Overtime, in which as a full-time employee you work more than your normal 40 hours each week, is an interesting phenomenon. It has at times helped careers. Excess amounts have admittedly divided families, but it has enriched families at other times. For those who work overtime, it becomes a personal issue: Do I need to? Do I have to? Most of us could use the extra money, that's for sure.
But at what price?
I worked a goodly amount of overtime for many of my years at Ford Motor Company. There were two kinds: paid overtime, in which I was paid 1.5 times the implicit hourly rate of my salary (aka "on the clock"), or casual overtime, in which as as an exempt employee I was expected to do because I was a well-paid professional, expected to get the job done despite tight deadlines and limited resources.
I recall that casual overtime was defined as up to two additional hours each day beyond the eight hours of straight time, five days a week. Although I worked it when needed, the different working cultures in Ford regarding overtime practices differed among exempt salaried employees.
As a Finance person responsible for engineering expense, I often reviewed the rates of paid overtime for different types of employees. I recall that, in good times when Ford was profitable, the overtime as a percent of straight time for design engineers was about 15 percent. In other works, for every 40 hours of straight time the engineers worked, they were paid for overtime for six additional hours each week.
In Finance, I was paid overtime for some types of work through about 1992. I recall working on a new global engine program with my European colleagues in the late 1980's. We were gathering and analyzing results from a cost study for the engine program, which we had requested a few weeks earlier.
I went into the office on a Saturday morning, and didn't leave the office till 16 hours later, at midnight. As I was faxing information to my counterparts in Europe, my phone at my desk a few feet away began ringing. I answered it, and it was my friend, my colleague in Europe. I was in the office at midnight, but England being five hours ahead of the Eastern Time Zone in the United States, he was in the office at 5 a.m. Ouch.
But for me and for them, the work weekend wasn't over. I went home shortly after I sent the fax, got some sleep and returned bleary-eyed to the office early Sunday morning. I worked till early afternoon that day, and went home and crashed.
It was around that time that our management concluded that overtime was a costly and habit-forming trap. Casual overtime continued, but hours of overtime required to meet deadlines for key projects was henceforth compensated with what was called "compensatory overtime." For each hour of non-casual overtime that we worked, we were given an hour off.
Now, the time off coming from compensatory overtime had to be used before vacation time off; it had to be used in the year earned, and like any time off, you were asked to be sensitive to yours and others' workload, and not take time off during unusually busy times of the year.
In 1992, I was working on another major engine program, a new V-6 engine for our F-150 truck. An engine designed by engineers in the United States and manufactured next door in Canada was competing against an engine designed and manufactured by our European colleagues. I was asked to put together the cost picture in a manner fair and acceptable to both competing sides.
I burned a pretty fair amount of midnight oil on that project, and it was all compensatory time off. In fact, I had burned through my 80 hours of available compensatory time in February 1992, and I still had ten months to go!
Oddly, however, the additional amount of overtime hours I worked that year were not too bad. It was either dumb luck or conscious management of my workload by me and my management, to avoid overtime spikes to complete important projects.
I concluded that it was in fact a little of both, but Ford's increasing sensitivity toward the issue of overtime, including its cost and its toll on peoples' lives, helped Product Development Finance to wean itself off what one of our Controllers called a "narcotic."
Like a narcotic, you use it when convenient, and it's helpful for a short while, but the cycle of dependence has begun and you are sorely tested to kick the habit, as it were.
Ford PD Finance in my last 20 years managed to kick the habit. Certainly it reduced my income, but the additional hours I was afforded with my family paid dividends, I thought, back then and even today.
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