Aibu. ahhh boss quibbling over 1 minute.

[Peterbear]

IWork for a council in E England. NEw boss has just emailed to say that she has checked my time sheets - on a couple of days last month i have written start time as 8am. ( work from home since covid) I did not however send in my 'log on' email till 8.01. I am being asked to go back and amend my time sheet.
Wtf?? Do I say don't be ridiculous that is a complete waste of taxpayer money or do I just play along? Worth saying that I often work a bit over and don't log this as feel it's petty to put for example 5.07 on a time sheet. Wwyd? Aibu to think jesus get a bloody life??

God i had a micromanager like this once. You have my sympathies.

She wanted every tea break and lunch entered too, tried to ask for loo breaks as well. She got in trouble with HR when ever staff member had loads of input to the excel sheets. Most of us took tea at our desk and ate at our desk answering emails so 1 day sheet would look like this:
8am logon
845 make tea
848 back at desk
11am tea
1103 at desk
1pm buy lunch
115 email
118 lunch
127 email
135 lunch etc. etc. all day.

HR were not impressed and asked for start and finish times only. They also raked boss over the coals as she insisted lunch was at our desks in the first place! Whether working at home or office. They said the timesheets proved an unhealthy atmosphere.

Interestingly the next manager didn't care about timesheets, was flexible and everyone worked much harder for her. We even came in and worked over a non working weekend a couple of days during our busy time as we knew she'd let us have it in lieu

I have a colleague who is a team leader (not mine, thankfully), who records all her subordinates times in her little black book.

So if x writes on the timesheet 5pm leaving, but it’s actually 4:58pm she notes it down and will pull them up in their 1-2-1s. Unsurprisingly they don’t ever stay late to help out.

Whereas I’m free to come and go as I please, which means I’m usually the first person in the office and stay late frequently if things need sorting.

We also have an electronic time sheet to fill out corporately and our team has a paper sign in sheet. She will cross reference the times to make sure they match up.

I had much worse than the 15 minutes docked for 1 minute under some people have noted. I was a contractor working for a big bank, working a "professional 40 hour week" which basically means anything under 40 hours you don't get paid, anything over 40 hours you also don't get paid - so I was working typically 45-47 hours a week but only being paid for the 40.

But the timesheet system the agency used was rather inflexible, and only worked on an 8 hour day basis. So you could work any about over the 8 hours and it still rated that as 1 day. But as little as 1 minute under on any day meant you would be docked a half day as you hadn't done your 8 hours! So 7 hours 55 minutes would still only be paid 4 hours. Bearing in mind that were were being paid in the region of £3-500 per day depending on role, that was a fair bit to lose!

My boss at that time (also a contractor, as most of the team were) was an absolute stickler for abiding by the rules etc but even he would tell us to log for the full 8 hours even if we'd done a short day (say an hour or so less) - he knew we were all professionals & wouldn't take the piss.

I'm sooooo lucky. We've got Skype and my boss has messaged me before saying he's noticed my status has been green for over an hour and to take a break (I'm on a reasonable adjustment plan). I couldn't work with micro managers again.

pfffft - that's nothing. I worked - very briefly - for a company that expected you to supply your own toilet roll and hand cleanser.

I had a manager who would check the sign in sheet against time sheets and even once went as far as to call for the log sheet of passes swiping into the building. Her lack of trust was duly noted. I acted entirely in kind, I also started looking elsewhere. Fortunately when they made redundancies they decided only 1 person in the whole section at her level had to go .... so she's retired early I understand.

That would really get my hackles up! Clearly she must know it takes more than 1 minutes to log on and send an email and quite honestlhy - 1 minute can easily be the difference between a clock and an email time stamp. New boss is a box ticking twat. I had a boss that would time how long i took to go to the loo or make a coffee and complained i took longer than the others in the office. Did care i was the only female and my loo was further away let alone lady stuff. As for coffee - it was my only rest bite from being glared at so took the time to de stress. Even had a phone call when i was in the loo him raging at me for packing up and leaving and to bloody well get back now. I said i was in the loo i would be a minute and he threatened to come and check!! Needless to say - i didnt stay with that boss!

Tbh I can see why your boss is annoyed- if your start time is 8am, that is the time you should be at your desk working, having already logged on. It doesn’t mean you saunter in the door at 8, make a cup of tea and log on at 8.15.

I’m a senior manager and director of a medium-sized company and we expect our employees to be working throughout their contracted hours. So if they are employed from 8am-5pm, they should be logged on and working at 8 and should log off at 5pm.

Staff should not be making cups of tea during working hours and they should not be logging off their computer before their finish time.

@FishyDuck

Tbh I can see why your boss is annoyed- if your start time is 8am, that is the time you should be at your desk working, having already logged on. It doesn’t mean you saunter in the door at 8, make a cup of tea and log on at 8.15.

I’m a senior manager and director of a medium-sized company and we expect our employees to be working throughout their contracted hours. So if they are employed from 8am-5pm, they should be logged on and working at 8 and should log off at 5pm.

Staff should not be making cups of tea during working hours and they should not be logging off their computer before their finish time.

Unless all your staff are doing a service desk type role, where customers will be calling at bang on 8 every morning, there really isn't a need for getting het up about 1 measly minute of a morning when much more than that one minute is being made up at the end of the day on a regular basis. Presumably you would be annoyed if a staff member logged off at 5pm means leaving something incomplete, or dropping a long call part way through. Anywhere I've worked in the past the assumption is that you finish anything crucial at the end of the day, especially if it will only take a few minute, but that expectation was tempered with a bit of give and take. Otherwise it's all "give" on the staff member's part, and "take" on the management side.

And the OP wasn't talking about regularly logging on then going afk for 15 minutes, she's talking about ONE minute, twice in an entire month.

Fair enough to be logged on and working during working hours but
"Staff should not be making cups of tea during working hours". What do you expect them to do? They're entitled to make a quick drink. That's mean.

Jesus Christ I am very glad I dont work for Fishyduck! Not being able to make a hot drink during working hours - I bet morale isn't high there!

Fishyduck is the type of manager who can only fixate on appearance not performance...this is more about power plays than profit ...wonder what the staff turnover is ..

I've had managers who , if offered the choice of a staff member making targets and profits in four hours or less profit in eight hours would've taken the eight hours so as to exercise their power over someone ..there are some truly weird people out there .

I'd love to hear your staff's side of things @FishyDuck

On outlook you can set emails to go at a time of your choice. Just saying ;)

Play them at their own game.

Go along with and make sure you arrive 10mins early and leave 10 mins late every day and put it on your time sheet.

They are being unnecessarily pedantic but they are your boss so you've no option but to comply but make it hurt. 😉

If staff aren’t allowed to make a cup of tea, are they allowed to go to the lav or do they have to piss their pants?

Staff should not be making cups of tea during working hours

🤣

Good to see Scrooge is alive and well.

Seriously though, your staff satisfaction levels must be abysmal. Who treats people like that?

are they allowed to go to the lav or do they have to piss their pants?

Maybe they’re required to catheterise themselves for a shift?

@FishyDuck , do you sometimes wonder why staff are always leaving? Why they're not willing to "go that extra mile"? Why they treat your business as just "some job"? Why it's so hard to get them doing overtime?
Treating people as if they were some components in a machine rather than people shows you don't care about them, so why should they care about you?

I reckon fishyducks employees will be unhappy. We expect people to be in and working for their contracted hours. We can't be flexible as emergency services and if we don't have staff in your 999 call could go unanswered however I am happy for my staff to make a drink or whatever in work hours. They wouldn't do it if we were busy. I also don't give them grief if they are late occasionally for something out of their control. In return the staff I manage will cut short their breaks or log in early if we have spike in calls. I also give them extra time off if they have done something that really helps us out. If you build up good will people go the extra mile for you.

It boils down to being a decent manager, you know the kind of manager that can differentiate between employees that are big on 'presenteeism' and the ones who actually put in the graft. It ain't rocket science!

@FishyDuck you sound a lot of fun 🙄