I have a perfect example of what I have been talking about in this blog (as far as what NOT to do as an employee). A colleague of mine who is an employee of an IT consulting firm just told me that he’s been working 65+ hours for the past month so far including long days and weekends. I asked him if he was getting paid overtime. He said no, because it was a fixed price project that his employer had won. I asked if he was at least able to bank the time (and take it as days off later), he also said no to that too. ‘They’ weren’t accepting banked time for this project. Understand that if an employer pays you overtime on a fixed price that it will chew into their profits on the project. While IT projects are sometimes difficult to make money on (especially fixed price projects), they should build in a contingency for this uncertainty.

He also mentioned his utilization rate. This rate is calculated as the number of hours billed / number of hours worked. If this number get low then you can imagine the employer won’t be happy. This might put a bullseye on your back if it stays low for a while. My colleague’s rate has been fairly low because he’s been ‘on the bench’ for a while. (‘On the bench’ means he hasn’t been on a project – being charged to the client by his employer). So by working overtime he’s increasing his utilization rate.

On one of his previous projects he was only being charged out at 50% (about 20 hours per week) since the position was for a part-time consultant. But because this was a support role for an application in production, he ended up working almost full-time. Because this extra time was not being charged his utilization rate was also not 100%, but closer to 50%.

While we’re at it, another colleague of mine was on a consulting project where the employer would only pay overtime after the employee worked more than 8 hours above the regular work week (ie. above and beyond 40 hours/wk). This sometimes happens when there is a difference between the work week of the client and the work week of the employer.

No, no, no, no, NO!!!!!

• Whether you are on a fixed price contract or time and materials through your employer is NOT YOUR PROBLEM. You need to bank your hours or get paid overtime for these hours
• If you are on the bench, or have been on the bench in the past this is not your fault – the fact that your employer hasn’t found you continuous work is NOT YOUR PROBLEM
• If your utilization rate is less than ideal, this is NOT YOUR PROBLEM. It is the employer’s job to find your work and keep you 100% chargeable. If you’re on part-time projects this is because they put you there.
• If you’re an employee you should get paid overtime for any hours above the work week of your employer. And you better believe that in most cases they are charging the client for your hours!

I consider this to be employee abuse. If I were to state my main goal as a blogger about employee empowerment, it would be to stop employer abuse of employees.

Employees tend to blame themselves for not being chargeable. “I must not have enough experience”, or “If I had more relevant skills, I would be more chargeable”.  Don’t fall into the same trap. They hired you based on your known skills at the time. It’s their job to keep you busy. Of course you will be taking courses and learning new skills when you can. You will work overtime when required to get the job done successfully.

If you can’t get your employer to agree on this, you might want to consider contracting.