Working until our scheduled time or leaving right after we clock out?
IMO, it all depends on your job or how much your manager cares, even though I’ve seen people leave 5 minutes early, right on time, or sometimes stay 5-10 minutes after their scheduled time.
I define it as the moment when I punch out on the time clock.
I’m not sure I understand the question. Do you mean in terms of how we get paid, or just when we feel we’ve finished work, something else?
I have tended to have had jobs that were finished when they were finished and I got to go home when they were finished. As a pilot I’d have a schedule for the day and I’d work until I’d completed the schedule and then go home. I was paid the greater of what I’d actually worked or the schedule or the minimum guaranteed hours (59 flight hours in 28 days). Now I control trains and I’m on the clock until the next shift comes and takes over from me. I’m sometimes asked to work later to cover sickness but I’m also often sent home early as things quieten down in the evening and different geographical train control areas are combined to be under just one controller. Again, I’m essentially paid the greater of what I actually worked or what I was scheduled to work or the minimum guaranteed hours (80 hours / fortnight in this case).
I’m on salary so I suppose as long as hit 40 hours by Friday afternoon there’s no real set time to clock in or out. I typically work 7-3:30 with a half-hour lunch break but some days I work more or less, depending on what happens to be going on that day.
As far as the process goes… I log my billable hours in an online portal and submit at the end of each week. I guess once I click that button I’m basically clocked out for the week.
Ditto.
For hourly workers, at least, I’m not sure how anything else makes any sense.
It’s an annoying process I engage in at the end of the week. Open stupid time clock application in web browser. Create an entry for time punch request. Select “forgot to punch”. Reason: “I forgot”. Select date. Punch in standard start and end times. Repeat for remaining days of the week.
I’m a professional, I’m spoiled, and I have no patience for a cumbersome agency’s notion that its employees should clock in and out instead of just trusted to put in our hours.
The time system that I use just assumes
you’re going to be there unless you tell it you’re not.
So there’s no physical clocking out.
For me, it’s when I log off my computer. Then I just sit and relax until my replacement shows up.
I am a partner in a firm. I work in a 24/7/365 industry. I haven’t clocked out since 1996 approximately.
Academic here, so there is no equivalent at all (often I wish there were). This has pros and cons.
I’ll be off the clock when I retire, quit, or die, whichever happens first. 
Not salary, but work odd ours and often have to. That’s the nature of programming and managing a few of our many servers. I worked yesterday for a while which would technically put me into overtime, but it was my choice. I’ll just adjust my hours for this week. Don’t care about overtime, I do care about getting things done.
I now work from home (thank god). Most of the team does. COVID brought many changes.
I say hello to other team members in the morning on Slack (a sort of instant message system). I guess that’s my ‘clock in’. I clock out by saying good night. Just to let people know when I’m out for the day.
But like Princhester, I never really clock out. I’ve been puzzling about an issue we have all weekend on and off. But most people do that if you work at McD’s or a Fortune 500 company.
I should do a bit of research on the issue, but I have a sink drain to clear at home. So the work stuff will probably wait until tomorrow.
Another salaried programmer, but one with better compartmentalization than most - my ‘clock out’ is whenever I leave the office, at which point my brain tends to completely flush the cache of all work thought until I come in for the next day of work and have to forensically determine what I was doing the day before. (Often what’s on my screen when I power my computer up is a good clue.) This also happened when I was working from home - once I shut the computer down, I was ‘off the clock’.
Of course, as a salaried person, there actually is no clock. In fact a couple of weeks ago the boss sent out an email asking all of us how many hours we were working, because she didn’t know and her boss had asked. (This caused some consternation, because apparently the last time this was asked a whole bunch of extra overtime was demanded a short while later. We’ll see.)
I clock in as soon as I arrive, still with my coat on and hot beverage in hand. It’s a call in system so I’m standing at my desk using the phone.
At the end of the day when there’s nothing left to do, and after I’ve visited the loo and put on my coat then I pick up the phone to clock out.
I teach at a community college. I’m student facing 20 hours a week. I’m contracted for 35. My Dean is in another building. I come and go as I please but my teaching schedule changes quarterly.
I don’t punch a clock at my current job.
My hours tend to run long. I may come in at 8:20 and work till 6 or 7. Instead of straight 8 to 5.
Once in awhile things work out that I can leave at 4:15. But, I had already worked 9 or 10 hour days earlier in the week.
I don’t get overtime and rarely put down comp time. Unless there is a emergency. Last payday, a staff pc picked up a virus. I worked untill almost 11pm formating the drive and reinstalling Windows & her software. I earned comp time for that.
Ditto. On weekends I am still expected to have my work phone with me.
Hell, I get chided for not answering intakes when they call at 2 am. Mofo, I’m asleep! I’ll call on the drive to work.
Teachers at my school are expected to arrive by 7:00 and stay until 3:00, but there’s no actual mechanism for tracking that. If you happen to pass by the principal on your way in or out, you wave, but I doubt they’re keeping track unless someone’s egregious about it.
In practice, I see a lot of teachers leaving at 2:55. And I personally usually aim to leave at about 3:05, just because the traffic situation in the parking lot is a bit calmer by then.
I’m salaried, and my workplace is pretty laissez-faire when it comes to coming and going times. The official time is 8-5, but in practice, that means as long as you put in 8 hours on average, and that you’re basically in the office from about 9-3, you’re good.
Every couple of weeks, we have to go enter our time into the timekeeping system. Thus far, there hasn’t been any demand to actually track how long we spend on each project, unlike my last job. This is strictly for the sake of the system- there’s a sort of “Normal Week” button where you enter a 1 or a 2 for an entire week at a shot.
My previous employer was the other way around; they didn’t require us to track our time for payroll purposes, but rather for project accounting. Which was a colossal pain in the ass, since it was OUR OWN department demanding this nonsense. If it had been a payroll thing, I think we’d have been more amenable to it. As it was, it was mostly guesstimation, if not outright fabrication on everybody’s part. I think as long as the work was getting done, and we sort of approximated how long we worked on everything, it was good enough for calculating project spend.
When I telework, I just turn off my work computer when I’m done at 1630. When I go in to the office, anytime it’s 1600 or later, I just leave. In both cases, I enter my hours on an online timesheet the next morning.
I am retired, but I did installation, service and repair at client sites. We had a payroll app on our phones an I would clock in when I left the house to drive to my first appointment and back out when I got home at the end of the day. The app took care of everything.
There was a second app on my iPad where I would clock in and out of each appointment. This is where I entered invoice information and listed parts used. Each job required a report and closing out of that program uploaded all of the billing and reports to our server. It also printed a customer copy on the printer in my truck.
Heh, “trusted.”