If you work out on the road - do you include your commute?

[spottedinthewilds]

If you have a job that takes you out and about for the whole day do you include your commute to and from work within your working hours?

If you work from say 9-5. Do you leave home at 9 and get home for 5?

Or, if the work is local, get to your first job for 9 and then expect to finish for 5 before driving home.

The work is never more than 20/30 mins away, sometimes less.

I think it can / should be flexible. Sometimes I need to be in the office for 9, so I leave at 8 and commute in my own time. If I don’t need to be there until 11, I do some work at home from about 8am then travel in ‘work time’. Same at the end of the working day - if I have a meeting that doesn’t finish until 5 then I’m travelling home in my own time. If I travel in rush hour it takes a lot longer so I prefer to travel during the day but I then work at home to make up the time. I just make sure I do my hours over the course of the week (37).

Thank you, yes that makes sense to me. The job often finishes early and they get home early but sometimes it finishes a little late. There is a tiny bit of admin involved at the end of the day. Probably 20 mins or so.

I have one team member who refuses to do the admin if she gets home at or after 5pm. She works from 9-5.

It then falls down to the rest of the team to pick up her admin.

She had recently moved further away from the area that we work so instead of a 15 min commute she had 30 mins.

I just thought that if her work technically finished at 4.30 then she has a 30 min commute then she technically still should do the 20 min admin.

It's not often things run over and to be fair it's often the opposite.

Are you paid hourly? Not sure what your company does but when I travelled to different offices I’d try and arrive still by around 9am, I’d never be just leaving at 9am but the office was a couple of hours away.
I would be expecting them to finish their admin at the end of the day not to leave to others, especially if they are sometimes home early. Give and take.

Entirely dependent on the contract to be honest. It can go either way - I've seen contracts that state the workday starts at the first site and ends at the last (normally with a caveat that these sites can be no further than 25 miles from a contracted base), or that the 'base' is the employees address and any travel is counted as work travel.

Yes, paid hourly.

It would be quite outing if I said what we did as it's quite niche. But I suppose similar to cleaning.

Say you had 3 or 4 jobs to do in a day, not set hours but set tasks. Some jobs take longer, some get cancelled, some are quick, But when you get home you need to send some info to the clients.

Some of us do it the next morning which is fine before heading out.

When I worked in tax law (admittedly many years ago) you had to have a declared place of work.

Commutes to that were considered your commute and then from that place to your actual first call was company time as it were.

Obviously in practice you never went to the actual "place of work" as you were always in the road.

Best solution is usually for each call to have a (notional or otherwise) admin time attached to it (eg if a care call then you do the 30 mins care and then sit in the car outside doing the (usually electronic) these days paperwork.

That way if someone chooses to go home and do the paperwork at home it's clear that the paperwork is attached to the call and part of working hours.

Unless you have to pick up essentials or get them ready at home before you go to work, then I'd say your hours start when you arrive at your job and are in a position to work.

In your colleague's case, if she's stopped the main part of her job early but still have paid admin to do, that should be done immediately at 4.30pm or after her commute home.

For my job I have to work at a different site once a week that's a 1.5 hour commute from home. For that I am allowed to include travelling time within my working day (so I'm actually on site 10.30am to 3.30pm). But often I do have a few bits to finish off or emails to send as I'm rushing out the door to beat the traffic. I do any extra bits of work when I get home. 20 minutes of sending info to clients once she gets home sounds absolutely fine to me.