15 Minutes expected before you begin

[ThatPearlkitty]

Inspired by another thread but a separate topic when eg the role is 9 to 5 paid hourly then why do some employers want people eg 15 mins before your actual start time why dont they pay for your time before then, yes i understand most roles is necessary eg coat, get ready for the day etc but then its free labour ?

Logging in is part of your job and should be paid for.

I work a minimum wage job and aim to clock in about 10 minutes before my shift at 0550. I then deal with my coat, lunch etc and join the huddle. Often a group of people won't arrive until 2 or 3 minutes after the start time and the supervisor can't allocate work until they know everyone is in (lots of agency staff including me). I think 15 minutes is excessive!

At my work a lot of people use the facilities just before lunch break and just before the end of the shift. I very rarely use the work toilet- probably about once every 6 months - but I would normally wait until break or home time but that's me!

I walk straight into the office at no earlier than 8:55, bang my lunch in the kitchen fridge and sit down at my desk and log on so I’m always ready for 9:00am. Takes me at most 2 minutes. (Unless there’s a Windows update and the circle of death 😂)

I don’t drink tea or coffee though, I bring a bottle of water to work with me.

But I really don’t get the people who arrive early and just faff about. Life’s too short to spend unnecessary time at work.

I'm totally with you, I used to work for a building society. Contracted hours 9-5pm paid from 9am was always expected to start at 8.45am every day for closed for training sessions/team meeting. Never got extra pay the 1hr 15 mins a week we worked and if you were late for the training it was used against you in performance reviews!

Then turn up one minute before and be ready to work dead on 9 then.

I don’t believe that any workplace has an actual written policy where employees are expected to come in 15mins early to prep before their start time.

We have a clocking in system and we allow for 5-10mins clock in before start time (paid of course) should you need to catch up on something / put your uniform on and there’s a queue for the changing rooms etc. In lateness disciplinaries I will make a suggestion though to leave your house / arrive a bit earlier if you are persistently unable to clock in on time. That’s a suggestion to improve timekeeping and not a policy, and I wouldn’t expect anyone to arrive early and start doing work, but I will expect them to make considerations to get them in on time.

Logging in is work.

The way i look at it is if I have a meeting at 9am i need to be online, on teams and ready to join the meeting at 9am which is my start time. I also want to make sure I haven’t had any urgent emails or messages before the meeting so I make sure I’m online 5 or 10 minutes early. That’s my choice in a senior leadership role. I wouldn’t expect others to do that but would be concerned if someone didn’t join meetings on time however. I avoid putting meetings in at 9am for that reason but others do quite frequently and it is frustrating when we never get started properly on time because people join late.

I hope you target your frustration at your colleagues for foolishly choosing inappropriate starting times for meetings - showing no business sense of the basic preparation time needed in advance of a meeting - rather than at the people who are expected to attend them without any preparation the moment their working day begins?

Who in their right mind would schedule something that clearly isn't the first task in the working day for the minute when people's working day begins? It's as mad as expecting to butter your toast before you've put the bread in the toaster!

You hardly ever use your work toilet? You go 7 or 8 hours without a pee???

I used to work with someone several grades above me who would wander in at 9am, take her time taking her coat off, have loud conversations with others about their weekends, what they were watching on the telly etc, take her time sorting her lunch out to put in the fridge, get her breakfast (cereal and milk), eat her breakfast at her desk, wash up her breakfast dish, make a cup of coffee and THEN start work. Oh, and before starting work she would reapply her lipstick and spray her hair with hairspray - in a shared office.

Another colleague kept chickens and would microwave herself some scrambled egg every morning to eat at her desk. To be fair, she prepared it before she started work and would eat it while reading her emails, but it stank!

I think employers need to have a specific policy about this, one that takes account of the physical set-up of the job, with jobs where the bulk of the preparation for starting work is due to requirements of equipment that the employer has elected to have - eg logging on to multiple systems, use of authenticator, needing to adjust screen settings due to hot desking policies etc - having an explicit start time of 10 minutes before actual on-task work time, with that ten minutes being paid.

This is how it works in eg factory jobs - you clock on when you are physically ready to work. The line you're assigned to (ie the employer's equipment) may not be physically ready, indeed it often isn't, but you're paid for the time it takes to get it up and running, because you yourself are already classed as working.

Requiring this is no more petty than employers resolutely refusing to include lunch breaks in pay calculations.

I struggle to believe this too - unless PP lives next door and goes home every time she needs a wee... which will obviously take considerably longer than using a toilet on the premises.

If you have any kind of strategic/managerial responsibility for the untouchables your employer pays minimum wage to, you absolutely do need to start thinking differently.

I think there's a balance to be struck, isn't there?

Staff who are flagrantly wasting work time with their own drawn-out personal activities can be challenged about this on an individual basis, without expecting everybody to give 10/20/30 minutes of their own time every day for essential work-based tasks.

Nothing wrong with an employer sending out a memo to remind staff of this: "Please ensure that you are ready to log on and prepare to start your working day at your paid start time; but you are very welcome to come in earlier if you like to catch up with personal chat or get some breakfast etc. before work."

But what if you arrived 5 mins before 9 and started working by 9? Would they consider you late?

I think there's a common mindset that people who work in factories and other manual jobs - 'blue collar' - are the ones on minimum/low wages; whilst those who work in offices - 'white collar' - are all on very decent salaries.

The latter may be true for those at board and higher management level, but there are many, many people who work sitting at a desk who are on very low rates of pay - often lower than a lot of the people in the more manual jobs.

@AntiqueBabyLoanSmurf you're right. People on salaries don't tend to get paid overtime but some of my admin colleagues working in a university are paid very low salary for what they do. That said, I think it's more flexible where we are with start and end times and lots of them can take time off in lieu.

The old job in a call centre I mentioned upthread was an hourly rate. Any hourly rate job shouldn't be expecting half hour extra regularly.

Yes, regularly- I probably should drink more when I'm at work but I'm the same if I go out shopping or staying somewhere! I'm at work for 8 hours.

@AntiqueBabyLoanSmurf Yes, absolutely. I think historically the distinction came about because, although there have been low paid clerical jobs since professions became salaried, those clerical jobs were always more desirable than manual jobs because they were in a safer environment - you were much less likely to die at work, basically. Even though you weren't paid a great deal and were expected to fund your own "respectable" work clothes, it was a more pleasant life than working in eg a coal mine or a steelworks.

But, low paid clerical workers although their working set up looks similar have never had the same kind of rewards from their employers as the professionals and managers do. They still don't, despite that now they may be less physically distinguishable from them as they sit alongside them in open plan offices. It's ludicrous to assign the same expectations to them wrt flexibility etc as someone with four, five, six times more wages and therefore four, five, six times more purchasing power, wealth accumulation mechanisms and so on at their disposal.

Yes, I was wondering what the poster meant by 'professional environment' as well. Do they not have any support staff?
But also you don't need to be on minimum wage to work your proper hours.

That sounds very unhealthy. Are you too busy to drink and pee or afraid of public toilets?

University jobs are probably among the best admin jobs there in terms of conditions and pay. And yes, if you have to start early one day, you should be able to leave early another day.
People on an hourly rate shouldn't work more unless they're paid for it.

In my first job (public sector) it took 30 minutes for the computers and programmes to ‘warm up’. They tried to get us to come in early, very soon backed down when the union got involved.

instead they paid ONE person to come in half an hour early to turn them all on and boot up the programmes. This went on for 2 years.

Then it went to ‘individual logins’ and they had to pay everybody.

then the jobs got regraded and people were finally compensated above minimum wage.