Working hours are down across Europe. The admin burden is not.

The share of European workers doing more than 48 hours a week has nearly halved over the past two decades, dropping from 19% in 2005 to 11% in 2024. That is a significant shift.

For anyone managing a team, fewer hours per person does not mean less to keep track of. If anything, the experience of managing working time in most SMEs has become more complicated over the same period, not less. The hours are down. The complexity is not.

Eurofound data, based on a survey with more than 36,000 workers across the EU, helps explain why. The total number of hours has come down. But almost everything else about how, when, and where people work has become more varied, more distributed, and more difficult to keep track of.

Your team no longer works the same hours in the same place

Ten years ago, a typical SME team largely started and finished at the same time, in the same location. Tracking time was relatively straightforward because the working day had a clear shape. That shape has changed.

Hybrid arrangements are now the dominant pattern among workers in roles where remote work is possible. Combined home and office schedules have become the norm across Europe, with the share of people working exclusively from home declining steadily since 2022. Add to that the growth in part-time contracts, flexible start times, and varied shift patterns that many SMEs have introduced to attract and retain staff, and the result is a team where almost everyone works differently.

In practical terms, this means more exceptions to manage. Someone works from home on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Someone else does a compressed four-day week. A third person job-shares. Each arrangement is reasonable on its own. Together, they mean that a simple register or a shared spreadsheet no longer captures what is actually happening. The gap between what you think your team's hours look like and what they actually are grows wider every time a new arrangement is added.

The work is harder to observe

There is a second shift that is easy to miss because it happens gradually. The nature of the work itself has changed in ways that make working time harder to track from the outside.

The EWCS 2024 data shows that 42% of women and 39% of men now spend prolonged periods sitting at work, reflecting how much more screen-based and sedentary work has become across sectors where it was previously the exception. At the same time, the share of workers doing repetitive or monotonous tasks has risen from 39% in 1995 to 48% in 2024. Much of what people do now is concentrated, individual, and invisible to anyone not doing it.

For an SME owner or manager, this matters because the informal cues that used to help you understand how your team was doing have become less reliable. You cannot tell from a glance across the office whether someone has been at their desk for six hours or three. You cannot easily see when someone stayed late to finish something or left early without logging it. The work is quieter, more individual, and harder to read.

The broader picture suggests most SMEs are managing this more complex reality with broadly the same administrative habits they have always had. A lot is being tracked in people's heads, in informal conversations, or not at all.

The compliance expectation has moved the other way

Here is where the pressure becomes most concrete for SME owners. While average working hours have come down, the expectation of being able to demonstrate those hours accurately has increased. Across European markets, employers are expected to hold clear records of hours worked, overtime, and absences. That expectation has strengthened in recent years, not softened.

What this means in practice is that the administrative stakes of getting time tracking wrong have gone up even as the average working week has shortened. A missing record, an unlogged absence, or an overtime hour that was never formally acknowledged can create problems that a general sense of "everyone worked roughly the right amount" cannot solve.

For a business owner already stretched across multiple responsibilities, maintaining that level of accuracy without a system that supports it is genuinely difficult. It is one of those things that works well enough until it does not, and then the cost of catching up is disproportionate to what better habits upfront would have required.

What this looks like in practice

Put these three shifts together and a clear picture emerges. Your team works more varied hours in more varied locations. The work they do is less visible from the outside. And the bar for keeping accurate records has risen. The businesses navigating this well are not dedicating more time to administration. They have made time tracking continuous and straightforward enough that it no longer depends on anyone remembering to do it at the end of the week.

The result is a more accurate picture of how the team is actually working, less time spent reconciling discrepancies, and a cleaner process when payroll or compliance questions come up. That is not a luxury for a growing SME. It is increasingly just the baseline of running things well.

Find out more

If this sounds familiar, it is worth asking whether your current approach to time tracking was built for how your team works today or how teams worked a decade ago. TimeMoto Cloud gives SMEs a single system for recording hours, managing absences, and staying on top of compliance without the manual effort. Try it free for 30 days and see how much of your current process you could simplify.

Source: Eurofound (2026), Living and Working in Europe 2025, Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg. Based on the European Working Conditions Survey 2024, covering 36,000+ workers across the EU. Eurofound is a tripartite EU Agency and an independent source of research on living and working conditions in Europe.