Hi everyone. I haven't vanished. I've just been lurking and too busy/preoccupied to jump in.
Long story short. My firm, which has been paying hourly since the beginning of time is going to salary. We were investigated by the Labor Department a year ago thanks to an office manager out for revenge after being fired and we came out smelling like a rose. No legal issues. However, I suppose in an effort to forestall any other acts of revenge and to save a bit of money we're going salary.
The catch is that they are starting with me. Not the whole office at once. It was brought on by negotiations due to a job offer I have received at another firm. The "raise" that was offered sounded good at first, but has turned out to be something of a salary cap. We've always been paid straight time for hours worked and the philosophy has been that if you needed a little extra money, hourly was a way of providing it through extra work. No other bonuses or profit sharing other than a somewhat OK Christmas bonus. I work a lot of overtime and we've all been pretty happy with it. When I ran the numbers and discovered this wasn't all it seemed, compared to what I've been earning in the past, I went back to my employers with questions, I was told they hadn't thought about things such as comp time, less than 40 hrs per week worked or bonuses for exra time worked yet. Obviously this is a half-baked plan at this point.
My question is how does salary work in your office? How are you compensated for additional work? How are you de-compensated for a shortage of hours? What about carry-over of vacation or comp time? Any other comments?
Except for student jobs and one early job where I was hourly and paid time-and-a-half for overtime, I was always on salary at all firms. A few of these firms did offer comp time in some circumstances - i.e. you didn't get comp time for things that were normally expected off-hours tasks associated with your projects, like attending zoning board or school board meetings - but you did get it if there was some huge project deadline crunch.
The problem I encountered with comp time is that in any firm in which I'd accumulate much comp time the firm was so busy that I basically wasn't allowed to spend it.
Most firms I've worked for have allowed carry-over of vacation (and comp time) for at least 6 months, and usually for a year. But again, carry-over of vacation is usually only necessary if the firm is so busy that you haven't had time to take a vacation.
I worked in one firm where bonuses were directly tied to amount of overtime worked, but at other firms the principals felt that this puts a lot of pressure on people with family commitments and other outside interests to sacrifice to keep up with the single workaholics (though as one of the latter I liked the system.)
I've never been in a situation where anyone was "de-compensated" for a shortage of hours. If you are fulltime and on salary you have to be paid for 8 hours on any day that you show up and work AT ALL. So, if you're taking time off for dentist appointments or you go home early they still have to pay you for a full day. However, they are allowed to insitute a "make up hours" policy that would mean that within some amount of time (usually some number of months) you would be required to log some overtime to make up the difference.
If the firm is cutting back on hours because they don't have enough projects then they'd need to re-negotiate with you if they want to cut your salary down because of this. Realistically though, if the firm is cutting back on hours this will more often than not result in layoffs soon.
As for your personal situation: this sounds as though it was the result of a counter offer situation. I've seen some interesting research that found that more than 75% of employees who forced their employer to make a counter offer are no longer working for that employer 1 year later - regardless of the offer. Being forced into that situation often made the employers resentful - and let the cat out of the bag that the employer was unhappy enough to have been job searching, which sometimes made the employer assume that the person would leave soon and thus the employer started giving less opportunity/responsibility to that employee....
In my current office we pay part-time people and students hourly with overtime. Everyone else is on salary with no overtime. There is not much overtime required, though occasionally there have been situations where "special bonuses" were distributed after deadline crunches that required people to work successive weekends. There is no comp time. Vacation time can be carried over indefinately - though most people take regular vacations so it's not much of an issue.
Hi Ormolu,
Yes, it's a counter offer. This is the second time I've been through this with them in 7 years and as you suggest, this may be the end of my employment there. We've actually been quite busy the last year or so. There's no financial crunch. I think just a potentially good business intention on their part gone wrong. My "raise" amounts to about $40 a month net extra. I think I'll buy a bigger house!
What exactly is comp time and how does it work? How were you not allowed to spend it? Has all this been typically explained in an employees manual? You'd think I'd know this after all these years but for some reason I've always been hourly.
mum, I think ormolu explained the salary/hourly thing pretty well. My current employer does not offer any compensation for "overtime" past 40hrs/wk. End of year bonuses are arbitrary and paid only if there is a proffit. Most employers are the same "on paper" but your supervisor/boss may allow you to take time off after working OT, and get paid for it...ex: you work 50hrs one week, and the next you take friday off, and carry over the hours from the week before to the next.
My previous employer did have "comp time". Here's how it worked before they changed it (too much abuse) the employee would receive 1 hr of comptime for every hr of overtime worked past 45hrs/wk. You could only bank 40hours at a time, meaning if you already have 40hr in the bank and continue to work overtime you loose those hours, however there was no limit for the year. Vacation/Pers. time was accrued with no limit/time frame to spend it, so you had people that took vacations on Comptime and had 160+ hours of vacation in the bank...Policy changed and the max comp was capped @ 40 for the year.
Mum: "comp time" is time used as compensation - usually as J3 describes it - you accrue an hour for every hour of overtime. I didn't experience any limits on how much we could accrue though. As I said above, the firms usually didn't grant comp time for things that a salaried worker would be expected to work late for (mostly late meetings and evening presentations.) But they did grant it for other overtime - mostly hours that happened during "crunch" times.
What happened in one firm was that I had accrued several weeks of comp time each of the years I'd been there, in addition to my regular vacation time. The only thing you could do with this time is use it as vacation - unless you left the firm, in which case you'd be paid for the time at your usual salary, in your last check. I could not possibly have taken the whole 3 weeks off because at the time there were so many deadlines in the firm that they were strongly discouraging vacations and trying to get everyone to defer their time to the next year. Eventually I did leave the firm and got a fairly large last check - because it included all this vacation and comp time that I hadn't taken.
If you dont' get bonuses, and they don't pay you for overtime, it's simple, do not work a minute past 40 hours. They legally couldn't fire you because of it.
Where I am now, not an architecture firm, they will not let you work more than 40 hours, unless there is cash in the budget. They pay time and a half, AND it's salary. There is no reason you shouldn't be paid beyond the 40 hours simply because you are on salary, unless, say, you are getting 20% more a year.
my firm doesn't have an official "comp time" policy, but our pay periods are broken down into twice a month.
all salary employees can usually work their alloted 80+ hrs (for that pay period) as they see fit.
so if there is a big deadline and i work a bunch of extra hours at the beginning of the pay period, i usually take some time off before the end of the pay period. unfortunately if that big push comes at the end of a pay period, they win.
Salary versus Hourly is always an interesting variation for architects. I have worked at firms that used both scenarios; however, I feel that a good firm which pays salary is the nicest way to go. Actually, its probably best for the firm too. Working salary meant that there is no nit-picking about hours worked. There was no comp-time, which I have now found to be nice. The one thing the firm did do was give a sizeable bonus each year. This was around 7% of your salary. I am not sure if it was a based on overtime hours worked or if it was a straight percentage. I have also worked at firms that payed no extra for overtime, which in some states is actually illegal, but it is still something that is done in the architecture profession. The current firm i am working for is hourly for all unregistered people and salary for registereed architects. The bonuses for salary less than those for salary. They have to make up for the bonuses somehow. The thing about comp-time is that it can be benifical for the firm if the alternative is to pay time and a half for all time over 40 hours. Letting you switch out hours which you could say count for 1.5 for ones valued at 1.0 can be a signifigant savings. But like you said, it can be abused.
Never again would i work for a firm that had no overtime pay if i was an hourly employee. Also, bonuses are a very critical issue when working salary. One must also figure in medical compensation too. If you have 7 years experiance, I would say that there are some demands that you might want to place in fron tof your employers. Maybe you need to make a chart or spreadsheet for them since you are their first salary employee.
The last issue is raises. How often do people see raises at their firm and what percentage is this working out to be. I am currently in my fourth year of post graduation work and I have always expected about a 10% raise per year. Luckily, this has and is happening so far. Too often Architects forget that this a buisness and a Profeesional one at that. We should also be payed as professionals.
The last large office I worked in seemed to be fairly legit about this in relation to the labor laws (at least they started out this way). Interns and people just out of school, in addition to the CAD people and admin staff, were paid hourly, including overtime, vacation, full medical benefits. Basically we were expected to work 40 hours a week and overtime was discouraged unless absolutely necessary, which worked out well at least for me because I worked harder to get things done in 40 hours (I was hourly) and if necessary I would get overtime, so I never resented having to stay extra for the crunches (which weren't that often because the projects were big institutional projects for the most part). We all got bonuses at Christmas, based on your position in the firm. The people who were salaried did not get overtime, but for the most part also worked only 40 hour weeks. If they had to work extra hours occasionally, they would then use the "comp time" hours they accrued for vacation - take a half day or something. They were supposed to use those hours during the same pay period, because apparently this system had been abused in the past. The thing that was strange about it was that they didn't want anyone to put more than 40 hours a week on their time sheet unless they were hourly, so it was up to you to keep track of your comp time and therefore seems ripe for abuse. I'm not sure why they did it that way - you would think they would want to keep track of it. It may be that comp time causes problems for taxes, bookkeeping or something, so maybe it isnt strictly legal. The other thing is that as others said above, you never really have the time to use all your comp time, so that situation really works out in favor of the employer. I know this firm has shifted to making everyone salary, and is expecting people to stay longer now. I think they were very corporate to start out with and didn't realize that young naive designers would actually be willing to work overtime and not get paid for it. Now that they are trying to become more design oriented they've shifted their philosophy - a mistake in my mind because people don't like to work all the time unless they get something out of it, whether it be more money or a big name they can use for their cv (which this firm doesn't have).
Basically, if you are paid salary and get bonuses (even one I think), you are expected to work what is required of you to get the job done (at a professional job). You are in a good position to know exactly how much you'll be expected to work. If you don't think the salary compensation is justified, I would either explain to them that you won't be working as much, slow down a bit and see what happens, or look around. I know a couple of people that have switched jobs when they were moved to salary because either they could get more elsewhere or they preferred to start out fresh and have the work terms laid out clearly. In your case they are switching the rules on you, and if they aren't flexible it's natural you would be upset. I definitely think it's fair for you to explain that you aren't ok with working the same amount for less money, if that's the way it's going to work out. Or to say that you feel you should be making more, or are looking for more, and unfortunately you'll have to look elsewhere. As an aside, both times I asked for a pay increase larger than what my employer was offering, I got laid off a few months later. Could have been a coincidence, but I doubt it...
Hi R.A. Thanks for your input. I'm hearing that comp time might not necessarily be a good thing.
I'll let you guys know how it goes. I've always worked a lot of overtime. I also take care of all the IT stuff, troubleshoot all the cad problems, co-wrote the cad manual. I'm also obtaining certification in the next two weeks in an area that could bring an additional service into the office. Aside from the other job offer, that was the purpose of our initial discussion.
I've also found out that I am the least paid project manager they've had in 8 years.
You are a PM and IT person, working a lot of overtime? Maybe now's the time to really think about going out on your own. Sounds like you have all the skills, I know you've been considering it. At the very least you should be highly valued by your current employer, if you aren't then take it elsewhere and their loss!
This issue of being the IT person at the same time as a project manager (or associate or intern or even principal) is widespread. Especially if the others in the firm (particularly the principals) don't have the skills to do the IT stuff themselves they may not have enough information to understand what it is you do, how much time is involved, etc.
One thing I'd recommend is trying to delegate some of this responsibility to newer/younger staff members. For instance, if you have a decent CAD standard in place then pass the duties of updating the CAD manual, troubleshooting CAD issues, software updates, etc. on to someone else - at least as a first line of defense.
At one point when I was in this position I sent around a memo listing routine computer maintenance tasks that needed to be done, announcing that these are everybody's responsibility, and then I just kind of went on strike as far as addressing minor technical issues. This was pretty effective even just as a lesson to people about how much time is involved in these tasks.
On another issue: there are some types of certification that will increase your firm's insurance costs because they add another "standard of professional care" to what your firm is expected to do. For instance, insurance companies have recently been upping rates for firms that have someone LEED certified. In this case your firm might have to balance any pay raise to you with the immediate costs to the firm of this insurance problem. In the long run if the certification is of a type that will make the firm more marketable then everything should hopefully work out in their (and your) favor.
Sep 13, 04 7:27 pm ·
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Salary questions
Hi everyone. I haven't vanished. I've just been lurking and too busy/preoccupied to jump in.
Long story short. My firm, which has been paying hourly since the beginning of time is going to salary. We were investigated by the Labor Department a year ago thanks to an office manager out for revenge after being fired and we came out smelling like a rose. No legal issues. However, I suppose in an effort to forestall any other acts of revenge and to save a bit of money we're going salary.
The catch is that they are starting with me. Not the whole office at once. It was brought on by negotiations due to a job offer I have received at another firm. The "raise" that was offered sounded good at first, but has turned out to be something of a salary cap. We've always been paid straight time for hours worked and the philosophy has been that if you needed a little extra money, hourly was a way of providing it through extra work. No other bonuses or profit sharing other than a somewhat OK Christmas bonus. I work a lot of overtime and we've all been pretty happy with it. When I ran the numbers and discovered this wasn't all it seemed, compared to what I've been earning in the past, I went back to my employers with questions, I was told they hadn't thought about things such as comp time, less than 40 hrs per week worked or bonuses for exra time worked yet. Obviously this is a half-baked plan at this point.
My question is how does salary work in your office? How are you compensated for additional work? How are you de-compensated for a shortage of hours? What about carry-over of vacation or comp time? Any other comments?
Except for student jobs and one early job where I was hourly and paid time-and-a-half for overtime, I was always on salary at all firms. A few of these firms did offer comp time in some circumstances - i.e. you didn't get comp time for things that were normally expected off-hours tasks associated with your projects, like attending zoning board or school board meetings - but you did get it if there was some huge project deadline crunch.
The problem I encountered with comp time is that in any firm in which I'd accumulate much comp time the firm was so busy that I basically wasn't allowed to spend it.
Most firms I've worked for have allowed carry-over of vacation (and comp time) for at least 6 months, and usually for a year. But again, carry-over of vacation is usually only necessary if the firm is so busy that you haven't had time to take a vacation.
I worked in one firm where bonuses were directly tied to amount of overtime worked, but at other firms the principals felt that this puts a lot of pressure on people with family commitments and other outside interests to sacrifice to keep up with the single workaholics (though as one of the latter I liked the system.)
I've never been in a situation where anyone was "de-compensated" for a shortage of hours. If you are fulltime and on salary you have to be paid for 8 hours on any day that you show up and work AT ALL. So, if you're taking time off for dentist appointments or you go home early they still have to pay you for a full day. However, they are allowed to insitute a "make up hours" policy that would mean that within some amount of time (usually some number of months) you would be required to log some overtime to make up the difference.
If the firm is cutting back on hours because they don't have enough projects then they'd need to re-negotiate with you if they want to cut your salary down because of this. Realistically though, if the firm is cutting back on hours this will more often than not result in layoffs soon.
As for your personal situation: this sounds as though it was the result of a counter offer situation. I've seen some interesting research that found that more than 75% of employees who forced their employer to make a counter offer are no longer working for that employer 1 year later - regardless of the offer. Being forced into that situation often made the employers resentful - and let the cat out of the bag that the employer was unhappy enough to have been job searching, which sometimes made the employer assume that the person would leave soon and thus the employer started giving less opportunity/responsibility to that employee....
In my current office we pay part-time people and students hourly with overtime. Everyone else is on salary with no overtime. There is not much overtime required, though occasionally there have been situations where "special bonuses" were distributed after deadline crunches that required people to work successive weekends. There is no comp time. Vacation time can be carried over indefinately - though most people take regular vacations so it's not much of an issue.
Hi Ormolu,
Yes, it's a counter offer. This is the second time I've been through this with them in 7 years and as you suggest, this may be the end of my employment there. We've actually been quite busy the last year or so. There's no financial crunch. I think just a potentially good business intention on their part gone wrong. My "raise" amounts to about $40 a month net extra. I think I'll buy a bigger house!
What exactly is comp time and how does it work? How were you not allowed to spend it? Has all this been typically explained in an employees manual? You'd think I'd know this after all these years but for some reason I've always been hourly.
mum, I think ormolu explained the salary/hourly thing pretty well. My current employer does not offer any compensation for "overtime" past 40hrs/wk. End of year bonuses are arbitrary and paid only if there is a proffit. Most employers are the same "on paper" but your supervisor/boss may allow you to take time off after working OT, and get paid for it...ex: you work 50hrs one week, and the next you take friday off, and carry over the hours from the week before to the next.
My previous employer did have "comp time". Here's how it worked before they changed it (too much abuse) the employee would receive 1 hr of comptime for every hr of overtime worked past 45hrs/wk. You could only bank 40hours at a time, meaning if you already have 40hr in the bank and continue to work overtime you loose those hours, however there was no limit for the year. Vacation/Pers. time was accrued with no limit/time frame to spend it, so you had people that took vacations on Comptime and had 160+ hours of vacation in the bank...Policy changed and the max comp was capped @ 40 for the year.
Mum: "comp time" is time used as compensation - usually as J3 describes it - you accrue an hour for every hour of overtime. I didn't experience any limits on how much we could accrue though. As I said above, the firms usually didn't grant comp time for things that a salaried worker would be expected to work late for (mostly late meetings and evening presentations.) But they did grant it for other overtime - mostly hours that happened during "crunch" times.
What happened in one firm was that I had accrued several weeks of comp time each of the years I'd been there, in addition to my regular vacation time. The only thing you could do with this time is use it as vacation - unless you left the firm, in which case you'd be paid for the time at your usual salary, in your last check. I could not possibly have taken the whole 3 weeks off because at the time there were so many deadlines in the firm that they were strongly discouraging vacations and trying to get everyone to defer their time to the next year. Eventually I did leave the firm and got a fairly large last check - because it included all this vacation and comp time that I hadn't taken.
If you dont' get bonuses, and they don't pay you for overtime, it's simple, do not work a minute past 40 hours. They legally couldn't fire you because of it.
Where I am now, not an architecture firm, they will not let you work more than 40 hours, unless there is cash in the budget. They pay time and a half, AND it's salary. There is no reason you shouldn't be paid beyond the 40 hours simply because you are on salary, unless, say, you are getting 20% more a year.
Thanks for the tips. I have some good starting points for further discussion.
Nice to hear from you J3!
Trace,
Do you say "Yabba dabba dooooooo!" when you leave work?
haha, yeah, there's a smile on my face!
I was actually surprised when I learned this, but I now know that's how the real world works! Damn brainwashing in school really worked!
my firm doesn't have an official "comp time" policy, but our pay periods are broken down into twice a month.
all salary employees can usually work their alloted 80+ hrs (for that pay period) as they see fit.
so if there is a big deadline and i work a bunch of extra hours at the beginning of the pay period, i usually take some time off before the end of the pay period. unfortunately if that big push comes at the end of a pay period, they win.
Salary versus Hourly is always an interesting variation for architects. I have worked at firms that used both scenarios; however, I feel that a good firm which pays salary is the nicest way to go. Actually, its probably best for the firm too. Working salary meant that there is no nit-picking about hours worked. There was no comp-time, which I have now found to be nice. The one thing the firm did do was give a sizeable bonus each year. This was around 7% of your salary. I am not sure if it was a based on overtime hours worked or if it was a straight percentage. I have also worked at firms that payed no extra for overtime, which in some states is actually illegal, but it is still something that is done in the architecture profession. The current firm i am working for is hourly for all unregistered people and salary for registereed architects. The bonuses for salary less than those for salary. They have to make up for the bonuses somehow. The thing about comp-time is that it can be benifical for the firm if the alternative is to pay time and a half for all time over 40 hours. Letting you switch out hours which you could say count for 1.5 for ones valued at 1.0 can be a signifigant savings. But like you said, it can be abused.
Never again would i work for a firm that had no overtime pay if i was an hourly employee. Also, bonuses are a very critical issue when working salary. One must also figure in medical compensation too. If you have 7 years experiance, I would say that there are some demands that you might want to place in fron tof your employers. Maybe you need to make a chart or spreadsheet for them since you are their first salary employee.
The last issue is raises. How often do people see raises at their firm and what percentage is this working out to be. I am currently in my fourth year of post graduation work and I have always expected about a 10% raise per year. Luckily, this has and is happening so far. Too often Architects forget that this a buisness and a Profeesional one at that. We should also be payed as professionals.
The last large office I worked in seemed to be fairly legit about this in relation to the labor laws (at least they started out this way). Interns and people just out of school, in addition to the CAD people and admin staff, were paid hourly, including overtime, vacation, full medical benefits. Basically we were expected to work 40 hours a week and overtime was discouraged unless absolutely necessary, which worked out well at least for me because I worked harder to get things done in 40 hours (I was hourly) and if necessary I would get overtime, so I never resented having to stay extra for the crunches (which weren't that often because the projects were big institutional projects for the most part). We all got bonuses at Christmas, based on your position in the firm. The people who were salaried did not get overtime, but for the most part also worked only 40 hour weeks. If they had to work extra hours occasionally, they would then use the "comp time" hours they accrued for vacation - take a half day or something. They were supposed to use those hours during the same pay period, because apparently this system had been abused in the past. The thing that was strange about it was that they didn't want anyone to put more than 40 hours a week on their time sheet unless they were hourly, so it was up to you to keep track of your comp time and therefore seems ripe for abuse. I'm not sure why they did it that way - you would think they would want to keep track of it. It may be that comp time causes problems for taxes, bookkeeping or something, so maybe it isnt strictly legal. The other thing is that as others said above, you never really have the time to use all your comp time, so that situation really works out in favor of the employer. I know this firm has shifted to making everyone salary, and is expecting people to stay longer now. I think they were very corporate to start out with and didn't realize that young naive designers would actually be willing to work overtime and not get paid for it. Now that they are trying to become more design oriented they've shifted their philosophy - a mistake in my mind because people don't like to work all the time unless they get something out of it, whether it be more money or a big name they can use for their cv (which this firm doesn't have).
Basically, if you are paid salary and get bonuses (even one I think), you are expected to work what is required of you to get the job done (at a professional job). You are in a good position to know exactly how much you'll be expected to work. If you don't think the salary compensation is justified, I would either explain to them that you won't be working as much, slow down a bit and see what happens, or look around. I know a couple of people that have switched jobs when they were moved to salary because either they could get more elsewhere or they preferred to start out fresh and have the work terms laid out clearly. In your case they are switching the rules on you, and if they aren't flexible it's natural you would be upset. I definitely think it's fair for you to explain that you aren't ok with working the same amount for less money, if that's the way it's going to work out. Or to say that you feel you should be making more, or are looking for more, and unfortunately you'll have to look elsewhere. As an aside, both times I asked for a pay increase larger than what my employer was offering, I got laid off a few months later. Could have been a coincidence, but I doubt it...
Hi R.A. Thanks for your input. I'm hearing that comp time might not necessarily be a good thing.
I'll let you guys know how it goes. I've always worked a lot of overtime. I also take care of all the IT stuff, troubleshoot all the cad problems, co-wrote the cad manual. I'm also obtaining certification in the next two weeks in an area that could bring an additional service into the office. Aside from the other job offer, that was the purpose of our initial discussion.
I've also found out that I am the least paid project manager they've had in 8 years.
You are a PM and IT person, working a lot of overtime? Maybe now's the time to really think about going out on your own. Sounds like you have all the skills, I know you've been considering it. At the very least you should be highly valued by your current employer, if you aren't then take it elsewhere and their loss!
This issue of being the IT person at the same time as a project manager (or associate or intern or even principal) is widespread. Especially if the others in the firm (particularly the principals) don't have the skills to do the IT stuff themselves they may not have enough information to understand what it is you do, how much time is involved, etc.
One thing I'd recommend is trying to delegate some of this responsibility to newer/younger staff members. For instance, if you have a decent CAD standard in place then pass the duties of updating the CAD manual, troubleshooting CAD issues, software updates, etc. on to someone else - at least as a first line of defense.
At one point when I was in this position I sent around a memo listing routine computer maintenance tasks that needed to be done, announcing that these are everybody's responsibility, and then I just kind of went on strike as far as addressing minor technical issues. This was pretty effective even just as a lesson to people about how much time is involved in these tasks.
On another issue: there are some types of certification that will increase your firm's insurance costs because they add another "standard of professional care" to what your firm is expected to do. For instance, insurance companies have recently been upping rates for firms that have someone LEED certified. In this case your firm might have to balance any pay raise to you with the immediate costs to the firm of this insurance problem. In the long run if the certification is of a type that will make the firm more marketable then everything should hopefully work out in their (and your) favor.
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