Other industries often get paid lunches. In 20 years of working in higher ed, public administration and marketing (yes, 3 different industries), my wife has always had paid lunch breaks.

Why is a 20% salary cut assumed?

Well, how else could you justify the change? You don't just get the same $ for less hours.

you could if you measured outcomes instead of hours

...also you could if you had clients and construction schedules that could absorb a 20% increase in delivery times. I just dont understand how people think things will get completed in less time (hence the 20% figure) if you work a 4day/32hr week vs a 5day/40hr especially if you're expecting the same compensation.

You don't just become 20% more efficient by having less required weekly hours.  

^ this. I would love to see an office let go of the hourly billing model and instead focus on completion of tasks and outcomes.

Note that "^ this" was referring to tintt's comment, not Non's. I do agree with Non's comment that 32 hrs does not equal 40 hrs ... which is why I think it would be interesting to see an office get away from an hourly mentality and instead focus on outcome. I'm assuming this is how tintt manages her contract work, which makes sense and is probably normal, but I've never heard of an entire office being managed this way.

Some of my work is hourly and some is not. I like to mix it up. I like that for results-oriented work I can take frequent breaks when I need to like when working on difficult and tedious stuff (cause sometimes an answer just pops into your head that can't come when you are staring at a screen) and I like that I can work on difficult stuff when I'm at my best (mornings) and do easier stuff when I'm feeling lazier. Some days I like the marathon pace and some days I like to run sprints. Cross-training. I get burned out when every day feels the same and I'm expected to perform continuously for a set part of the day. Plus then I can never watch any Dr Phil. Just kidding. 

Very good points. One thing some might not realize is that someone needs to be available when the client calls. We have a handful of staff on modified schedules and it can be a pain when they are the expected contact for a project... gets even more frustrating when it's a repeat client looking to get new project started. Dito for construction admin. So those with direct client interactions and who control productivity can't really make a 4day week work.

Pay for my phone and I'll answer it, simple as that.

instead of paying for your phone you get reimbursed for your phone, so you don't need to manage both a person and professional one. also, that way you get the phone and provider you want and put whatever aps you want on it. that reimbursement is included in the salary you already receive.

good point - the most severe scheduling pressures always come from deadlines by the client due to meeting unreasonable obligations for financing or government submissions / revisions. those are things over which the clients have no control. it's going to require a more systematic review of the conditions within each industry if society as a whole wants to change this norm. it's not primarily architect-bosses driving the problem.

I'd love to see a comparison with other industries that require extensive coordination for large projects. The aerospace industry also seems to have big coordination challenges driven by the inherent complexities of precision manufacturing, worldwide logistics, competitive market, threat of litigation, and big factors beyond the company's control (Global economics and government regulations/policies). Would love to see how those guys handle their workload. I find comparisons with other professions less relevant - especially those which don't require as much external coordination as the construction industry or those which have the power to dictate timelines and schedules.

That's a sexy monitor. I like that the blouse matches the vent grilles.

What's my attitude exactly here? I think yours is far shittier than mine: foregoing evenings and / or working 11hr days is better than a normal 5day work-week. 

I work CM now. I'd like to implement a flexible schedule for my team if I ever make PM.

Flexible that covers most of the typical office work hours works. Gets harder if everyone is away at once tho.

Non, I think archi_dude doesnt have kids, and will never do with his/her 11 hour days...

To be fair that's not for architects.

My office is 37.5 hours. In Canada. It can be done.

37.5 here too for like 75% of the staff. I'm most PA and CM, so my hours are closer to 42-45.

France is not a real country, never won a war.

I never give clients a cellphone number.

With that commute you’re working four 11’s and 6. That’s a 50 hr week.

I don't commute on the half day, typically. But yes, I'm gone from home a lot, and have a 1 year old. Like I said, if I didn't have the commute, it's a pretty sweet schedule.

senjohn, how do you actually make sure your dedicated day stays dedicated? I swear since I became a PM the ONLY way I get any dedicated time for anything is to do it after 6pm or on the weekend when on one else is in the office bugging me for attention. Do you set up an out of office reply or pull an invisibility cloak around your desk or something?!

I work remotely 98% of the time on that day. I could probably manage it pretty well in our office. We have a lot of people who work four 10 hour days, and several part time folks. So, they aren't there on Fridays. I work in a corner in the basement, so that helps too. The lack of people and remoteness of my office makes Friday's fairly slow, if I'm in the office.

but imagine making the 4 x 2 in 7...

Me too

I’m a fan of the 7:30am to 5:30pm then 9pm to 3am when I need to turn up the heat. I definitely prefer that over working 8am to 8pm steady.

Mandatory overtime pay

We pay OT above 37.5hr per week for production staff (non inner-circle management folks). I've just made the leap into this inner circle which means I've replaced my OT compensation with a share of office profit. Since OT compensation comes out first (profit is distributed annually), there is an incentive for management to reduce overhead and OT costs. There is always going to be a better office. No excuse for those who become complacent with a bad place and expect everything to change to suit them.

I’m in the midst of hiring a few workers and expanding from a one man show to a small company...I’m doing a 4 day a week work schedule. I’m also doing a 1 hour lunch family style with home cooking provided at least 2 days a week. Our current system is unhealthy and depressing. Plan on doing my small part to change that...

I strongly disagree. I want to be home every weeknight before 6pm (assuming 10hr day is 8am to 7pm + 1hr lunch).

The hour lunch would be included.

And leading at 5 sucks. Leaving later let’s you miss the bulk of traffic

Traffic does not really impact me since I dont drive and 90% of the downtown workforce are federal employees... so they all leave at 3pm anyways.

edit, I did not see your above potluck comment before making my first reply.  How's your cooking?

I cook every day non. I’m good at cooking any Italian food or Mexican. Even make my own bread and pizza. My best is a seafood pasta with a sauce I make from roasted tomatoes and herbs...people have said it’s the best pasta dish they've ever had :) Was considering dumping design and going into culinary, but too much work and hours in that biz.

Cushy gov public service gigs are 35hr/week, maybe. many are 8am-3pm give or take an hour or so. Most are replaceable/forgettable roles so very few take their job seriously compared to the private sector. They get paid more and do very little work (and their union and annual strikes are a huge burden on everyone), but it's dreadful work.

So instead I’ll just cook for my peps

I should not have asked during lunch time. Now I want seafood pasta.

:)

Could I have burger please?

My wife is a Fed. Two days a week in the office for a 6 hour phone shift. Otherwise, it is teleworking and just doing the case files by the deadlines or training. That equates to about 20 hours for her which she schedules around the kids. But, she makes about 60% of what she did in the private sector that forced 60 hour work weeks and had massive turnover and layoffs.

"Was considering dumping design and going into culinary, but too much work and hours in that biz." 

Same. I bartended/served for a while during the recession. If you think the architecture industry has shitty hours, hoo boy. 

I enjoy cooking as a hobby too much to ruin it by turning it into a job. 

 Maybe we should have a "What's cookin?" thread?

F#*k those hours code. No matter how great the project or much you'd pay me I would not destroy my life by working those hours.

This is not a good brag. I've only passed the 70hr mark 3 times in 10+ years.

When I just started I happened on a team that had an owner who changed the entire project and didn't want the deadline to move and was ready to open their wallet for it. The firm expanded the team from 4 to 8, and asked the interns who would be willing to work 5x16s + 12 on sat and 8 on sunday... 100 hours. I signed on and it lasted 5 weeks. We got a special bonus at the end (which as I recall basically covered what I would have been paid if it was all overtime pay) and they provided lunch and dinner. Dinners were actually a big affair where each team member got to pick the place and we all took an hour off to eat and chat.

I could never do this again, and I appreciate that the firm asked for volunteers, but at the time I didn't mind it.

I could do that 1 week in a crunch (and have), but 2 weeks in a row, or more than once or twice a year, and I'd be out the door. I know there are firms that expect this regularly (see the Patrik Schumacher discussion below), but I believe such firms should be shunned and publicly shamed just as much as the firms with the unpaid internships.

code, you looking for job?

You can tell Patrik is wrong here because he's lying about his argument.

Not forcing your employees to work long hours is not the same as forcing your employees to not work long hours. 

It is the nature of creative work, or maybe of creative workers, that sometimes one gets hyperfocused and can work many, many hours. The problem with Patrik, and many like him in the profession, is that they believe it's reasonable to expect his to be everyone's default work mode, all the time, and that people who can't sustain it day in and day out are therefore unfit to work in the profession.

Exactly. It's about the choice, not a requirement one way or the other.

Yep. I personally, don't care if the person next to be feels the need to put it more or less hours - which is where, in the profession, hourly+OT as opposed to salary makes sense to me. Also, in a business standpoint, it makes sense to only allow OT when the project needs it. However, if everyone is on salary...things get a little more convoluted and allows for foul play. I've also found that bonuses can be used as the carrot at the end of the stick.

I agree. I worked for a firm that the only way you got a year end bonus was for working OT. Over five years the bonus only once equaled the base hourly rate for the OT I worked. Most years it was 50%.

In Liberland the masters relax by the pool, waited on hand and foot by naked slaves while the minions toil in dungeons below.

Frankly, our profession is task-based, not hour based. If I can complete my expected amount of work in 4 fewer hours than a colleague, I should be able to work 4 fewer hours for similar pay.

A place I used to work had a great policy of setting milestone deadlines for Wednesdays. Not only did it build in a couple of buffer days in case we ran behind, but we were done for the week when we hit the milestone. Sometimes it was late Friday, but a lot of times we earned a 3.5-4 day weekend by staying on target.

tduds: Hmm... yes you are correct in that we're tasked-based, but I don't think they're mutually exclusive. From a management POV, if the employees were salaried and there's enough work you're going to work on the next task. You're not going home early just because you finished your homework early.

Also, I think that office environment you mentioned is extremely rare.

It is very rare, but I wish it wasn't. My overall thought is that - if my reward for efficiency is just more work, there's no incentive for me to be efficient. I get profit share now so the incentive model is a bit different, but I think more firms should prioritize balance. Otherwise you'll end up with half your office coasting & the other half burned out. That's not how you get quality.

Exactly, no incentive, no balance of work load, etc. and that's how most firms I've personally experienced and vicariously experienced, operate. In finance there's what's called the utilization rate - the % of time a person does doing billable work. I have never seen an office actually calculate or have constant awareness of this, but I think going hourly would enforce it.

Almost all firms I've worked at calculated and could pull up any employee's utilization rate in a minute or two. This is usually built into whatever they are using for timesheets. In some offices it mattered more than others. It has nothing to do with being hourly vs. salary.

EA: You're right, it has nothing to do with hourly vs.salary. I don't even know why I brought it up.

The biggest issue I have with the whole utilization rate metric is that I have yet to see an office account for worker efficiency with this. If, for example, it takes tduds 36 hours what it takes me to do in 40, but we are both being measured for our billable time, I look like the better worker with 100% utilization compared to tduds' 90%. 

One office I worked in seemed to calculate utilization on a 40-hour work week regardless of how many hours you actually worked. So if you were really inefficient and worked overtime you could have over 100% utilization. The really annoying part about that office is that they would usually bring up your utilization rate when you wanted a raise, or they were handing out bonuses, which meant that it penalized those who were more efficient. I brought this up in one of my salary negotiations, and you could tell the principal had never considered this. His only response was that I should be taking on other tasks to remain above the target utilization rate ... I passive aggressively implied that he/the firm should win more work.

this sounds like incompetent management. utilization rate isn't a measurement of performance; it's a measurement of availability for billable tasks. in general it should be lower for more senior level positions. senior management was often less than 50% - they spent most of their time on office management and building client relationships, not billable work. deviations from target utilization rates are symptoms of poor work planning by the pm, or an inadequate amount of incoming work for the staff, or possibly an employee given the wrong role for their skills. it's not relevant to consider individual employees utilization rate unless they are fully in charge of their own task assignments and scheduling, which again would be poor management.

Tduds, are you suggesting that for example, if one person was asked to complete a certain set of drawings and coordination tasks and they burn through them by wednesday, they can just fuck-off (politely) and take a 5 day weekend? I don't think that works. Control of deliverables and reasonable scheduling is better and having most of your staff on hand for most of the workweek helps when the eventual problems occur. Perhaps I just don't agree with the piecing apart of a project and giving staff their own sandbox to play in. There is one deadline and one team. More efficient team members get rewarded with better compensation and better project/career opportunities while the slackers stay at the bottom. (and unfortunately become a loud parasitic voice behind the otherwise good intentions of the pro-union folks). My 2 canadian cent's worth. Time for a beer.

to clarify, utilization rate is a project management / work plan metric. it helps you know how much time you can 'assign' to certain individuals. it's not a performance measurement. if someone is exceeding their target utilization, their workload is being mismanaged, or they are doing the wrong job for their position. if a managing principal is spending 38 hours a week drawing details, their utilization will be high, but they are hopelessly failing at their role as a manager.

agree w non here. architecture is very much a team project. everyone has strengths and a focus within their team, but it's a dysfunctional team that gives people such limited roles that they can finish on wednesday and leave for the week while others stay in the office plugging away. this can really only work in a small office where incoming work is limited, and so nothing else is ready to do once one project milestone is done. it's also not necessarily a sign of personal efficiency. some clients are easy, some projects run smoothly. some don't - and that's not usually the fault of the individual staff.

I completely agree with you on the incompetent management comment midlander. One of the many reasons I don't work for them anymore. Cheers!

Non - To clarify, it was team based. & only for milestones. So, for example, we targeted to submit for permit on a Wednesday. If we busted our asses and got the permit set in on Wednesday (or Thursday, or Friday morning), the team was good for the week.

Those Monday deadlines though. Who does that?

I don't know why we're still making Patrik relevant.

some people are their work and you can't really compare a business to a life.

Yes you can.

how? one person "works" 120 hours a week and the other has some plan with spreadsheets.

What are you drinking tonight?

only did 12 hour today, stopped at 630 (i work while in transit) between 630 and 830 had drinks and dinner with relative I hadn't seen in 20 years. in those 2 hours had 12 calls, 12 texts divided between (3) contractors, (1) realtor, (1) management. (2) contractors were in panic mode - one because of the realtor and other because his subs don't listen to him and he can't read drawings (good combo)....only responded to (1) management company as they are about 20% of our revenue. 2 hours I didn't pay attention after typical work hours....so I will awake at 5am tomorrow to get a leg up on it.......drank a Duvel, Hofbrau, and Bronx Summer Ale.

If it keeps you knee deep in duvels, it ain’t a bad way to go.

Happy - what types of projects are you doing that your clients and contractors are that needy?

contractors - either we went from schematics to construction overnight and we're filing in the blanks as we go or the contractor is very green and I'm esentially a mentor/coach

realtors - either selling or buying you need either space studies in 5 minutes or close out legal issues before closing

clients - the "needy" ones are one who have never taken on a project before and of course think their project is the only one the office is working on and have neurotic anxiety issues or have some political scheme that needs constant narration in the architect's ear...they have money too, so we work for them