[nevatiaritika]

My employer monitors tap in, tap out and break times too. It started with a "good intention" from the HR and middle management started exploiting it in no time.

Background:

There was a lot of new about a year or two ago how the Japanese government was starting to take initiatives to reduce the overtime culture here in Japan. We always had to tap in our security cards to enter the building and perhaps the timings were always recorded for security concerns. But, the HR announced that in an effort to reduce overtime culture, these times will be automatically entered in the attendance system and your boss would be notified if you worked for 8 hours or more. "Ideally" the boss should then reprimand you and overtime, we would become overtime-free culture to work in.

What really happened:

While there were emails being sent for every employee working more than 8 hours, the manager would just approve it. There was no practical use of the new system and nothing improved. Rather, my managers started getting access to all this data they never had direct access to before. Colleagues were being sent emails if their break times exceeded 5 minutes more than the stipulated 1 hour. Same for coming in at 9:04 instead of 9:00. When a colleague back lashed, upper management threatened him by telling him they could also dig up his PC on/off/sleeptimes etc to give him significant paycuts.

The work culture was never worse.