to get narked at people's managers thinking 45 hours a week is outrageously long hours

[eggyface]

(sorry long, wanna avoid drip feed)

I work in white collar officey work. Classic making presentations, analysing data, sort of stuff. I remember when I was starting out in my industry, working 9.30 until 6.30 with hardly any lunch break was fairly usual. I wouldn't think that was a hard week for someone at the start of their career, learning the ropes. (A hard week might be be two or three nights until 10 or 11, or putting in 5 hours on Saturday).

We work for clients, so the ethos is that we need to service all the projects that come in, but on the other hand we are a big rather stuffy company which doesn't have much of a 'hungry' mentality for work. In our office a manager polices the diary of their team and if someone wants to nab a junior, their manager will often say they can't work on your thing because they're already working enough hours (i.e. 40).

When you're senior and working a longer week than that yourself, this is very annoying!

I know that it's important to protect people's rights and to create a culture where people don't work long hours for the sake of it. And yes, if I'm working long hours that's my problem and I need to organise my diary. But there's got to be some flex, hasn't there? I'd expect all the juniors to be keen to take on a new project even if it made them prioritise work over home life for a bit. I did that and I enjoyed the responsibility and opportunity to shine. AIBU to think that 45 hours is totally reasonable level of overtime to expect in a ft job (NB not paid, can take time off in lieu but in practice this might not happen as you'd be busy the next week)??

GotToBeInIt, no, no-one should be forced. But, if you're in a consultancy environment and in a company where some degree of unpaid overtime is expected across all grades, it's not practical to completely shield juniors from it.

They shouldn't be expected to shoulder more overtime than the OP, but at the same time the OP can't pick up the slack herself as she's too expensive to do tasks that have been costed with a junior in mind.

I can't believe people actually agree to work over 40 hours a week. WTF has happened to people?!!

Gotta, the OP is in the private sector, looks like a consultancy type job. So she's under pressure to win work from clients (to keep the company afloat) and once won, that work has to be serviced.

To remain competitive, projects tend to be costed 'leanly', so will probably will involve more hours than have actually been budgeted for. This may sound like madness, but charging more can result in losing the work to another company.

So, unpaid overtime is more or less built into the role. People do it without complaint because they want to progress. Those who don't like it, don't tend to stay in these kinds of jobs.

The thing is, you might think it's great to get juniors to do millions of hours out if misplaced loyalty, but nobody in, or joining, the workforce these days believes it's reciprocal. Yeah, you can break yourself working outside your contracted hours, but you're doing it for a company that won't pay, give time in lieu or bat an eyelid when redundancy is in the cards.

So the real question is, how foolish do you think people are? The only one who's going to respect you and your time is you.

Clearly there is a problem with there being more work than people or people are not being efficient.

Be proactive and approach the manager with a solution. You might find the manager is trying to push for hiring more junior people so they are not overworked. They have probably already asked for more headcount and been told by senior mgmt that juniors have to work unpaid OT.

FWIW - I HATE that my employer expects me to work unpaid OT. FFS my 75% schedule is approx 36hrs/wk of billable hours. I greatly resent that I am expected to work 65hours a week in a FT position year round. We are perpetually short of people BECAUSE NO ONE WANTS TO WORK 65 HRS PER WEEK! It would cheaper to hire more 1.5x juniors have have everyone work 40hrs a week. Employee turnover for my peer group of 2 years is over 50%...

YABVU
A full-time job in the UK (at least in the public sector) is 37.5 hrs. If someone has worked this amount, they should not be expected to do more. They can agree to work more if asked, provided no pressure whatsoever is put on them.

When someone is willing to work loads of overtime, I always get suspicious. Of their home life.

So Iona, what do you do if the deadline for a piece of work doesn't get met?

Laurie I know your question wasn't directed at me. In my world taking two years career break as of this year to SAH with DD if you missed agreed client deadline then the client would without doubt brief certain legal regulations, in some cases they would be unable to legally trade and it would without doubt mean our company got sacked and possibly fine by the client.

As an example one of my old companies global clients was one of the four major supermarkets so imagine the impact on revenue. If this happened without doubt the would be redundancies because of the loss in income.

GymBum But that is a gross management failure, that is not solved by having juniors work unpaid overtime, it's solved by efficient planning with contingencies, early identification of delays, renegotiating scope or dates, buying more resources through freelancing / overtime / diverting from other projects etc. On any non trivial project you task a project manager to deliver it, and when you miss or go over budget you do some serious analysis as to why.

LaurieMarlow Depends on the project of course, and how early you find out, and what mitigations are possible, there's no simple answer, but unpaid overtime by junior staff is never the answer, it may be part of a solution rarely to get out of a particular hole. But you should be identifying any problems much earlier than that, and if the sales / business development teams have costed it "leanly" to get the sale then they really need to be looking elsewhere for work...

Yes, but if all the supermarkets did it then it wouldn't impact.

This drive to the bottom leads to seeing which company can exploit their workers the most.

And this business model had become desirable.

Fred in our sector. You can't not renagotiate scope or date. It's the nature of the beast. Deadlines are set and failure to deliver on time immediately hits the client. Contractors would be usuless, again this is because of the nature of our business and client requirements.

I agree that lack of FTE is managment failure and in the Ops case it sounds like the team managers are failing to ensure they have the required FTEs for upcoming projects. They not the Op should be managing this and raising to their management team if they can't cope. But, until Op is in a position to answer my earlier question this is all conjecture on my part.

Laurie sorry but what do you mean if all the supermarkets did this? If all the supermarkets did what?

1. Where I worked, there wasn't the option to work unpaid overtime. You either worked extra hours, recorded them against the appropriate project and were paid for the extra time - or you didn't. Anyone attempting to work extra hours and not record/claim would get a stern talking to. This was to prevent managers trying to make themselves look good at the expense of their staff and to ensure that the company met all the working time legislation ito recording hours worked accurately.

2. When bidding for a project, do you estimate realistic resourcing levels? Or are you trying to cut corners/make your bid cheaper, by assuming that you can rely on a big chunk of "free" time from juniors.

3. Assuming that juniors have access to lots of extra childcare, how do you propose they pay for it if you aren't paying them for their extra hours?

4. People face an increasingly complex set of responsibilities outside work (caring for children, elderly parents, volunteering, doing stuff they enjoy) which aren't easy to drop on your say so.

I haven't read the whole post but I find your attitude awful.

Most people work to live, rather than live to work. Unless what you do for your work is particularly exciting, that's how it should be.

And that's why the working time directive exists, to stop people from you taking the piss. For most jobs, if it can't be done in a reasonable amount of hours (and no, 12-14 hour days, 3 times a week are not reasonable) then it's probably a sign that more people need to be recruited to do that work.

And I'm glad the other managers are responsible employers.

Sorry - if they arranged sensible deadlines based on staff availability within statutory working time (instead of being allowed to promise the earth and flog their staff to get it)

Too much business modelling is done on maximum output and relying on free staff overtime to get it

I'm a contractor so don't do more than my 40hours. Or when I do I take shorter days after.
When in perm jobs my contract usually stated that we had to do extra hours for the benefit of the business.

But that would mean putting in longer hours coming up to deadlines or during client go live. Not putting in a free 5-10 hours every week.

If you're expecting people to do a 45 hour week instead of 40 hours, over a year that's going to add up to over a month of unpaid overtime. Would you be happy if you were paid for working from January to October but expected to work for the rest of the year for free?

Speak for yourself Cactus I was always thrilled to be recognised for the extra effort I (and my team) put in.

Laurie unfortunately it's not always that easy to set deadline because in some case things happen that are unpredictable (horse gate, foot & mouth, 911, fraud, other businesses collapsing etc.).

I don't think you are being unreasonable at all. YANBU

I work in a long hours job. It's the nature of the job and quite frankly I challenge anyone here to find me a transactional law job that doesn't require me to work insane hours and yet also provides me with cutting edge, interesting work.

It is particularly irritating when we have juniors who think they can pick and choose these hours - no you cant - it's a competitive industry so lump it or leave.

It is also irritating to have extremely short deadlines dumped on us by clients who then sod off home at 5pm. I have had insane deadlines imposed on me, got documents ready when asked and then found that the clients have gone home at 5pm and are completely contactable to sign the documents, even though they knew it was happening. Its stressful and frustrating, and it's not my own doing.

However, YABU to ask this question here. Long, hard overtime for no extra pay is not representative of the average Briton's working practices. And yet you've come looking for vindication that it should be on a forum which showcases a cross section of society, where the average working practice is likely to be normal office hours with paid overtime. KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE.

cactusannie recognition for your job among your peers, people saying thank you, recognising you've gone above and beyond, genuine warmth and thanks. that's what i'm talking about. Surveys show this is worth more than a pay rise to most people, as it happens. Herogramme, I agree, is a hideous term and I apologise for using it.

it's interesting on here - lots of assumptions about the way the asking would be done, and how awful and put upon everyone would feel.

the childcare issue is a real one and that's perhaps the most important reason why this unpaid overtime world is rubbish. fwiw I have a small child and am working my hours much more than when I was 20. but when i was 20 I loved being in the office at 9pm with a load of sparky colleagues and some beer, all getting the job done together. Horses for courses.

the person who's most accurately expressed what it is like at my work is lauriemarlow

*uncontactable!