Reasonable amount of billable hours from employees?

Thanks, Sprockets…that does help put some perspective on it.

From a planning perspective, I calculate your numbers a bit differently. I have to consider vacation, stat, and sick days into the planning. Which leaves me with 225 billable days per year if I provide 4 weeks of vacation.

If you divide by 45 instead of 52 weeks/year, your average billable rate per week is higher.

4 weeks would be amazing… I may have someone you need to speak to on my behalf.

I took into account two weeks of vacation and so divided my yearly totals by 50. I did forget about holidays and I unintentionally left out sick days as I have not called in sick to a job since 2006 or so – the concept of a sick day is a little foreign to me right now.

Four weeks of vacation? Our company vacation plan bumps to three weeks at five years of service and I think after ten years you get bumped to four weeks. I would have to take up a new hobby to fill an extra two weeks of vacation time. Or maybe I would actually finish some of my side projects that have been in various states of completion for the last few years . . .

Getting a bit off topic here, but 2-3 weeks of vacation?! I feel lucky now, here (Norway) it is 5 weeks (or 25 days plus weekends) by law.

Here in the US, vacation is not something we do particularly well.

4 weeks vacation? What are you Canadian? :wink:

When it comes to the billable rates for directors, it all depends on what they do right now I manage 5 people, do BD pitches and proposals, assisting in recruiting people, as well as writing and speaking on top of leading two project teams, one with 11 people on it, the second with just 3-4… All that stuff takes time. I think if your expectations are similar, than 70-75% would be better. If your directors are not doing all of those other marketing and BD activities then maybe 80% will do it.

Well, I managed to prove that sick days are needed on Monday. Feeling human again now, thank goodness.

Currently they aren’t needing to do BD efforts, but I can see where that would kick in as the team grows (we’re no Frog :wink: ).

I’ll say one thing with respect to vacation, I believe the US has it backwards from a human resources perspective by not giving more vacation time…but man, from a business perspective 4 weeks off kills the bottom line.

I wonder why the US economy doesn’t do better, then.
*
Over here in Germany almost everyone has 6 Weeks paid
vacation and full medical…and businesses do great.

I guess part of the answer is, that giving your employee
time to recharge the batteries and grow as a person helps
“the bottom line” and much so in the creative business.
There are already enough zombiees around. Bringing your
clients in contact with real human beings might give you
an edge…

end of rant

And no, I didn’t take my full holidays for a few years, but
having a little kid, now I do. Owning a share of our
small business I am kind of paying myself to go on holiday.

What I hate though, are employees, who try to build “bridges”
with their holidays and try to wring out even more weeks
by combining their days off with state given non work days.

mo-i

I don’t know if this is any worse than 2 days here and 2 days there with no predictability. No matter how you slice it, you typically can’t plan for when your employees take time off.

Within the first weeks of the year we make a company holiday plan, that tries to take into account
the wants and needs of our few souls here . But there are few people who do not understand the
concept of “give and take”.

mo-i

Those damned employees! Always making us employers lives miserable :slight_smile:

I read over this thread, if I was working in a steel mill (I use to work in a steel mill) it would be expected that work time is work time. I’m not getting paid to think any more then is what I am doing up to QC etc. As a designer I am paid to think, and I’m paid not to know then figure out a new way to do it. So I would expect to be paid to get what was outlined and agreed upon in a project forecast. If I’m getting my work done, and you appreciate what I am doing, then why wouldn’t you pay my time that leads to a break through?

This is a very nebulous space from a business and planning perspective.

Fundamentally I agree with you. Design (Innovation?) isn’t a contiguous process. It happens on the drawing board, in the shower, in bed, watching TV.

My brain instantly starts spinning on solving a problem the moment a prospective client puts a problem on the table. To say it isn’t linear is an understatement.

But, this discussion is different from what you’re alluding to (or my interpretation of it). This isn’t about clock punching. It is about how many hours can one reasonably expect from someone to be billable every day? There is always going to be inefficiencies in every process.

Another way to look at the question, if as an employee you are expected to be at work 8 hours…how many of those hours should be productive? You’re not a robot. You likely believe that you can’t be expected to be “on task” 8 hours in a “thinking” profession (this isn’t putting a bolt in place on an assembly line…it isn’t repeatable).

But what is reasonable?

I suppose one way is to try and cure “the problem” on the front end. Let’s say you bid the job for 80 hours but you get it done in “40”. As a designer it is reasonable to say that the other 40 hours occurred during the “off hours”. When you were reading that novel, or out on a date. Whatever.

But, it is all very tough to plan for…let alone sell to a client.

May be of interest “bring back the 40 hour work week”. Not direct to your question about billable hours but related. Will reply more OT later. Many thoughts

R

Recently, a friend at a Montreal consultant told me about one of his firm’s owners working over the Victoria Day weekend to finish a project. The regular employees enjoyed the holiday. I thought it was nice of him…

Fantastic article, rk…Lots of stuff in there to digest. After a bunch of number gymnastics, the number I landed on for billable hours was 6.4. Which, based on this article is about right. If I have a plan for 6 hours and a goal of 6.5 billable this article seems to support that as being a good number for getting the most out of people.

When I was a ‘real designer’ (now I’m a graduate student) I remember it being around 6-6.5 hours a day of actual work out of the eight.

I didn’t take a paid lunch, but during the four hour blocks of time between when I got there and when I ate lunch, what ever I was doing was what had to be done for a human to do the work I was doing. So if I went to the bathroom, that was what a human had to do in order to get design work done, I didn’t take like a half hour of course, but the five minute breaks are part of having a person work for you.

Then again, that doesn’t really fit into my story of 6-6.5 hours does it.

I got really into that focus booster thing, where you work for 25 minutes and then stop for 5 and then repeat, and then every 4th cycle you take 15.

so 25 on – 5 off – 25 on – 5 off – 25 on – 5 off – 25 on – 15 off, the repeat and take lunch, then repeat and take 15 minute 2pm break, then repeat and go home. That works out to around 6.5 hours a day of real productive, creative work.

I do that now and it helps me to work 12-13 hour days with less burnout.

I’d say 6-6.5 is reasonable. I have several retainer contracts where I count my hours and I frequently end up with 6.5 hours of billable in a day among all the other stuff I do. Though I don’t really work 9-5, more like 10-6 and take short lunches since I’m at home.

R

Richard,

thank you so much for that Salon article. I forwarded it immediately to two friends.
One working at a “magic circle” law firm in Frankfurt, one directing a team of IT Specialists
at an internationally renown business consulting giant.

Both are putting in 14 hour days and the whole gig is expected to do likewise. All highly paid
and highly ranked experts who have big dollars at stake with every decision they take.

scary, scary stuff, if the analysis of the salon journalist is halfway right.

mo-i

Re: the Salon article, interesting about the 1848 reduction in work hours from 12? to 10, then to 8. Contrasting that with modern work days in Europe esp those countries that have a big break around lunch. They probably end up also working 8-9 hours a day (napping at home since everything is closed). Its tempting to equate the differently structured work day with the current economic status of the PIGS countries (read: Bad).