How many hours do you require of employees? 17

[referee]

I own and manage a ten person engineering firm. On the average, I work 60 hours a week at the office. My wife usually only sees me at work (she works there as well as my accountant). For those of you with engineering employees, how many hours do you require them to work? I feel that asking 50 hours a week from my employees is not too much; what do you think?

 

[JAE]

I guess it depends on whether you pay them accordingly for the additional time verses what they can get paid across town for 40 hours/week.

 

[whyun]

Short duration of overtime is expected of employees to meet major deadlines, say two to four weeks no more than twice a year. Expecting a constant 50 hour work week is too much regardless of overtime pay. Hours spent beyond 40 hour work week are generally less productive.

 

[TheTick]

They are employees. They are not partners, shareholders, or indentured servants. If you need more time from them, the only right thing to do is pay them for their time.

Your employees share none of the risk of business ownership. I doubt that any of them share any significant chance of additional reward, either.

The illegal conscription of non-managerial salaried professionals to work unpaid overtime went on for many years. Judicial review of the existing laws showed that engineers were not exempt, even though the practice was widespread (universal?). It was only recently that laws were changed to make this abuse legal, reclassifying engineers as "creative professionals" or some rot like that.

 

[tygerdawg]

When I interviewed my present company, Mr. Big asked how many hours per week I currently worked. I told him:

"I average about 50 now." He gave a kind of smug, approving smile.

I quickly added, "And that's too much. I worked 100-hour weeks in graduate school, and that cured me of long hours for anybody except myself. I am looking for a 40-hour job, and am willing to do a little more to get things done. If you're expecting people to work those kinds of hours, it tells me that you don't have enough people."

They hired me anyway, and are paying me a very decent salary.

So far with this company I have willingly put in some outrageous hours for a couple of crisis situations. It wasn't pleasant, I did it anyway, and the situation was caused by Management's inability to act effectively. I communicated to management that this is the fastest way to make me leave the company. So far, this kind of silly nonsense has stopped, and I'm still here.

TygerDawg

 

[whyun]

There are employees who can produce 4 hours worth of work on an 8 hour Saturday (costing you 12 hours in wages) and others who can produce 10 hours worth of work in a regular 8 hour work day. As an employer, identify the second kind and do whatever you can to keep them.

 

[FACS]

40 hours is plenty time to get the job done.
If not, then more people need to be hired or someone needs to work more efficiently.

I don't expect any of my employees to regularly work more than 40 hours per week. Other than finishing a project or working on an emergency, no one should be expected to work more without compensation.

I respect my employees and I respect their time; I choose not to steal it.

Charlie

http://www.facsco.com

 

[kontiki99]

The problem with the 50 hrs/week deal is that if an employee wants to exercise regularly or take clases it's more difficult and maybe impossible depending on their other obligations.

How do your medical and retirement benifets stack up as an offset to no growth in the direction of their choice.

 

[referee]

I wasn't asking about if I'm paying a project manager enough; I was asking how many hours do you expect from him on staff?

TygerDawg, asking for more time from an employee may not mean that I need more people; it can also mean that I don't make enough income on the hours he works to produce a net margin. He could be being paid more than he is producing at the salary I give him. Assuming that the salaries I pay are in line with other project managers' salaries, how many hours a week would you expect from him (for ex. at $60,000)? Also, I'm located in Fly-over country.

TheTick, what in your opinion is a significant chance of an additional award? Is sharing 19% of the net profits of the company between eight employees each year significant enough?

Thank you for all input!

Referee

 

[FranMac]

"On the average, I work 60 hours a week at the office. My wife usually only sees me at work . . . "

Get a life!

 

[referee]

FranMac,
Are you a business owner? Do you not know that business owners on the average, work much more than their employees? Did you know that CPAs also work these hours during a number of important months a year? In a small firm such as mine, the owner may clean the bathrooms, shovel the walks, fix the furnace, take the mail to the post office, and various other things that the other employees wouldn't deem worthy of their time. If I paid everyone else to do these overhead costs, the expenses would close the doors, the taxes would snow me under, and I would have to work for someone else. There ARE reasons to work as the boss...

 

[FACS]

referee,
I worked as a janitor through college. Now here I am, owning my own business, and I'm moping the floor and scrubbing the toilets... Good thing I'm experienced in that area...



Charlie

http://www.facsco.com

 

[TheTick]

Profit sharing is a good incentive to give employees a feeling of ownership and help spur productivity. However, it is not guaranteed, and (in my experience) not truly an equitable trade for one's precious time.

The fact remains that employees are not owners, and it is not realistic to expect employees to be driven by the same motivations as an owner. Learn to recognize what motivates individual employees. The whip is a poor choice. So is guilt. Even money has its limits.

 

[whyun]

I've encountered employees intentionally working slowly to justify their low hourly rate.

Not everyone is motivated enough to open an engineering office no matter how small. I give you full credit for having enough confidence to do so. This position comes with much perks as well as risks and responsibilities. Employees don't have to share any of these responsibilities. Their only duty is to perform well enough to make you some profit and justify the paycheck you give them.

 

[MacGyverS2000]

"Is sharing 19% of the net profits of the company between eight employees each year significant enough?"

I don't know... how much of an incentive is an extra $2 in an employee's pocket a month? How about $2k? If the net profit is significant, then 2.5% per employee can be an impressive incentive (to some), but if the net profit is minimal why should they bust their ass for you?

I'm at work before 8 and typically don't leave until 6:30-7 (as well as being a business owner on the side). I'm working these hours temporarily because the company needs the extra work to finish a project (several months long), but I would never choose to work such long hours day in and day out. As a business owner, I put in 60-80/week before I went back to the 8-5 deal for someone else, but I would never expect an employee to even come close to those kind of hours unless they were a partner.

Profit shring only gets you so much loyalty, and a burned out employee can easily tank an entire team.


Dan - Owner

http://www.Hi-TecDesigns.com

 

[tygerdawg]

ref, there's no pat answer to this. I think everyone is trying to give you insight.

When younger I worked at a company whose unwritten rule was "do what it takes", meaning long hours. The unspoken corollary to that was "if you don't have any thing to do, then take off". Fortunately, the work was amazingly fun and the co-workers were fantastic. Many late nights were spent. I didn't care that the salary was a bit less than I could have gotten at a less-fun job. I have fond memories of me & my co-worker looking at each other one afternoon, bored with nothing to do. We left at 230PM and spent the rest of the afternoon plowing through a couple of 12-packs. It was the kind of job where I couldn't wait to wake up in the morning because it meant I got to go to work.

I saw another organization, manufacturing, that was team-based and incentive-based. The assembly lines were all highly engineered, orchestrated, and timed. The people were actually running from station to station. It turned out that the incentive was 25%-30% of their base annual salary. All the laggards had been kicked off the respective teams by the team members. Those people were standing in line waiting for the gates to open every morning.

Then again I've seen places run by managers who looked at spreadsheets, but had no notion of the context of the numbers, nor of the way of producing those numbers or increasing/decreasing the numbers. Those were the places that laid down the edict of "## hours minimum expected per week". It was a hell-hole: unmotivated managers, poorly motivated troops, everybody spending their intelligence and talents trying to figure out ways to beat the system.

If you want the silver bullet answer, I'd say it is this: pay a fair (or better) salary for the time worked. Through culture, lay down the expectations of the number of hours that is acceptable to be successful in your business. Eliminate waste everywhere to reduce overhead costs. Do your job as a manager to create a positive workplace that allows talent to take root and flourish. And do your job as a manager and cull under-performing team members.

TygerDawg

 

[EddyC]

If an employer wants me to work 50hrs/week on a regular basis then they will have to find some way to reward me for my extra time. Also, engineering is supposed to be about people coming up with new ideas to solve old problems in a more efficient manner. Such a creative process shouldn't be contingent upon having to work a particular number of hours.

 

[COEngineeer]

are they paid hourly?

 

[zcp]

What if you move away from the hourly concept entirely? Manage people by results and hitting their goals. Long hours burns people out and stunts creativity and efficiency.

Have your people turn in their time accurately....if they were looking out the window for an hour, put down "looking out the window". That way you can accurately gage costs and help set their goals where they need to be to keep the company profitable.

As whyun said, some people are more efficient than others. If my people can get 8 hrs of work done in 2, they shouldn't have to sit there for the other 6 just so that I think everyone is working as hard as I am.

referee, if you look in the mirror or did a time study on yourself, I think you will find that your 60 hr week isn't all that efficient either.

I try to instill a culture where we get everything done in 40 hrs (standard work days). If we aren't, then we need to
1) get more efficient / organized
2) raise our rates
3) hire people

Work is not everything and that extra 42 days a year that you are working (20 hrs x 50 weeks / 24) takes a toll and is a hidden cost to your business.

ZCP

http://www.phoenix-engineer.com

 

[corus]

"My wife usually only sees me at work (she works there as well as my accountant)."

Reading between the lines I thought that your accountant may be seeing more of your wife than you do. Perhaps a comma should be in there somewhere, or perhaps not.....

corus