Maximum Working Hours

Ask anyone who works in professional services if they’ve ever had trouble filling their 8-hour day with work. You will be hard-pressed to find someone who answers with a yes. More often than not, employees are burning the candle at both ends trying to complete their projects within their work week, which, at large professional service firms, is often much higher than the standard 40 hours. In fact, for many, working long hours at grueling jobs is a badge of honor, which creates a culture of peer pressure for everyone to hit those milestones. How do we enable our employees to actually achieve work-life balance?

I have never had an interest in doing things a certain way simply because that’s how they’ve always been done. And when my business partner and I started Zeroed-In, this mindset became my daily mantra. I like to question things. And not simply for the sake of playing devil’s advocate (we all have that one friend) but because asking questions inspires improvement and often, transformations. Before we made our first hire, I started asking questions about our working environment – from the perspective of a future employee.

It’s no secret that I come from the world of professional service firms where employees are told from the very start that they must clock a certain number of minimum billable hours per week and, depending on the season, often 50 and 60 hours rather than the standard 40. So, I asked myself: do we need to have minimum billable hours? Are there other options? And that’s how we came up with…

Maximum charged hours

Instead of telling our people that they need to hit a certain number of hours, we implemented maximum charged hours per week – and no, not 40 hours, but 35. Does this mean that if a client is in a pinch and needs overtime support that we always say no? Absolutely not. We know there will always be ebbs and flows of high working time. But the standard we want to set is 35 hours.

To ensure we are facilitating this for our people, we set up a heat map in one of our internal KPI dashboards that indicates when people are approaching the maximum chargeable hours for the week. And if we see a pattern of someone regularly working over their maximum hours, or even close to their maximum hours, we can address it on an individual basis and be able to reallocate work to others that may have some availability. Projects have the tendency to develop scope creep and we have the ability to reassess the number of resources dedicated to any project, in real time.

This idea is in direct contrast to the tone that many large firms set – if you aren’t billing hours, you aren’t being productive. As you can probably guess, I vehemently disagree with that notion. But now you’re probably asking yourself a few questions: Do employees take half days on Friday? Or perhaps fewer average hours working each day? We don’t mind how you do it, we only ask that you use the extra time to focus on…

Professional development

In the professional services industry, things are always changing and staying up to date on new technology, legislation or any other topics is what sets apart the good firms from the great firms. Having maximum billable hours builds in free time for the professional items that often get down-prioritized when you’re working around the clock. And one of those items is professional development. For example, let’s say a new information system launched in the market this year and you want to explore it. Under a traditional firm, you would not have the ability to investigate this during normal business hours and likely wouldn’t look into it after hours as you’re already exhausted from a long work week. With maximum charged hours, you have built-in time to develop complimentary skills.

With this set-up comes another perk: the opportunity for knowledge sharing. If one of us takes a course in data science, we can bring our insight back to the full team and assess if we all need to take this course to level up our skills. Or maybe simply having the general insight into this new avenue of data science is enough for us. The fact is, when one of us develops, we can all develop. A rising tide lifts all boats.

Again, we acknowledge that not every week will see a perfect cookie cutter allotment of 35 hours billing and 5 hours developing. But having leadership model this standard and actively encourage it with other incentives like development bonuses builds a culture of prioritization which includes self-growth and development, rather than a culture of burnout.

What approaches, if any, have you seen to protect employees’ time and avoid burnout from excessive hours?