Calculation for the Otherwise Working Day

An otherwise working day (OWD) is a day that an employee would typically be scheduled to work if it wasn’t a public holiday or leave day. You can configure Dayforce to calculate an average otherwise working day based on conditions of your choosing, such as a specific lookback period and calculation method. This also involves configuring your time off policy to use the otherwise working day average to calculate time away from work (TAFW), which is covered in the previous section. See Time Calculation Settings.

Role feature access:

Time Away From Work > Time Off Policy > Days Calculation
Time Away From Work > Time Off Policy > Otherwise Working Day
Time Away From Work > Time Off Policy > Weeks Calculation

In the Otherwise Working Day section, you configure how Dayforce calculates a normalized, average working day through which it can derive TAFW hours.

Dayforce shows this section only after you select Otherwise Working Day in one of the calculation lists in the Weeks or Days sections.

Otherwise Working Day settings
Setting	Description
Number of periods to look back	The number of periods the calculation engine evaluates when determining the average otherwise working day.
Period Type	The period type that the calculation engine evaluates. Dayforce uses this period type when evaluating the lookback period you configured using the Number of periods to look back field. For example, if you select Weeks and you entered `8` in the Number of periods to look back field, Dayforce uses an eight-week lookback period to calculate the average otherwise working day. The option is: Weeks.
Ranking Strategy	The method that drives how Dayforce calculates and ranks average working days when determining the otherwise working day. The options are: OWD %: The otherwise working day percentage, which represents how often a specific weekday contained a worked shift during the lookback period. Dayforce uses the following formula to calculate the OWD %: `(Number of times a specific workday was worked in the lookback period) / (Number of weeks in the lookback period) * 100` For example, if an employee worked on 8 out of 12 Mondays, the OWD % for Monday in the 12 week period is 67% ([8 / 12] * 100). Dayforce applies this formula to each day of the week to determine different percentages for each day. OWD Average Hours: The otherwise working day average hours, which is the average number of hours worked for a workday that’s included in the lookback period. Dayforce uses the following formula to calculate the OWD average hours: `(Total number of hours worked for a specific day in the lookback period) / (Number of times that day was worked in the lookback period)` For example, if an employee’s total worked hours on Mondays during the lookback period is 54 and they worked 8 Mondays, the OWD average hours for Monday in the lookback period is 6.75. Dayforce applies this formula to each day of the week to determine different average hours for each day. See Additional Calculation Information.
Equal Day Proportion	Determines whether each of the ranked days in the normalized week have the same week proportion.
Pay Codes Eligible Pay Codes Ineligible	The eligible and ineligible pay codes for inclusion in the otherwise working day calculation.
Pay Categories Eligible Pay Categories Ineligible	The eligible and ineligible pay categories for inclusion in the otherwise working day calculation.
Exclude Unworked Weeks	Determines if unworked weeks are included or excluded when calculating the otherwise working day average.

Additional Calculation Information

To determine how many OWDs should qualify, Dayforce counts the total number of days with worked shifts in the lookback period and divides this by the number of weeks in the lookback period. This calculation gives an average number of worked shifts per week. For example, with 46 days worked in a 12-week lookback, Dayforce calculates an average of 3.8333 shifts in a week. If this calculated value is not a full number, Dayforce rounds it up to a full number (that is, the application rounds up 3.8333 to 4):

Chart showing average hours and days worked over twelve weeks.

Based on your selected method (either OWD % or OWD Average Hours, Dayforce then uses this average number of days divisor to pick the corresponding number of highest-ranked average working day values. Using the example above, Dayforce would pick the four highest values as OWDs, regardless of whether there were OWD % or average hours values recorded against other days of the week. The application only designates OWDs based on the number of highest ranked values that match the average days worked count. Any ranked values that are lower than the average worked days count aren’t designated as OWDs:

Chart showing ranked values for otherwise working days.

Next, you must generate the OWD based on the applicable average number of days per week (in this example, 4 average days). This figure is calculated by summing the OWD average hours and considering it 100% of the work hours in one week. The formula is:

Copy

OWD Day / OWD Week = % of the week

In this example, 6.75 OWD average hours on Monday is divided by the total weekly hours of 31.50, resulting in a 0.21 portion of the week:

Chart showing the otherwise working day based on four average days per week.