Payroll Issues - How Many Hours Should Your Employees Work Each Week?

One of the biggest expenses that small businesses have is their payroll expenses. Payroll expenses include salaries, payroll taxes, benefits and a variety of insurance products. In order to minimize these expenses employers need to find a balance between providing employees with enough hours to satisfy their financial and work needs, but limiting the hours enough so as to reduce the amount of time that is unproductive. This is a huge challenge that many employers fail to adequately address.

Traditional Work Schedules

Most companies are going to base their work schedules around traditional hourly schedules. Full-time employees are going to be scheduled for 40 hours a week and part-time employees are going to be scheduled for less than 36 hours a week. Part time employees are usually scheduled consistently with the amount of work that they need to get done, the problem with scheduling too many hours or too few hours rests primarily with the employees that are considered full-time employees.

Evaluating Full-time Employee's Work Schedules

Full-time employees are a prime target to start with when evaluating your company's time use. To start this evaluation you will want to have your employees keep a journal of how they spend their time. Have them record when they are working on billable hours to the client, when they are working on administrative activities and when they have down time. Managers may need to help monitor how time is being spent as well. They can track when and how long employees seem to be standing around conversing and when they seem overwhelmed by the amount of work that they have been assigned.

The next step is to take a look at each time journal. Employers will want to look for trends in time use. The optimal scenario will have the majority of the time that an employee records will be either billable or directly related to functional administrative tasks. The ratio of billable to non-billable hours will need to correspond with what is appropriate for their position. If their non-billable hours seem too high for their position then either the employee needs training on how to complete administrative tasks more efficiently or they are wasting time on these tasks because they have nothing billable to do.

When wasted time is identified the employer can use this information to determine the best way to deal with it. For example, they can either reduce the number of hours that the position is assigned or they can add tasks to the position to help spread the workload out more evenly between employees.

On the other hand, if a position seems to be overly work intensive then the employer can decide to either expand the position's hours, in which case a second person may need to be hired to fill the position, or they can reduce the responsibilities of the position. When this happens the removed duties can be assigned to another position. Many employers will create a new position when this happens and label it as a "II" job. For example, Machine Operator II or Bookkeeper II. The "II" indicates a lower level position than the original "I" position. It will involve the duties that require less skill, it will usually have a lower pay grade and it will usually involve less hours than the "I" position.