Employee Down Time

[GACC Dallas]

This question doesn't relate to mark-up, but it does affect the bottom line.

Just how much time lost from any given employee is acceptable?

I know each employer has his/her own idea of what is acceptable and what is not and this can vary from employee to employee.

But what would a national average of time lost each year by employees be?

Ed. Williams

[Barry Novick]

Ed,

Please define time lost.

Are you looking at lost production time each day, or are you asking about time off (vacations, sick days, hunting. etc)?

Barry

[GACC Dallas]

Barry,

Time off from the job no matter what the reason.

Ed.

[Bob Curry]

On small projects billed on T&M basis, my target is to bill 30 of the available 40 hours a week or 75%.

[Scrapr]

Ed,

I am assuming you are talking about personal days. Mental health days off, see the dentist, funeral, consoling your cat, etc. My answer is it "depends". Guy has been a good employee, consistently on time, good attitude. Maybe a little leeway. I try to figure out why the time off. One of our men's wife has been having surgery. He has asked for a couple of days off to be with her. No problem. He asked for a draw Friday. Didn't have to ask why.

Is the crew b& moaning about the slack they have to pick up? Is it making you miss your promises to contractors? If you never know when he will take a day off I would sit him down and let him know it is starting to become a problem. Ask him for solutions. Document it. Start a paper trail. Just because you ask I think it may become a problem.

To answer your question. Other than the 9 or 13 or 27 holidays our men might miss 2 extra days/year. But we work 4 10's. So they can get errands done on a day off. We don't have sick days. Good luck.

[beezo]

I think that he may be asking for more like in an 8 hour day how much work gets done. I know that is what I am asking sometimes of the occasional people that I hire for a job. I do not smoke and most of those I hire do not smoke. The ones that I do hire, how many smoke breaks a day are acceptaable? I had a guy that I will not hire again who needed one 15 minute smoke break every hour. Since we do not smoke in the house outside he went and every time I had to go looking fo him. He seemed to hear me coming because he always was just starting his 2nd or 3rd cigarette when I found him. Maybe I am just sensitive to the smoking issue. I do not think so. Another wanted a soda break every hour. Fo some reason a glass of water takes a lot less time to drink than a liter of soda. These are things that seem to drive me crazy but you would not want to hear all of them. Or the guy that leaves the jobsite to go to McD's for a combo meal, comes back with it and sits down just as everybody else's 30 minute lunch is over but still wants to sit down to eat it and get his 30 minutes of lunch time which has now turned into 60 minutes of no work. Yet on Friday he insists that he deserves 40 hours of pay. That is the type of down time that I am interested in hearing about. I pay for 40 hours but get only 30 hours of work out of him. That seems to be a lot of time to bill out without seeing results.

[Barry Novick]

This is a subject we just discussed a few weeks ago at a company meeting.

To cut down on unproductive time, I now employ one person to make sure my five production people have what they need. As this guy drives around, cleaning jobs and getting material, he is "on call" in case we find we need something. If we are short lumber, ran out of nails (this should never happen), etc...

Lunches and breaks were getting out of hand, so now we work 8:00 to 4:30, half hour paid lunch break. If the guys want to go out or take many breaks, they lose the paid lunch time.

This seems to keep the guys happy, although every day it seems I'm being asked to pay for one more thing to add to overhead!

Barry

[Dick Seibert]

I solved this problem with a job clock. They can log out, take a smoke break or go to lunch, and log back in again. And no more trouble getting accurate timecards from them. In this computerized age there is no excuse for not keeping accurate records. You find out a Hell of a lot about your employees when you sit down at the end of a week and view all their log ins and log outs.


Job Clocks

[GACC Dallas]

I see it this way:

You've got your basic holidays - Christmas, Thanksgiving, New Years, Memorial Day, Labor Day and July 4th. That's six days a year we take without question.

Then I figure a persons going to be sick at least five days out of the year, give or take a day or two. I also figure a person will need at least 5 days a year for personal stuff, give or take a day or two. And then they need to get away for at least a week just to recharge, take the kids to Disneyland or just get away from the job.

This adds up to an average of 21 work days a year a man won't be there. That's OK. I expect that.

Some of my employees don't take that much time. Some have situations where they need to take more.

I was just wondering what you other folks with hourly employees thought was reasonable.

I am told that in some countrys in Europe, they take an average of three months a year. I would find that hard to get business done.

Ed.

[Sonny Lykos]

We gave 6 Holidays, an occasional sick or personal day off paid. Our day was 8-4:30 with 1/2 hour lunch not paid, but a 15 minute break in the AM and PM that was paid. Sometimes a guy took an hour lunch to run to the bank or something like that, but then he worked until 5 to make up for that extra 1/2 hour. Generally that system worked pretty good for us.

Barry, the UPS truck I talked about in another thread was used by my "warehouse" man. He maintained our equipment, trucks (oil changes, brakes, etc.,) keep extra nails, screws, caulk, blades, primer, etc., and while visiting the jobs replenished whatever they guys needed, and keep a log of where the equip went too (the guys signed off in it), when it came back and it's conditioin, what he did to it as far as a maintenence, Picked up extra material and returned it to the supplier or our warehouse, gofered, did clean ups, demos, generally anything I didn't want the higher paid skill guys to do.

That warehouse man was never out of work, the guys loved him, and he was a boon to everyone and greatly increased our effeciency.

[Michael]

BEEZO:
You need an employee manual that you have the new employees (and in your case all of your existing employees) read and sign before they start work. The signing should be done in front of a neutral third party by the way. Something is going on within your company that gives your employees the idea the stuff you talked about above is OK. It is not and you should not tolerate it. I think you will find that a written employee manual stating company positions will eliminate a lot of that stuff.
DICK:
Finally, somebody gets the idea that owners do not deliver materials to job sites. Good for you. I have never been able to figure out why an owner, who's time is worth at least $45.00 per hour, regardless of what his or her company does, would spend their time picking up and delivering materials to a carpenter or other mechanic that they are paying $20.00 an hour.
Dick's approach is great. I can pass along some other methods that I know work for other contractors if there is some interest among our FF.

Michael

[GACC Dallas]

Michael,

I agree, but I do exactly what you say I should not do. I run errands, pick-up material and tools and deliver them to job sites. I'd love to have a person to do that, but as a "by the hour" company, it's hard to factor that in.

It was suggested to me here that I hire a part-time retired person to run errands. Sonny called his man the warehouse guy. That's the best idea I've heard yet. I could probably figure that into general over-head.

Until then, you'll hear me say "you guys need anything from the lumber yard?".

I'm open to all suggestions.

Ed.

[Michael]

Ed:

Your post says:

I agree, but I do exactly what you say I should not do. I run errands, pick-up material and tools and deliver them to job sites. I'd love to have a person to do that, but as a "by the hour" company, it's hard to factor that in.

Let's be candid here for a minute.

If your open to suggestions as you state on your post...........

Why would you ignore probably the best advice you will ever get on the subject of delivering materials to a job site? This is not a practice round your going through here my friend. Every minute counts. Everything you do contributes or takes away from your bottom line. I have discussed, reviewed, analyzed and went through this owner delivering materials and such to job sites with literally hundreds of contractors over the last 20 + years. It doesn't make sense financially to do it. Owner's of companies that deliver stuff to job sites are waisting time and money.

And by the way, it is not hard to factor in an employees time, regardless of how you bill out your time. It is simply a matter of understanding the mathematics of the business.

You also stated:

It was suggested to me here that I hire a part-time retired person to run errands. Sonny called his man the warehouse guy. That's the best idea I've heard yet. I could probably figure that into general over-head.

If the "warehouse guy" is doing what your talking about, it is a job cost or job expense. It is NOT an overhead expense.

Until then, you'll hear me say "you guys need anything from the lumber yard?".

Ed.

You can pay someone 1/3 what you should be paying yourself and get the same materials and such delivered to your job sites.

Now tell me Ed, What is the best use of your time......playing errand boy or running your business like a businessman?

Michael

[Allan]

Here are my thoughts about picking up material. In a global sense I agree it is not efficient for an owner to use his time to do what most would consider a menial tasks. However, I would not want to hire a gopher just for this job even at minimum wage unless I had one heck of a large operation. I will occasionally pick up material but I really try to keep it to a minimum.

A bigger issue for me is why with prudent and efficient planning you can't get material delivered. All of my vendors deliver, and if I am short material either I did a poor job on take-off or my subs do not tell me in time they are short material. 80% of the time when I am short material it is a human error that could have been prevented. That's my goal, with po's and planning to minimize picking up material. Maybe once every 2 weeks, I could live with that, but any more than that I am looking at my systems and processes and making some changes.

Allan

[GACC Dallas]

Michael,

I understand what you're saying.

I own this company lock, stock and barrel. We are debt free, completely. As of today I have 25 employees on the books. As sole owner, what I pay myself per hour is a moot point. At the end of the year, all the money is mine. I could pay myself $15 an hour or $150 an hour. It still comes out the same at the end of the year. By running these errands myself and NOT paying someone else to do that, I have saved myself the cost of an employee that I cannot cost out to each job individually.

I do log my time to each job I'm running for, but I charge my time in carpenters billable hours. No more, no less. It's the same as if I sent one of the men on the job to get extra material. It happened today. The homeowner wanted to add some shelves in her garage. We didn't antisipate it, so I went and got the material. I could have had the lumber yard deliver it tomorrow, but I hate to call the yard to deliver one sheet of plywood. Like Allen, I use my suppliers delivery service as much as possible. But there is always that unexpected "Hey, while you're here, let's build this too" kind of thing. And as for those shelves, we will have them built and installed before the lumber yard could get the material delivered. Good business.

If I hire an errand boy, who do I charge him out to when the errands are done and he's sweeping up at the shop? Remember, my business is charged out by the hour for each carpenter on the job....working, not sweeping up at the shop. Now he gets paid straight out of my pocket.

My business is established. We have several GC's that we build for year 'round. We are booked for well into next year. So I don't need to spend time making sales calls, drumming up more business or networking with anybody right now. I don't like running errands ALL day long, but with that many jobs, it can happen. It also keeps me in touch with what's going on.

I know in the real world that what I do probably makes no sense at all. But it works for me.

Go figure.

That's my problem. I can really see no solution to me being the errand boy that doesn't effect my bottom line in a negative way.

Ed.