Do you wait that extra minute at the time clock or do you sign out whenever?

[J Route Z]

In my place of work, they are typically very lenient when it comes to attendance. There are a group of people waiting at the time clock like 5 minutes before the hour they are finished, for instance, at 2:55pm, waiting for 3:00. I have swiped out a minute or two for several days and it doesn't seem that big of a deal. You can swipe in 7 minutes early at the most, otherwise it's overtime (8 or more minutes early).

[US71]

Most places I've worked at figure time on the quarter-hour. You work 8 minutes, you get paid... 7 minutes you don't.

[cjk374]

We write our time on & off on a time sheet. No clock to punch. ANd we are paid for every minute we are on duty.

[jeffandnicole]

We don't have a time clock.  Every 2 weeks we have to fill out some sort of online attendance thing showing the total normal hours we worked, vacation hours, etc.  As we're salary, we don't get OT. 

[hbelkins]

We sign a timesheet, which is a legally binding document, and are paid in 15-minute increments. Some people treat the time sheet as a time clock, but I don't. I'll typically sign in and out at the same time just before I get ready to leave in the afternoons. And some days I couldn't punch a time clock at all because I have to work part or all of the day away from the office.

[kkt]

We fill out a speadsheet every month, print it and sign it.  In theory I'm overtime eligible, but there's never been an emergency dire enough to require it.  And we have annual leave and sick leave, so in practice it's just a matter of how much of each we use during the month.  They're fine with rounding off to the nearest 10 minutes.

[NJRoadfan]

We don't have a time clock.  Every 2 weeks we have to fill out some sort of online attendance thing showing the total normal hours we worked, vacation hours, etc.  As we're salary, we don't get OT. 

Being salaried doesn't mean you don't get overtime, unless your position is considered "exempt" from overtime under the Fair Labor Standards Act. I am paid salary based on a set amount of work hours per week, we have no time clock, but I certainly am able to get overtime pay if needed. There of course is a form that needs to be filled out with extra hours worked etc.

[1995hoo]

No time clock. Billable hours, time billed to the nearest tenth of an hour above what you've worked (so, if a task takes two minutes, you bill .1 of an hour). I'll lump things together in fairness to clients, but many people don't.

[lordsutch]

I have to approve my "time card" every month online and enter hours for leave (or sick leave or jury duty or whatever), but I don't have to enter any times or even hours worked. The joys of being FLSA exempt.

The other places I've worked in the past (at least, in my academic career) didn't even make us fill out time cards at all.

[vdeane]

No punching in or out for me either, just a timesheet that's entered on an 80s mainframe.  Whether or not anyone cares if one leaves 5 minutes early if they have their work done or not generally depends on the temperament of their supervisors; some are more laid back than others.  If working over the scheduled amount, for those with salaries below a certain grade, starts as compensation time (max 2.5 hours/week) and it's OT after that.

[golden eagle]

I have a card I have to swipe. We can't clock sooner than five minutes before our shift. I work in a call center and recently, we were told that we must log off of our phones at exactly the time our shifts end. Previously, we could log off one minute before.

[DandyDan]

I have a warehouse job and where I work, they let us clock in up to 5 minutes before the official time.  However, in my job, we essentially have to work until the moment all orders are filled, so there is no set time work ends, so therefore, no one is ever waiting to sign out.  The truly annoying aspect is our half hour of lunch.  They are real anal about making sure no one takes a second more than a 30 minute lunch break, so essentially, everyone will stand around the clock waiting for the exact moment the clock hits the 30th minute and then clock in, or at least the people who aren't in a hurry to get done do that.  OTOH, since the one manager took over, he set it up so each section of the building essentially gets its own break schedule, so we don't have masses of people all clocking in and out at once, unless for some reason, we have to stick around just to get hours in (which doesn't happen much anymore).  Then again, there's only about 35 employees on my shift where I work (plus whatever number of temporaries they have at any given time).

[GaryV]

When I worked hourly, we had the 7-minute rule (to round to the nearest 15 minute increment of working time).  But it was made known that if you consistently clocked in at 7 minutes past and clocked out at 7 minutes till, you would be talked to about your hours.

What I didn't like about it was that you clocked in at your computer at your desk.  That meant you had to wait until your computer booted up to clock in.

[tidecat]

Any recommendations on brands of time clocks? I need to replace the one where I work.  I want to get s biometric clock, but I need one that can work in a manufacturing environment where the employees frequently had hands that are dirty from grease and oil.

[KEVIN_224]

My supermarket in Connecticut has an older punch clock. However, it's used mostly for new employees around the time of their orientation. Once in the store's system, you enter your employee number (usually like 6 digits). You then place your fingertip on a sensor for it to read and accept (right index in my case). On most days, I wish I could literally give it the middle finger, but I digress.

As for overtime part? If you go like 7 minutes over your scheduled end time, a red card from an assistant manager or store manager is required. You swipe their card, enter a 5-digit pass code, then enter your code and do the finger thingy. It's also needed if you fill in for what was an off day or if your shift changed significantly.

To keep this truly on topic...I rarely, if ever, wait for more than a minute at the clock. The manager's office is at the very end of the hallway to the left. They can easily see if people are huddling around it.

[Scott5114]

The casino chain I work at rounds off to fifteen-minute intervals. As a cashier, I don't have a set end time, I just clock out whenever the vault is done verifying my ending bank. We go back at 11pm and I have clocked out as early as 11:20 and as late as 12:10 depending on how involved my paperwork is (lots of chips, jackpots, and checks cashed can make things take a long time), if I have issues like missing money, or the vault staff is shorthanded or new. That being said, if I go to clock out and it says 11:37 I will find something to occupy myself with for a minute so it will kick over to 11:38 and I get paid for another 15 minutes. I figure if they actually care about me doing that they should pay by the minute so there's no incentive.

I previously worked for another casino in the same chain and I got written up for clocking in at 2:31 once instead of 2:30. I made damn sure my boss spent more than 60 seconds justifying that to HR.  That was one of the reasons I left that job.

[hbelkins]

For those of us who are on-call 24/7, a time clock is impractical. Say I leave work at 4:30, come home, and then at 8 p.m. someone calls or emails me to tell me we've had a rockslide or a road is closed by high water. I will have to do a social media post about it at the very least, and if it's something major, I will have to write a press release and send it to media outlets. What I do is go back into work the next day and add the time to my time sheet.

For awhile, when I was upset with the state for something, I had what I called my 15-minute policy. If I got an email that needed an immediate response, even if it only took me a minute, I claimed the minimum period of time allowable. I was not going to give my employer my time for free after hours.

[DeaconG]

In the jobs I've worked I've had to use PC based systems (usually Deltek), preprinted time cards with the hours entered on them and signed, and badge swipe systems.  My last job actually had a time clock with paper cards (which blew me away) and hours were entered based on charge numbers.

On most jobs I've worked they were fairly lenient on clocking in/out (usually five minutes plus or minus), I had one where if you so much as looked at the time clock five minutes before quitting time you ran the risk of being terminated, which meant one hell of a line when you did clock out, and they wanted you out within five minutes of quitting time.  Really?

[Duke87]

I only enter quantities of time in my timecard, not when during the day it was, so there is no "signing out" in my world. If I do 8 hours of work in the space of 11 hours of the day, with some errand running and goofing off mixed in there, so be it. Actually, this is what most days are like for me.



When I was an hourly employee as an intern there was a physical clock that I swiped my ID card in and out of. I got paid in 15 minute increments. I'm pretty sure they always rounded down, though, so if I clocked out 7 hours and 59 minutes after clocking in, I'd get paid for 7 hours and 45 minutes. Yes, I would note the time and usually try to be just above rather than just below a 15 minute interval when I left.

[slorydn1]

We have a time "sheet" that we fill out at the end of the period. There is no place to log the in and out times, just the number of hours worked, and a little block next to that to indicate the code for the hours (RH for Regular Hours, CT for Comp Time, AL for Annual Leave, HL for Holiday etc).

It works for us because all of our shifts are either 6a-6p or 6p-6a for the 12 hour employees or 8a to 5p for the 8 hour daytimers (that 9th hour is for the lunch that has to be taken).

Back when I worked at the hospital we had to clock in and out and it MUST be at the clock closest to your department.

There had been a problem with people all congregating at the clock at the back employee entrance and there was no way 300 people were going to be able to swipe in/out in the 60 seconds between 7:00 and 7:01. 1 minute late was a fire-able offense after 3 occurrences during the length of your employment. You could be there for 30 years and only be late 3 times in those 30 years and no retirement for you.

Anyway they instituted that "closest clock" policy for that reason, so they said. I think it was more to keep us from leaving our dept with 5 minutes to go to wait in line at the time clock in the back.

[Zmapper]

My employer has the time clock set to the minute, so there is no practical way to game the system. The clock doesn't display the current time until after one has clocked in or clocked out, so counting seconds for that extra minute of pay is a crapshoot.

[andrewkbrown]

A bit different doing shift work on a fire department. We get paid for 24 hours, 7am until 7am. We are allowed to come to the firehouse and relieve a firefighter from the previous day's shift up to 2 hours before 7am. Most guys (myself included) show up and assume duty around 5-6am, with the knowledge that they themselves will get relieved by tomorrow's crew around that same 5-6am the next morning. There have been times where I've arrived home at 6-6:30am (after a 15 minute drive from the firehouse), meaning I am at my apartment even before my "official" off time of 7am.

No timeclocks or timecards. Company officers do the time reporting and scheduling for members on department computers.

[Dr Frankenstein]

Our official timesheet is an Access database application, combined with a paper report that we print from the same app (apparently, HR can't be arsed to just look at the database). I, however, keep my own Excel-based timesheet which I copy into the slower and poorly-designed app only at the end of the month.

I'm salaried and don't have fixed hours (except that I need approval to be away from the office between 0930-1130 and 1330-1530... otherwise, planning a meeting would be a pain), and all that matters is that I have all my hours by the end of the month (plus a possible maximum of two days in bank, which has come in handy for road meets and other weekend trips).

I used to be eligible for overtime, subject to the approval of my supervisor, but recent austerity measures from the government I work for have put that on the ice (that also means that I will reject any request for overtime work).

I have never asked if our hours are rounded when calculated. All I know is that the arrow buttons in the Access app increment and decrement the times by 5 minutes (it'll allow anything from the keyboard, though), so that's what I round my times to.

[triplemultiplex]

The one job I had where we had a literal card to punch at a machine let you clock in a few minutes before your shift started, but there was something weird about not clocking out until the exact top of the hour.  I think it had less to do with the functionality of the machine as much as it had to do with somebody micro-managing a non-existent problem.  Probably one guy was punching out five minutes "early" every day and some middle manager saw a way to look like he was doing something.  So by the time I was working there, half the floor is huddled around waiting for the clock to strike 11. (second shift gig)

It's one of those small F-U's to the working man, in my opinion.  Your shift is over, but you still need to spend 5 minutes in line before you can even leave the building.  Just so you remember who's in charge.

Ever other job I've had, you record hours in some sort of computer database at your leisure.  That way it only takes 2 minutes to document the time you put in for an entire week.

[jeffandnicole]

I could see if one person started clocking out 5 minutes early and it was tolerated, then the entire department is hanging around the time clock to punch out 5 minutes early.

Thankfully, the one job I had where we punched a time clock, we weren't micromanaged like that.  But they did pay us for every minute we were clocked in...none of this rounding to the nearest 15 minute crap!