Exempt employees work day

Granhel

I want to address only EXEMPT professional workers. With a group of this classification, can an employer have a defined core work week that totals 40 hours? Can the employer mandate that the employees actually work that full work week? And, that the employees be accountable for their time during that defined work week, such as have pagers turned on, note out of office meetings on their automated calendars, etc.? And, can or must the employer provide compensated time off for exempt employees who claim to work over the defined workweek (if yes, in general or just for special projects)? What if these employees consistently work much less than the 40 hour work week but claim to have worked over and expect to have compensatory time off, how can that be handled if it can't be demonstrated? I really need your help! Thanks so much!

Down_the_Middle

This notion of requiring exempt staff to be accountable for their time is really strange to me and suggests that either the position's exempt status is truly questionable or maybe the position is less than fulltime. I see nothing wrong with informing exempt staff that it is understood that their position normally involves more than 40 hrs per week and that they are NOT entitled to any more pay than that. Requiring exempt staff to account for their time treats them as non-exempt. The impact of this to an employer is enormous considering the 2 yr retroactivity that applies. I've dealt with numerous wage & hour offices around the country and they all view this issue the same. They frown on treating exempt staff as non-exempt-----you have to treat them one way or the other. I see no problem with expecting these people to have beepers activated for specified times or expecting them to use automated calendars. The purpose, however, should not be to track their time, but to enable others to access them. Someone who consistently works less than 40 hrs but claims to have worked more is a whole bigger problem, but should not be confused with paying them addt'l hours.......... For what it's worth: I've had 2 different W/H regional offices permit me to track exempt employees time for a short, defined time period (up to 90 days) for purposes of time allocation, etc... and not be at risk for treating these people as non-exempt. you can't do this on a long term basis, but I've found it helpful to address some of the questions you raise.

Granhel

Thanks for the input.

Rockie

I see more and more questions of this type coming up insofar as exempt workers are concerned. Somewhere along the line, salaried individuals are getting the notion that they should only work 40 hours a week and if they work more than this, they are "entitled" to something more, whether it be pay or the ever popular "comp" time. We have a "controller" that has her hours set at 36 hours per week and if she works over this, she keeps a log and takes "comp" time. I have advised her supervisor over and over again that this is not legal, but she feels if she works over her "agreed" hours that she should get "comp" time. She also goes and works out an average of one and a half to two hours a day at lunch time. My feelings are if this rationale applies to her, what about the other exempt people who typically work 50 or more hours a week? Shouldn't they be entitled to "comp" time. My feeling is the exempt status is subject to being challenged if she ever wanted to file a DOL complaint and claim overtime.

We have had to counsel exempt individuals who consistently work less than 40 hours a week (disappear every Friday afternoon). They swear they work over 40 hours every single week, but when we tell them we can track them, they suddenly start working their expected workload. We also have had exempt people who walk in the door first thing in the morning, make sure their boss sees them and then
leave without being charged a day. This is another issue.

I don't really have any concrete answers to this question other than to counsel the employees who you feel are abusing the system and go through the disciplinary route, but taking care not to account for their time hour by hour.

Any other comments would be most welcome!

Don Avery

[font size="1" color="#FF0000"]LAST EDITED ON 06-21-01 AT 03:10PM (CST)[/font][p]Are the abusers able to get their work done, with sufficient quality?
If they are able to do that and still be gone a lot, they do not have enough suffiently challenging work. When I've had problems with exempt employees being too loose with time, I took a closer look at their work product.

Darlene

In a training session on Exempt/Non-Exempt which was conducted by a former Wage and Hour employee, my Director asked if we could require that Exempt employees put in a minimum of 40 hours per week. This 40 hours could be composed of actual work time, and annual leave and/or sick leave. That particular trainer contacted Wage and Hour and was told that we can do that and still retain the "Exempt" status on our managers. Of course, using that logic, we still track hours on time sheets and note any hours over 80 in a two week period - though no one is paid for those and no "comp" time is awarded. And he told us that the tracking was allowable also as long as we maintained this in a written policy for Exempt employees.

CuriousG

We seem to be forgetting what the term "exempt" means here. It means exempt from overtime premium payments. This means that regardless of the amount of time an exempt employee puts in each week they are not to be paid overtime premium payments or any equivalent practice.

"Comp Time"is an overtime premium equivalent practice. At least it is if it is provided properly. The practice of using comp-time is only legal in certian public sector jobs, so allowing any private sector exempt employee to take comp time would serve to negate their exempt status. If you are challenged on the practice it would require the employer to look back 2+ years for figuring back overtime premium pay owed.

PS: Agreeing to a set number of hours per work week for an exempt employee is a pretty solid indicator that they are not doing exempt classification work.

Granhel

Ifyou could provide me with resource material describing the legality as described below so I could share with my director, I'd appreciate it. Thanks. My fax is 863.534.8501; or email to [email]helen_littlefield@polkworks.org[/email]

Quote:
"Comp Time"is an overtime premium equivalent practice. At least it is if it is provided properly. The practice of using comp-time is only legal in certian public sector jobs, so allowing any private sector exempt employee to take comp time would serve to negate their exempt status. If you are challenged on the practice it would require the employer to look back 2+ years for figuring back overtime premium pay owed.