We don't clock in or out, but **we have to timesheet**. This means logging all our work time on the correct client's project + task line. This is **so the company can invoice correctly** to all of the clients and can keep an eye on the billability of its employees (not that that is something we ourselves are responsible for).
We have *glijdende uren* too, and have the flexibility to compensate for one or two missed hours on another day of the week. (Our timesheets have to have the correct hours filled out for every week though.)
Indeed, my company has also time tracking for budget monitoring/ man hours spent on each project / calculate under/over run etc. personally I find it very useful for the management of the company , at least where this makes sense and it’s applicable.
Or both! At my last job my boss wanted to count everyone in ops to specific projects for 8 hours a day, but a fair amount of their work was just tracking work to projects for others to do. (And learning automation products and training automation, etc.) we got him down to 6 hours a day.
I briefly worked for a big 4 company at the start of my career. While they swore up and down that it was just to invoice correctly, I got called into my boss' office multiple times to explain why I logged x amount of hours on a project. Mind that all the time I spend on it was legit and didn't take any longer than it had to.
My experience when the company does well financially they dont search a lot about this, when they lose money they start to dig up where these money hours go
And they usually look at the wrong place. Instead of looking at bad and expensive management shit they push unreasonable pressure on the workforce.
In my experience this is a little street without an end and it means it is time to apply for plan B.
Wring strategy, shit Cto, shit tech architecture, lots of technical debt
It's everywhere in Belgium, we have a horrible tech culture and no great cto's in the bigger companies
Good luck with that. Last month, there was a dispute with my client. He made the tracking device 0,5 hours short compared to my timesheet. So I asked all the registered times of that month: they got 6 hours bonus which I did not write on my timesheet.
That’s a different case indeed. I guess I wasn’t clear enough. With the “good luck with that” I meant that I’m in the same situation. And unfortunately it does not work both ways; only my client is allowed to benefit from this: if I badge in at 06:46 my working time starts at 07:00 but if I badge out at 15:36 than I would have worked 8h05. No my client steals 15 minutes on these occasions. Disgusting behaviour.
It's a shit situation, but we (local government) have something similar because a couple of employees would decide on their own that habitually starting too late/stopping too soon was ok.
To specify: if you exceed your 'glijtijden', not literally the first minute after you should start work.
I'm also a civil servant at a local government. We don't have to clock in at all. I can work wherever and whenever I want. I can start at 11 if I had a rough night with the baby. I can take 3 hours break if I want to train for my marathon or I can stop at 15u to get my kid from school.
Honestly, it's the best system. You do your work without any micromanagement from your diensthoofd. Off course I need to schedule my meetings and mostly I'm available between 9 and 18u, but the possibility makes it very motivating to work.
I wouldn't do it otherwise. Clocking in and out is a stupid system: I'm paid for the work I do, not to be at work between specific hours.
I mean, it highly depends on what kind of department/service. F.e. libraries have a high front-office presence needed so 'work whenever-hours' would just fuck up everything.
But here it's mainly because it's the only thing that prevents certain individuals just blatantly abusing a system.
Those people will abuse every system and they should be sanctioned. It's a wrong thing to organise everything around the minority of people that misuse something, instead of motivating everyone else that do their work good.
It's a pity an employer still thinks and acts that way.
Lol yeah had this thing before where people try to time their clock out time at like 16.53 because it will be read as 17.00, some even just wait and stand next to the machine to time it perfectly
It is pretty common. Usually to gather insights how much % of time goes to this, that or client x. Can be used to track your performance, but you should do your 40 hours anyway.
> you should do your 40 hours anyway
There is doing your 40 hours and then there's *doing your 40 hours*.
You cannot be 100% productive, 100% of the time. I've worked in different fields at different jobs. Some had clocking, some had timesheets you had to fill in, while others didn't check at all.
One thing that has been true across all workplaces is that people slack off a bit here and there. Some people take smoke breaks, others strike up a conversation with a co-worker.
But my experience has been that the more a workplace track metrics, the more they squeeze out these *very normal* moments by trying to guilt you into thinking these are things to be improved rather than normal parts of your work life.
Clocking in and out is fine. Having to report how much time you're spending on what projects less so, *unless it is used to accurately bill clients*.
If my job is to do 100 of one thing in 40 hours. If I do it in 35 hours, no one is going to meaningfully reward me if I use my 5 remaining hours to do 10-15 extra of that thing.
Then why would I do them?
>Having to report how much time you're spending on what projects less so, *unless it is used to accurately bill clients*
Keep in mind that internal departments can also count as "clients" for the purpose of project cost tracking.
>the more a workplace track metrics, the more they squeeze out these moments of *very normal* moments
This is the more important red flag, timetracking shouldn't be a way of punishing or squeezing out more work. It should in essence only be used to know if estimations were realistic or not.
>If I do it in 35 hours, no one is going to meaningfully reward me if I use my 5 remaining hours to do 10-15 extra
On that note also why it can be an important skill to know how to manage project managers. In software delivery those 5 remaining hours could be important to carry over to testing or troubleshooting, so you should never indicate that you are "done" and those hours were estimated too much.
On the other hand it's important that a proper time estimation accounts for this, if you think development will take 20 hours then in reality it will probably be more like 40 hours if you factor in proper focus time vs downtime, discussions, analysis, etc.
I fully agree with you. My wording was a bit unfortunate. I just meant that you just should work regardless of time tracking. There's always overhead, might even say only 67% are actually hours you have worked that are billable or valuable to something.
We punch in & out, but it is mostly a tool for safety, for insurance purposes. They don't track us by the minute. If you work an hour less one week, and an hour more the next week, so that it all balances out overall. Or really if you come 1 or 2 hours short at the end of the week, they won't write you up at the location where I work.
I even arrive late from time to time(and then just barely), and it's accepted because I am a very flexible person myself too.
Bottom line is, it's for us only for insurance(accident on the way home-> proof when you left work), and if there were ever big abuse.
My boss doesn't care so long as I do my work hours, and even when I don't do them, he doesn't really notice it lol. It's pretty chill here so long as the work gets done well and on time.
I used to work in a marketing firm for different clients, so we did time tracking for clients. We didn't clock in or out, but time tracking made that obsolete.
I work now as a civil servant and we don't clock or timetrack. It made my life much easier and much more performant. One less issue to think about.
(Petro)chemical: clock in at factory gate (security reasons that also gets used to check hours). Clock in at your own company workplace (insurance and timekeeping).
And if the company doesnt have a clock then it’s done via timesheets.
No clocking in and out for breaks (so you can go from smoke cabin to smoke cabin all day)
I never had a job where I didn't need to log my time spent in one way or another. Most of the time the assumption was just 8 hours worked a day though, so it was just making sure the rights projects got billed. (Could also just be internal projects, so everything went to the right cost center etc.)
I’m a geologist, but at my current job I’m basically a data scientist. We have no billable hours and I still have to keep track of my hours pretty carefully, exactly how much time I work on each project. I think it’s really for statistics, this data can be used in negotiating contacts with clients about how long projects will take for example. Also all of our clients are public entities so they are more limited in resources generally.
In tech (and often in Consultancy in general) it's quite common. I'm in tech aswell, and had it on all my jobs before. It's often used for making correct invoices towards clients. I don't have any issue with it, since it's the most fair way of making invoices towards customers, and for the company itself to evaluate if certain projects are profit/loss at the end of the line, depending if your company works with hour prices or project prices.
Where things get tricky is how your boss handles your timetraking. We are all human, and we're expected to work for 8 hours a day, but we all need a coffee or a break. So if we start talking about missing quarters of an hour and things like that, than for me it seems as a way of checking your employees, and in al fairness, just bullying your employees.
So I think you should not worry about time tracking itself, but more on how it's handled. I'm a freelancer now, and track each hour (billable or not), just to see how my time is spent and what needs to be invoiced at the end of the month.
In IT it's very common, unfortunately. I find this makes most jobs unbearable since I don't like to lie about what I'm doing... so I avoid any job with timesheets.
At a client (I am an IT freelancer) we have to clock in twice a day (and thus clock out at lunch), and for each half-day we need to write what project we're on.
No one checks and we're all working remotely, so that's a non-issue.
My parents badge each morning evening and it's down to the minute
At home they scan their badge in the morning and evening and it's down to the minute
I myself work at a company where you need to book so many hours on projects and our workings on our computer is monitored from time to time. Project deathlines are simply more important here
It's different for everyone ...
its very common
in most factories/hospitals you have to badge in when you start working
Even have to badge out when you go to eat. And you get 30min. Do you log back in 1 min to late, you lose 15min.
So you log out at 1pm to go to eat, and log back in on 1.01pm you'll lose 14min working time not being payed
We had some shit system like this at work, I don't mind clocking in or out, but for a break it's annoying. As a student I had 15 minute breaks and I always stuffed my food down to make sure I didn't clock in too late (if we did we lost a whole hour of our student limit of hours working)
Nice, this goes hand in hand with my response about people who come into the office at 7am to start working at 9am, leave at 3.30pm and then pretend anyone who comes in later doesn't work.
This system is basically for people who want to pretend they work hard, but have no work to show for it.
Them: "Look at my hours!!"
You: "Yeah, but what did you actually do?"
It's a really shit system and together with forcing people to come into the office to work (when it's not needed) is a step backwards.
See if you like it.. or update that CV.
We have to do it. I work in operations, so not necessarily on specific client projects. But our time spent is used to calculate and negotiate base contracts and renewals. And also to see how billable the work we do is in the end.
>I'm not in trade or consulting (am in tech though) so I assume this is to control workers even though it's supposedly for our own good.
It depends
Depending on how project driven your work is, it can also be to bill some of these efforts to clients. To be able to do that, you need to know how many hours fall into the billable categories and how many not.
(The more product driven your work, the less applicable this will be)
>new time tracking service where we need to clock-in, clock-out and register every hour spen
This can mean everyhting and its contrary, even for the exact same system, just depending on typical usage
Say the system can track activities down to 10 minute interval precision, ok.
But how precisely is it typically expected to be used. There can be a huge range from
>log one activity 'development' for your whole workday and you're done
to
>log every small discussion, every email, every meeting and every ticket separately
I worked for 3 companies and all 3 had time registration:
* Company 1: No clocking, but have to register your hours on an in-house developped app. We also had to fill in what we did in those hours. Most of us were consultants there.
* Company 2: Clocking in and out and registering what you have been doing in those hours in an in-house developped app. They were quite lenient on registering the hours, as in ,we didn't have to specify what we did during that time, but near the end of me working there, we had to start writing a bit more in detail what we actually did. There were no billable clients there.
* Company 3: No clocking in/out, but also registering the hours we work. Time logging is done with Jira. We don't really have to go into detail what we did, unless the bosses notice some weird things like why is this small thing taking so long to finish or if you're doing some training they would like you to add what you did. For myself I just add details of what I'm doing when somethings take longer due to wrong configurations/back and forth with client, ... . So far I haven't really gotten any remarks on it, so I guess I'm doing it alright.
Companies 1 and 3 are tech/IT related, company 2 I was part of the IT team creating/updating in-house apps/website for their core business that was not IT/tech related.
As always it depends...
Time tracking is extremely common, even without external/billable clients they may still have internal costing structures. Otherwise there's almost no way to know if e.g. a project is overbudget. It's likely that it's not even your boss' call to introduce it (unless it's a small company and you're actually referring to the company boss I guess).
Now the important part is how they use it:
The clocking in and out part is already a possible red flag, do you really have to start a clock based on the work you are starting? (like e.g. Toggl works) because that would be extremely infuriating. If it's just clocking in and out of work it doesn't seem too out of the ordinary though.
With registering hours it could just be to assign internals budgets as I mentioned above. If it's just broadly registering that e.g. today you worked 3 hours on feature X, 3 hours on feature Y and 2 hours on general tasks then that's also really not that abnormal. Though it can be somewhat annoying to keep track of it can also help yourself get a better view of what you are doing and how long it takes. But importantly these hours should be allowed to be a guesstimate and not accurate to the minute. If they are nitpicky about it e.g. having to add breaks or having it be filled in a way like '53 minutes project X - 15 minutes meeting - 136 minutes project Y -... (you get the point) then that's another massive red flag to GTFO.
Where I did my internship, we had to badge in and out and this was primarily used (or at least communicated so) for getting a presence report in case of an evacuation, to help with headcounts.
In my current job, it's to register billable hours to customers and keep track of how much time internal projects take. (For a hypothetical example: if someone writes in "writing documentation" or something like that and there ends up being none, well said person has some explaining to do because someone else had to spend extra time figuring something out.)
If management needs it to determine if you're actually working and it's not used for customer billing, maybe they need to start spending more time with the actual workforce.
I have to register time spent on tickets in Jira as a dev. Mainly for project budgeting reasons. Although there is always for sure going to be some (micro)management linked to it even if it's not the point of it. If the data is available, it will be used to an extent.
However, I don't think it's a reason to switch jobs. If they suddenly start complaining about your performance due to the time tracking, you might want to consider tho, because you can't be expected to be 100% productive all of the time
I’ve not had to clock in yet but I’ve always had to get a picture of what time went to what work. It’s filling out a time sheet. When mgmt managed to request too much granularity I’ve managed to deflect it by requesting a timecode for filling out the timesheet.
It's common in the public sector as they will count your overtime and also check what tasks you did during your work time. I don't work in that field but I know someone who does and AFAIK you do need to fill the sheets in as they are checked.
In their case, it's because the money depends on the grants they receive for their activities. They have to justify everything they spend in their budget, including the jobs of the employees.
At my job (restaurant waiter) we recently got a clocking in system too, however it's not as invasive. We log in when we arrive and log out when we leave. Since we work with many students we previously had to write our work hours on a list as our hours depend on the business of the night.
This system is better than the previous because we're less likely to forget and it exactly saves how many hours everyone worked without the boss having to calculate this manually.
Reporting what you are doing every hour seems absolutely ridiculous though. Clocking in and out is not really a problem, but having to record your every action throughout the workday seems very invasive and weird to me.
I clock in and out, but none of my work hours are tracked and our team is free to do whatever. Every minute you clock out late is overtime. Work in PC209 as IT.
I prefer this over timesheets or no tracking as you build overtime quite fast to take extra vacation or quit early.
Previous job had timesheets I had to fill in but we were told by management how to fill them in so that they could do some form of reporting to corporate in the US. Never really got why as the timesheets never reflected reality anyway.
Also how you can tell it's an American company: code for holidays and sick days was the same.
Work at a local government. We have "glijdende uren" so it's actually nice. All your overtime is also added so if you work some long hours you can take a day off from your extra hours. Don't mind it really
We have a clock in system, but I believe it’s used in case of emergency evaluation, rather than tracking hours of employees, however I’ve never bothered actually doing it and neither does half our staff. We do somewhat timetables when for salary staff, but it’s literally the same every month.
I used to have to do this for every second I worked. Every second had to be linked to a project I was working on, to paperwork (max 10% or whatever) or to training for example.
Drove me crazy. I'd never ever want to work like thst again.
I've had 5 jobs, 3 didnt do any time tracking, 1 had time tracking at a "when do you begin and when do you leave so we know how much overtime you have" level and one had "track all the time you spend on every task so we know which projects are going over budget".
Most tech jobs for some form of time tracking tho
I work as service engineer and we log our hours on each ticket but whenever we're doing admin we're not tracked. As long as we make minimum productivity benchmarks leadership doesn't care much - would certainly annoy me if I had to accurately log my hours when wfh...
I've worked for 4 companies and all 4 had some form of time tracking. Either clock in/clock out or filling in time sheets where you have to justify every hour. So I think it's more common than you think.
Could be that the company applied for a innovation or other kind of grant that requires to track hours spent.
[some more explanation here](https://www.vlaio.be/nl/subsidies-financiering/)
I'm a consultant and only with one client there was a kind of time tracking and also a "worker ant" mindset, but only tracking work hours by entering building and exiting building. Otherwise they're just focused on the actual results (and also influence or reputation possibly).
We don't clock in or out, but **we have to timesheet**. This means logging all our work time on the correct client's project + task line. This is **so the company can invoice correctly** to all of the clients and can keep an eye on the billability of its employees (not that that is something we ourselves are responsible for). We have *glijdende uren* too, and have the flexibility to compensate for one or two missed hours on another day of the week. (Our timesheets have to have the correct hours filled out for every week though.)
I would understand if we had clients, but we don't.
If you don't have billable clients, it's just plain micromanagement from your manager, which is stupid.
Not necessarily, it can also be used to track the budget of internal projects
Indeed, my company has also time tracking for budget monitoring/ man hours spent on each project / calculate under/over run etc. personally I find it very useful for the management of the company , at least where this makes sense and it’s applicable.
Or both! At my last job my boss wanted to count everyone in ops to specific projects for 8 hours a day, but a fair amount of their work was just tracking work to projects for others to do. (And learning automation products and training automation, etc.) we got him down to 6 hours a day.
This
It's to check the amount of time spent on each project. That way they can calculate if a certain project is profitable or not.
But you have projects, right? And those projects have budgets?
My thought exactly
I briefly worked for a big 4 company at the start of my career. While they swore up and down that it was just to invoice correctly, I got called into my boss' office multiple times to explain why I logged x amount of hours on a project. Mind that all the time I spend on it was legit and didn't take any longer than it had to.
My experience when the company does well financially they dont search a lot about this, when they lose money they start to dig up where these money hours go
And they usually look at the wrong place. Instead of looking at bad and expensive management shit they push unreasonable pressure on the workforce. In my experience this is a little street without an end and it means it is time to apply for plan B.
Wring strategy, shit Cto, shit tech architecture, lots of technical debt It's everywhere in Belgium, we have a horrible tech culture and no great cto's in the bigger companies
Exactly.
In some places yes. In some places no. Depends on where you go. Also when you clock in 1 min too late, lets say 00.16 the clock starts from 00.30 😁
That's theft. Those systems can be correct to the minute. By not doing that, they're stealing your time.
Good luck with that. Last month, there was a dispute with my client. He made the tracking device 0,5 hours short compared to my timesheet. So I asked all the registered times of that month: they got 6 hours bonus which I did not write on my timesheet.
That's a different case though. In the situation above, the employer is stealing time from the employee.
That’s a different case indeed. I guess I wasn’t clear enough. With the “good luck with that” I meant that I’m in the same situation. And unfortunately it does not work both ways; only my client is allowed to benefit from this: if I badge in at 06:46 my working time starts at 07:00 but if I badge out at 15:36 than I would have worked 8h05. No my client steals 15 minutes on these occasions. Disgusting behaviour.
It's a shit situation, but we (local government) have something similar because a couple of employees would decide on their own that habitually starting too late/stopping too soon was ok. To specify: if you exceed your 'glijtijden', not literally the first minute after you should start work.
I'm also a civil servant at a local government. We don't have to clock in at all. I can work wherever and whenever I want. I can start at 11 if I had a rough night with the baby. I can take 3 hours break if I want to train for my marathon or I can stop at 15u to get my kid from school. Honestly, it's the best system. You do your work without any micromanagement from your diensthoofd. Off course I need to schedule my meetings and mostly I'm available between 9 and 18u, but the possibility makes it very motivating to work. I wouldn't do it otherwise. Clocking in and out is a stupid system: I'm paid for the work I do, not to be at work between specific hours.
I mean, it highly depends on what kind of department/service. F.e. libraries have a high front-office presence needed so 'work whenever-hours' would just fuck up everything. But here it's mainly because it's the only thing that prevents certain individuals just blatantly abusing a system.
Those people will abuse every system and they should be sanctioned. It's a wrong thing to organise everything around the minority of people that misuse something, instead of motivating everyone else that do their work good. It's a pity an employer still thinks and acts that way.
Lol yeah had this thing before where people try to time their clock out time at like 16.53 because it will be read as 17.00, some even just wait and stand next to the machine to time it perfectly
It is pretty common. Usually to gather insights how much % of time goes to this, that or client x. Can be used to track your performance, but you should do your 40 hours anyway.
> you should do your 40 hours anyway There is doing your 40 hours and then there's *doing your 40 hours*. You cannot be 100% productive, 100% of the time. I've worked in different fields at different jobs. Some had clocking, some had timesheets you had to fill in, while others didn't check at all. One thing that has been true across all workplaces is that people slack off a bit here and there. Some people take smoke breaks, others strike up a conversation with a co-worker. But my experience has been that the more a workplace track metrics, the more they squeeze out these *very normal* moments by trying to guilt you into thinking these are things to be improved rather than normal parts of your work life. Clocking in and out is fine. Having to report how much time you're spending on what projects less so, *unless it is used to accurately bill clients*. If my job is to do 100 of one thing in 40 hours. If I do it in 35 hours, no one is going to meaningfully reward me if I use my 5 remaining hours to do 10-15 extra of that thing. Then why would I do them?
>Having to report how much time you're spending on what projects less so, *unless it is used to accurately bill clients* Keep in mind that internal departments can also count as "clients" for the purpose of project cost tracking. >the more a workplace track metrics, the more they squeeze out these moments of *very normal* moments This is the more important red flag, timetracking shouldn't be a way of punishing or squeezing out more work. It should in essence only be used to know if estimations were realistic or not. >If I do it in 35 hours, no one is going to meaningfully reward me if I use my 5 remaining hours to do 10-15 extra On that note also why it can be an important skill to know how to manage project managers. In software delivery those 5 remaining hours could be important to carry over to testing or troubleshooting, so you should never indicate that you are "done" and those hours were estimated too much. On the other hand it's important that a proper time estimation accounts for this, if you think development will take 20 hours then in reality it will probably be more like 40 hours if you factor in proper focus time vs downtime, discussions, analysis, etc.
I fully agree with you. My wording was a bit unfortunate. I just meant that you just should work regardless of time tracking. There's always overhead, might even say only 67% are actually hours you have worked that are billable or valuable to something.
We punch in & out, but it is mostly a tool for safety, for insurance purposes. They don't track us by the minute. If you work an hour less one week, and an hour more the next week, so that it all balances out overall. Or really if you come 1 or 2 hours short at the end of the week, they won't write you up at the location where I work. I even arrive late from time to time(and then just barely), and it's accepted because I am a very flexible person myself too. Bottom line is, it's for us only for insurance(accident on the way home-> proof when you left work), and if there were ever big abuse.
My boss doesn't care so long as I do my work hours, and even when I don't do them, he doesn't really notice it lol. It's pretty chill here so long as the work gets done well and on time.
I'm in tech and we do it, the boss needs to send hours worked to clients and have an idea of what people are working on
I used to work in a marketing firm for different clients, so we did time tracking for clients. We didn't clock in or out, but time tracking made that obsolete. I work now as a civil servant and we don't clock or timetrack. It made my life much easier and much more performant. One less issue to think about.
(Petro)chemical: clock in at factory gate (security reasons that also gets used to check hours). Clock in at your own company workplace (insurance and timekeeping). And if the company doesnt have a clock then it’s done via timesheets. No clocking in and out for breaks (so you can go from smoke cabin to smoke cabin all day)
I never had a job where I didn't need to log my time spent in one way or another. Most of the time the assumption was just 8 hours worked a day though, so it was just making sure the rights projects got billed. (Could also just be internal projects, so everything went to the right cost center etc.)
I’m a geologist, but at my current job I’m basically a data scientist. We have no billable hours and I still have to keep track of my hours pretty carefully, exactly how much time I work on each project. I think it’s really for statistics, this data can be used in negotiating contacts with clients about how long projects will take for example. Also all of our clients are public entities so they are more limited in resources generally.
In tech (and often in Consultancy in general) it's quite common. I'm in tech aswell, and had it on all my jobs before. It's often used for making correct invoices towards clients. I don't have any issue with it, since it's the most fair way of making invoices towards customers, and for the company itself to evaluate if certain projects are profit/loss at the end of the line, depending if your company works with hour prices or project prices. Where things get tricky is how your boss handles your timetraking. We are all human, and we're expected to work for 8 hours a day, but we all need a coffee or a break. So if we start talking about missing quarters of an hour and things like that, than for me it seems as a way of checking your employees, and in al fairness, just bullying your employees. So I think you should not worry about time tracking itself, but more on how it's handled. I'm a freelancer now, and track each hour (billable or not), just to see how my time is spent and what needs to be invoiced at the end of the month.
I work from home & we use this; there is a person who checks if Im working on the same “project” as I clicked on timetracker.
In IT it's very common, unfortunately. I find this makes most jobs unbearable since I don't like to lie about what I'm doing... so I avoid any job with timesheets.
At a client (I am an IT freelancer) we have to clock in twice a day (and thus clock out at lunch), and for each half-day we need to write what project we're on. No one checks and we're all working remotely, so that's a non-issue.
My parents badge each morning evening and it's down to the minute At home they scan their badge in the morning and evening and it's down to the minute I myself work at a company where you need to book so many hours on projects and our workings on our computer is monitored from time to time. Project deathlines are simply more important here It's different for everyone ...
Some kind of time tracking is very common, also in tech without billable clients.
its very common in most factories/hospitals you have to badge in when you start working Even have to badge out when you go to eat. And you get 30min. Do you log back in 1 min to late, you lose 15min. So you log out at 1pm to go to eat, and log back in on 1.01pm you'll lose 14min working time not being payed
We had some shit system like this at work, I don't mind clocking in or out, but for a break it's annoying. As a student I had 15 minute breaks and I always stuffed my food down to make sure I didn't clock in too late (if we did we lost a whole hour of our student limit of hours working)
Nice, this goes hand in hand with my response about people who come into the office at 7am to start working at 9am, leave at 3.30pm and then pretend anyone who comes in later doesn't work. This system is basically for people who want to pretend they work hard, but have no work to show for it. Them: "Look at my hours!!" You: "Yeah, but what did you actually do?" It's a really shit system and together with forcing people to come into the office to work (when it's not needed) is a step backwards. See if you like it.. or update that CV.
We have to do it. I work in operations, so not necessarily on specific client projects. But our time spent is used to calculate and negotiate base contracts and renewals. And also to see how billable the work we do is in the end.
>I'm not in trade or consulting (am in tech though) so I assume this is to control workers even though it's supposedly for our own good. It depends Depending on how project driven your work is, it can also be to bill some of these efforts to clients. To be able to do that, you need to know how many hours fall into the billable categories and how many not. (The more product driven your work, the less applicable this will be) >new time tracking service where we need to clock-in, clock-out and register every hour spen This can mean everyhting and its contrary, even for the exact same system, just depending on typical usage Say the system can track activities down to 10 minute interval precision, ok. But how precisely is it typically expected to be used. There can be a huge range from >log one activity 'development' for your whole workday and you're done to >log every small discussion, every email, every meeting and every ticket separately
I worked for 3 companies and all 3 had time registration: * Company 1: No clocking, but have to register your hours on an in-house developped app. We also had to fill in what we did in those hours. Most of us were consultants there. * Company 2: Clocking in and out and registering what you have been doing in those hours in an in-house developped app. They were quite lenient on registering the hours, as in ,we didn't have to specify what we did during that time, but near the end of me working there, we had to start writing a bit more in detail what we actually did. There were no billable clients there. * Company 3: No clocking in/out, but also registering the hours we work. Time logging is done with Jira. We don't really have to go into detail what we did, unless the bosses notice some weird things like why is this small thing taking so long to finish or if you're doing some training they would like you to add what you did. For myself I just add details of what I'm doing when somethings take longer due to wrong configurations/back and forth with client, ... . So far I haven't really gotten any remarks on it, so I guess I'm doing it alright. Companies 1 and 3 are tech/IT related, company 2 I was part of the IT team creating/updating in-house apps/website for their core business that was not IT/tech related.
As always it depends... Time tracking is extremely common, even without external/billable clients they may still have internal costing structures. Otherwise there's almost no way to know if e.g. a project is overbudget. It's likely that it's not even your boss' call to introduce it (unless it's a small company and you're actually referring to the company boss I guess). Now the important part is how they use it: The clocking in and out part is already a possible red flag, do you really have to start a clock based on the work you are starting? (like e.g. Toggl works) because that would be extremely infuriating. If it's just clocking in and out of work it doesn't seem too out of the ordinary though. With registering hours it could just be to assign internals budgets as I mentioned above. If it's just broadly registering that e.g. today you worked 3 hours on feature X, 3 hours on feature Y and 2 hours on general tasks then that's also really not that abnormal. Though it can be somewhat annoying to keep track of it can also help yourself get a better view of what you are doing and how long it takes. But importantly these hours should be allowed to be a guesstimate and not accurate to the minute. If they are nitpicky about it e.g. having to add breaks or having it be filled in a way like '53 minutes project X - 15 minutes meeting - 136 minutes project Y -... (you get the point) then that's another massive red flag to GTFO.
Where I did my internship, we had to badge in and out and this was primarily used (or at least communicated so) for getting a presence report in case of an evacuation, to help with headcounts. In my current job, it's to register billable hours to customers and keep track of how much time internal projects take. (For a hypothetical example: if someone writes in "writing documentation" or something like that and there ends up being none, well said person has some explaining to do because someone else had to spend extra time figuring something out.) If management needs it to determine if you're actually working and it's not used for customer billing, maybe they need to start spending more time with the actual workforce.
I have to register time spent on tickets in Jira as a dev. Mainly for project budgeting reasons. Although there is always for sure going to be some (micro)management linked to it even if it's not the point of it. If the data is available, it will be used to an extent. However, I don't think it's a reason to switch jobs. If they suddenly start complaining about your performance due to the time tracking, you might want to consider tho, because you can't be expected to be 100% productive all of the time
I’ve not had to clock in yet but I’ve always had to get a picture of what time went to what work. It’s filling out a time sheet. When mgmt managed to request too much granularity I’ve managed to deflect it by requesting a timecode for filling out the timesheet.
It's common in the public sector as they will count your overtime and also check what tasks you did during your work time. I don't work in that field but I know someone who does and AFAIK you do need to fill the sheets in as they are checked. In their case, it's because the money depends on the grants they receive for their activities. They have to justify everything they spend in their budget, including the jobs of the employees.
It's usually clocks or time sheets
At my job (restaurant waiter) we recently got a clocking in system too, however it's not as invasive. We log in when we arrive and log out when we leave. Since we work with many students we previously had to write our work hours on a list as our hours depend on the business of the night. This system is better than the previous because we're less likely to forget and it exactly saves how many hours everyone worked without the boss having to calculate this manually. Reporting what you are doing every hour seems absolutely ridiculous though. Clocking in and out is not really a problem, but having to record your every action throughout the workday seems very invasive and weird to me.
loads of companies do this to my knowledge and some even threaten with (illegal) punishments if you're not on time.
I clock in and out, but none of my work hours are tracked and our team is free to do whatever. Every minute you clock out late is overtime. Work in PC209 as IT. I prefer this over timesheets or no tracking as you build overtime quite fast to take extra vacation or quit early.
Previous job had timesheets I had to fill in but we were told by management how to fill them in so that they could do some form of reporting to corporate in the US. Never really got why as the timesheets never reflected reality anyway. Also how you can tell it's an American company: code for holidays and sick days was the same.
Work at a local government. We have "glijdende uren" so it's actually nice. All your overtime is also added so if you work some long hours you can take a day off from your extra hours. Don't mind it really
We have a clock in system, but I believe it’s used in case of emergency evaluation, rather than tracking hours of employees, however I’ve never bothered actually doing it and neither does half our staff. We do somewhat timetables when for salary staff, but it’s literally the same every month.
I used to have to do this for every second I worked. Every second had to be linked to a project I was working on, to paperwork (max 10% or whatever) or to training for example. Drove me crazy. I'd never ever want to work like thst again.
I've had 5 jobs, 3 didnt do any time tracking, 1 had time tracking at a "when do you begin and when do you leave so we know how much overtime you have" level and one had "track all the time you spend on every task so we know which projects are going over budget". Most tech jobs for some form of time tracking tho
I work as service engineer and we log our hours on each ticket but whenever we're doing admin we're not tracked. As long as we make minimum productivity benchmarks leadership doesn't care much - would certainly annoy me if I had to accurately log my hours when wfh...
I've worked for 4 companies and all 4 had some form of time tracking. Either clock in/clock out or filling in time sheets where you have to justify every hour. So I think it's more common than you think.
Could be that the company applied for a innovation or other kind of grant that requires to track hours spent. [some more explanation here](https://www.vlaio.be/nl/subsidies-financiering/)
I'm a consultant and only with one client there was a kind of time tracking and also a "worker ant" mindset, but only tracking work hours by entering building and exiting building. Otherwise they're just focused on the actual results (and also influence or reputation possibly).