I work for a software company in the support department. Many of us are remote or just not in the main corporate office. Since I started last year, they have been pretty awesome with how we are compensated. The whole culture of the company is pretty awesome overall. Basically, you are required to enter your hours on a time card every pay period. If you work extra, you enter it as more than the standard 8 hours for that day and get paid overtime. If you take PTO (which is unlimited), you enter PTO hours. I am basically non-exempt salary which is great.
Welp, yesterday HR casually sent out an email that all this is changing at the beginning of April. Starting then, we'll have to log in to our slow-ass HR website 4x per day to punch in/out for our shifts and lunch breaks. A mandatory training time has been set up for the Friday before it takes effect.
In order to make it easier for [employees] to capture their time worked each day, we are updating our timesheet interface in [HR Portal]. Starting Sunday, April 3, 2022, you will capture work time each day by simply clicking the “punch” button in [HR Portal] when you start work and stop work.
This needs to be done in real time, for instance at the point when you start working you should record a punch versus capturing your time at the end of the day or week. It is important that you are capturing your hours completely and accurately to ensure you are paid for all compensable time. As a reminder, you should never perform work off the clock as we want to ensure you are compensated for all time worked.
I replied with this email
I was immediately responded to with a “Thanks for your feedback” and offered an opportunity to meet with HR about it. The meeting is Monday. Not sure what they're going to do or say about this.
IT already has tools installed on our computers to make sure we are interacting with them every 10 minutes or else our status in the chat app goes to 'away' which our supervisors monitor (I bought a mouse shaker to circumvent this). We also report our status in the on-shift chat anytime we need to step away from the phones for an extended period of time. That seemed adequate, but apparently they needed more.
It is disheartening and likely a result of some new blood in the management pool that is reverting to ways other companies do things. Our department is constantly applauded for how well we do constantly both by our customers and our C-Level officers. I am concerned this is a trend that will keep going. I REALLY don't want to have to look for another job anytime soon.
EDIT: Redacted info in image