Overtime comes at a costly price for your business. If your employees are continually working more than 40 hours a week, you’re likely spending extra money on compensation at a higher rate. Your employees may feel the need to work overtime for several reasons. Here are five ways to reduce the need for employee overtime.
Change the Culture
Your business likely has an “overtime culture”—even if you didn’t realize it. If business leaders are taking overtime to get their projects done, employees will likely feel pressured to do so, too. Encourage employees against spending extra time in the office, the importance of work-life balance, and be transparent about when overtime work is necessary to complete a deadline and when a project can wait.
Track Patterns
Some employees may fall into a vicious cycle of working overtime to make deadlines. Others, unfortunately, could be abusing their ability to earn extra money by working after hours. Getting to the bottom of this problem is one of the many reasons to use employee time tracking software. By doing so, you can determine if employees are being overworked and need a lighter load or more extended deadlines to complete projects. You can also see if employees are wasting time or are nearing overtime and need a warning about their hours.
Cross Train Employees
If employees are trained solely on doing their job and only that, you could run into problems down the line. For example, if only one employee knows how to do a particular report, they could end up swamped with work requiring extra hours. Similarly, if one person in the system falls behind, everyone may fall behind, requiring overtime hours to catch up.
Instead, work on cross-training employees so everyone can step into other roles or help with overwhelming tasks if needed.
Overtime Capping
Sometimes, overtime is unavoidable. While most full-time employees qualify for overtime after exceeding 40 hours, there isn’t a federal limit on how much overtime can be worked. Design a policy that allows employees to receive fair overtime pay if necessary but keeps your business in budget and upholds your overtime culture.
Consider Expanding
Have you already tried implementing some of the above strategies but still can’t get a handle on employee overtime? If so, it may be time to consider expanding. Overtime work is often a sign your employees can’t complete their daily, weekly, or monthly workload on time. Adding another team member or two to disperse some of the workloads could be beneficial.
Try out one or all of these five ways to reduce employee overtime to save your business money and avoid overworking your employees.
