Expert: Shirley McAllister, CPP, PHR - 6/6/2011

Question
I am a new HR manager and I have a question. If the company sets a start time at 7am and employees start swiping their time cards at 6:41 am with the understanding that work does not start until 7am do we still have to pay them the 19 minutes from clocking in early? Even when they clock in early they do not begin work until 7am. We do pay OT based on clock out times. thank you.

Answer
Hi,

If you allow them to check in early than they must be paid according to what is on their timecard. You are not allowed to change the timecard it would be considered fixing timecards. You are only allowed to change the time if there is a missed punch or something of that nature and never without the approval of the employee. I actually have an initialed email from every employee asking for punches to be fixed.

Employees should not check in until they are ready to start working.

You are allowed by law to round the time automatically both in and out to the nearest 15 minutes of time. Many HR managers call it the 7 minute rule. There is no real 7 minute rule, but the Department of Labor says you can round to the nearest 15 minutes so if it is 7 minutes before worktime it round back. If the employee starts work at 8:00 and checks in at 7:54 it would round back to 8:00 and if he checks in at 7:52 it will round to 7.45.  It would work the same way at 5:00 when the employee leaves. 5:07 will round back to 5:00. 5:09 will round to 5:15.

You can set the rounding feature on the timeclock to do this automatically. It must be done both morning and evening according to the Department of Labor to be legal

As an HR Manager you need to know that if the employee consistently checks in early or late for overtime he should be told not to do this the first time, than written up for it and than he can be suspended or terminated if he continues to disobey the company rules. Write a policy regarding correct timecard proceedure, put it in the handbook, hand it out to the employees and let them know this is against policy and they will be reprimended for it.

While you still must pay the time according to the department of labor you have the right to discipline an employee for disregarding or breaking company policy.


Shirley