Is the expectation for a new full-time employee to log 40 billable hours each week reasonable? Is 100% billable a normal standard for billable hours? Does this not force employees to spend more than 8 hours at work every day just to achieve a full 8 hours of what is considered to be billable work? Is lunch supposed to be included?
If you take a half hour lunch break you can get 8 hours done in 8.5 hours. Not too bad
Better to be a FTE and work 9:30-4:45 (incl 1+ hr lunch)
Can you elaborate on this?
This is very common at common areas companies that charge customers for work. Estimated are done on 40 hour work weeks and that's the expectation on the employee. It's sucky and will look bad to say to a customer that we didn't get your job done Bob decided to only work 30 hours per week the last 4 weeks so we will be a week late.
I would consider any organizations that requires 40 billable hours to be broken. That assumes you never have to take a meeting, do general prep work or training, etc. The only way to make 40 billable hours is probably to work 55 or 60 many weeks.
Thatās my concern. Any admin tasks or undeliverable tasks donāt count towards billable hours. So my 8 hour day on paper is actually 10-11 hours at the office some days.
Time to vote with your feet, start searching out other job opportunities.
I believe that the industry standard is considered to be close to 75% for high profit margin positions and 85% for low profit margin positions.
Law firms will definitely bill more than 40 per week. Which means you have to actually be at work 10-12 hours per day. I imagine many consulting firms are the same way since you make money for the company when you bill hours. The easy answer is don't work at a company that requires you to bill hours. You can sometimes work at a place where your hours are baked into the retainer costs.
Yeah, 8-5 with an hour lunch has been standard at my previous workplaces
Iām 8-5 with an unpaid lunch. So I have to either work and eat simultaneously or make up for time lost. Is this normal?
Yes, I think weāre describing the same thing.