A bunch of us have been operating under RTO requirements being four hours in the office. Just heard from leadership today that it’s seven hours and that managers will now be looking at reports to verify this. Has it always been seven hours? Where is this requirement communicated? Or maybe this is just our line of business?
21 replies (most recent on top)
They don’t keep that data on a database? I would think it would just be a simple query with SQL or something similar, and the more inconvenient part of it would be putting in the request or whatever and getting it approved.
If they’re already storing all that data, why would it be expensive to query it? Just select for the columns you need and put the right unique ID and time range in the where clause. Once it’s approved it should take 5 minutes to produce, tops.
@ds+1 yes they can pull individual data but it's extremely manual and only used if there is suspicion/reason to suspect a pattern of abuse.
If OC+1 (direct report to OC) is "upper management" I can tell you for sure they do not have any reporting that's different than what any manager sees. They don't get reporting on hours.
@ds
It is very expensive to pull an individual report on someone to track badge swipes, network connection and pings. So management wont do that unless someone is snitching .
There’s definitely a way to have data pulled for a specific employee that would contain all their badge-swipes/network pings and the times they occurred. But they’d already have to have suspicions that somebody was just coffee badging that they wanted to investigate them specifically. Managers at least don’t have any routine reporting available showing all their directs and their hours. Who knows what sort of reports upper management has access to, I’ve heard rumors they have something but they could just be rumors.
@db correct. I know people that go late at night and swipe 2 days at once.
Anyway the #1 rule of fight club is don't ask about fight club.
I know for a fact several people that just swipe and don’t even log into the network and they’re still working here. So as folks have stated, the only way you can really be tracked is by being watched by others in the office who then go and snitch to your manager. Otherwise no one will know how long you were in the office.
Upper management can track badge swipes every quarter. But not actual hours. Your manager cant see hours yall.
The in-office reporting Does. Not. Track. Hours.
The FAQs on the reporting site says: what counts as a day in office is a badge swipe, a network connection, a travel/hotel day booked through concur or PTO/personal holiday of 4 hours or more. That’s where people keep citing 4 hours from. It has nothing to do with how long you actually stay in the office.
Individual managers can “mandate” hours as expectations, but unless someone is co-located and watching you come and go… there is no tracking
depends on manager, i’m in a part of tech and we were told 6 hrs months ago
Everyone questions when they were notified it was 8 hours a day but reality is if you were in office 8 hours before covid/wfh then when were you notified it WASNT 8 hours? A lot of job descriptions or offers have the work hours expectations on them.
2- regardless of what it was before today, your manager has now told you the expectation going forward. End of discussion.
It’s all LOB and manager specific. Why not test it out? Real simple, do a week at 4hrs. If it’s being looked at you’ll get flagged and warned. If you don’t get warned it’s just lip service.
So the best thing is to not ask too many questions. Otherwise they will come up with a standard and you won’t like it.
Management makes threats about in-office reporting every few months or so but the spreadsheet doesn't track time, only days in office. If you've put in 6 hours, 4 hours, 2 hours and haven't been talked to, you're fine. In my experience employees only get in trouble not because of the report that's generated, but because of bitter coworkers reporting to their manager.
As long as it takes me to go in, get a cup of coffee turn back around swipe my badge get back to the car so 15 minutes maybe
They’d never communicated a company-wide expectation on hours in-office. The 4-hours thing was because 4 hours PTO is what it takes for PTO to count as an in-office day, but exempt employees are only supposed to put in either 4 or 8 hours PTO on a single day anyway.
Our LOB was recently told a “full day” was expected and it’s floated around the rumor mill that they have some sort of time tracking, but I’ve yet to hear any confirmation they actually have that truly built out. I know my manager doesn’t have access to any such tracking yet. Their warnings thus far seem to be directed generally, and in response to execs doing an “eye test” of office floors on certain days in the afternoon and not liking what they see as far as occupancy. I have yet to hear of anybody in our LOB get told they’re showing up on any reporting as not being here long enough.
So it could be that it’s still just whatever your particular LOB wants to tell people at this point.
Does it really matter? They just told you the requirements. Doesn't matter what happened in the past.
So still no one really has an answer.
My understanding: they do have to be careful about over-stepping overtime exemptions, so there’s that, if that’s a that.
What business line are you in? I just get coffee and go...no issues
6 hours.
The hours are being communicated by your management. No minimum has been communicated at the enterprise level. By clearly communicating a minimum your manager has the option to consider compliance to in-office expectations on your performance review.
TL/DR- do the 7 hours!