How many hours per week do you work?

[disneysteve]

For those who are not retired, how many hours per week do you typically work? Are you full time or part time or per diem? Are there times when you work beyond your usual hours due to overtime or otherwise picking up extra shifts, perhaps to cover someone who is out on leave?

As of the beginning of November, I am full time at my job. That means I am contracted for 36 hours/week. In reality, it's actually 72 hours/pay period so it isn't always evenly split between the 2 weeks. For example, the first week I worked 28 hours and the 2nd week I worked 44.

Holidays can also throw the schedule out of whack. I was off on Thanksgiving although I would normally work on Thursdays. As a result, I did back to back 12-hour shifts on Tuesday and Wednesday. I was supposed to work 4 hours on Friday but they were short on coverage so I worked 8 hours instead. Another 8 hours on Saturday and Sunday, then 4 on Monday, and 12 on Tuesday. So in a stretch of 8 days, I will have worked 64 hours but that's pretty unusual.

My normal schedule is 12 hours on Tuesday and Thursday, 4 hours on Friday, and 8 hours every other Saturday and Sunday. It's not a bad schedule since it means that every other week, I have a 3-1/2 day weekend.

[QuarterMillionMan]

Me public sector 40 hrs/ week. OT is often available but I decline it. I like to have a life and not work so much.

[JoeP]

I'm salary, so I work until a balance is reached between what I am expected to complete and when it is time to stop due to personal commitments. I put in anywhere from 44 to 58 hours per week. It seems odd to me to suddenly stop work because a clock says a certain time.

[disneysteve]

I'm salary, so I work until a balance is reached between what I am expected to complete and when it is time to stop due to personal commitments. I put in anywhere from 44 to 58 hours per week. It seems odd to me to suddenly stop work because a clock says a certain time.

I would have a problem with a position that frequently required me to work that many hours especially when there is no additional compensation involved for doing so.

As for stopping at a certain time, that is pretty clearly the nature of my job. We are open from 9am-8:45pm Monday-Friday and 9am-4:45pm Saturday and Sunday. Once the doors close, we finish seeing any patients we've got and then we're done. I finish my charts and go home.

[JoeP]

I would have a problem with a position that frequently required me to work that many hours especially when there is no additional compensation involved for doing so.

As for stopping at a certain time, that is pretty clearly the nature of my job. We are open from 9am-8:45pm Monday-Friday and 9am-4:45pm Saturday and Sunday. Once the doors close, we finish seeing any patients we've got and then we're done. I finish my charts and go home.

I can understand people having a problem with this. The job is IT and we always have a backlog of work. The quicker we get our part done, the quicker the next group can start working on it. If we stop work at the end of the shift, our competitors will eat us alive.

Curious about the medical field: after closing, is there residual work that remains that could be done, but is delegated to the next opening period?

[disneysteve]

I can understand people having a problem with this. The job is IT and we always have a backlog of work.
If we stop work at the end of the shift, our competitors will eat us alive.

That tells me that the company is understaffed and overworking their existing employees.

Curious about the medical field: after closing, is there residual work that remains that could be done, but is delegated to the next opening period?

It depends on the position.

When I was in private family practice, I was almost never without work I could be doing. There was always a stack of forms to fill out, lab results and x-ray reports to check, specialist reports to review, prescriptions to refill, etc. Most days, I would do the most time-sensitive ones and if it got to be time to leave, I'd let the rest wait until the next day. Occasionally, I would go into the office on a weekend for an hour or two and catch up on everything.

In my current job in urgent care, it's very different. When I leave each day, all of the work is done. I see patients throughout my shift, and when my shift is over, I leave. There's nothing left that needs doing once I've completed my charts for the day. That does occasionally require staying a little past my scheduled time or even working on them at home, but most days I'm able to get it all done pretty much on time. The most I usually have to stay is 15-20 minutes after to finish up charts.

[Snave]

My full-time salaried position at my company was eliminated about 8 months ago, but I started a photography company a few years ago and it has been growing and exploded this year. So, now I am doing that full-time. There are weeks (and months) during our busy season where I work probably 60-70+ hours a week and then I may have only a few other weeks. It is definitely an adjustment from having a paycheck every two weeks to now being completely on my own. I have months that are beyond nuts and then other where we have nothing. I actually like it that way as I can enjoy my down-time completely. The actual photo shoots don't take long, so at least I am sitting in my office or on the couch doing most of my editing work watching TV or something like that.

[JoeP]

That tells me that the company is understaffed and overworking their existing employees.

An accurate assessment!

[corn18]

While in the military we worked until the mission was accomplished. Sometimes that meant 18 hours / day, 7 days / week for weeks or months at a time. I made a rough calculation once while on cruise and figured I made about $0.05 an hour.

That approach has carried over into my follow on jobs. But I am very careful about managing my workforce and ensuring they have the opportunity for a balanced work / home life. If they can be effective in 40 hours / week, then I have no expectation they work more than that. If they cannot, then I determine if it is their fault or they have too much workload. If it's their fault, we work on that (95% of the time, it isn't their fault). If it's workload, we look at that, too. Hiring another person is not the only solution. Often times it is a process problem that we can fix with some properly applied lean 6 / sigma tools.

As for me, I'm a retired type A fighter pilot, so I am a bad role model for work / life balance.

[Snicks]

I work a flexible schedule. Some days i work 2 days a week and some days i work 5 days. On average, i guess i usually work 3 to 4 days per week overall. DH works full time. But, he is a teacher so he has the summers off and holidays.

[disneysteve]

An accurate assessment!

I realize that companies want to do more with less to save money but it just never seems to work the way they intend.

My wife used to be a retail manager. Corporate would tell her she needed to cut hours and then complain that her department's performance was slipping. She could never get them to accept the fact that fewer people working fewer hours can not accomplish more work.

[disneysteve]

If they can be effective in 40 hours / week, then I have no expectation they work more than that. If they cannot, then I determine if it is their fault or they have too much workload. If it's their fault, we work on that (95% of the time, it isn't their fault). If it's workload, we look at that, too. Hiring another person is not the only solution. Often times it is a process problem that we can fix with some properly applied lean 6 / sigma tools.

I love this. I wish all management thought this way. Certainly there are crappy employees but so much of the time performance issues are not the fault of the employees but rather the fault of the workload, distribution of responsibilities, unrealistic expectations from management, etc.

[Mjenn]

I'm a salaried employee, but my contract states I am to work 40 hours per week with overtime only upon agreement. I currently take 2 hours per week as family leave. So I work 38 hours per week, but get paid for 40.

We have a company policy where you work for 10 minutes extra every day so that during summer months we only work 7 hours a day. That is really nice when the weather is nicer.

Sometimes I do end up working a it of overtime as I travel for work, but I often take the hours in flex (start later or leave earlier as long as I am there between 9-3 is OK) or as vacation days at other times, so it works out even in the end.

[greenskeeper]

I'm hourly and average 56 hours per week, sometimes more (all O/T is optional)

All overtime goes towards paying off the mortgage.

[Thrif-t]

I work part time, 24 hours in the office and 4 hours from home on my off days. I'm salary too computed on 28 hours.

Every year for year end my boss tries to get me to work full time in the office, but only for my part time salary, no more money, but just out of the goodness of my heart. Uh, I don't think so. He's such a tonk!

We went from having 4 1/2 people in our department down to just 1& 1/2(I'm the 1/2 since I work part time). As people quit they don't replace them. Not that they can't they just don't want to. I've been there 17 years and they really are a piece of work to work for. It's a private company so they do whatever they want and work the people to death. I give 100% on my job but I don't do anything extra. I hate to be like that because it's not my personality, but with the way they treat employees they've driven me to that.

There's been new people who took on so much extra work to get noticed and management just takes advantage of them as long as they can until they leave. They've shown us there really is no incentive to do more.

At this point I'm just biding my time. I make a competitive wage; thanks to my past boss who recruited me, so there is no way I can make what I make and work the hours I work anywhere else. This has been a great working mom's job.