FWIW, I would definately have a discussion with your manager about how he views business travel and guidelines for compensary time off. In my experience, it’s much better to have an agreement on this than to assume you get x. Many managers are reasonable on this front but it’s a case by case basis.
Yep, I hate the weekend travel part. My company is pretty good about not scheduling monday morning meetings to avoid that Sunday travel. I’ve got one big weeklong trip per year to the US for a massive global meeting, leave on a Sun and get back on Sun night. That one sucks big time
My bosses would comp me the afternoon if I was dragged all over hell’s have acre unless there was a pressing issue that needed attention. I’d be expected to do a little work at home later in the day. It’s more about getting enough sleep than anything.
And I would fall into the 50 hr/week crowd with additional work at home.
I spent the greater part of my career in management consulting so all this nitpicking over travel is a bit of a foreign concept to me. If you have a local client, that’s awesome, however most of the time you are required to fly out monday morning and fly back thursday night. Sometimes you have to fly out sunday night. And it’s usually like this for months at a time. So IOW, bitching about having to travel once a month seems a little petty to me.
Ultimately you need to decide whether you want a job that requires travel and how much travel you are willing to put up with. If you don’t like it, a career in sales, consulting, or several other professions might not be for your.
To echo what Voyager said, you need to be smart about what you push back on. Left to their own devices, many companies will be completely unreasonable about pretty much everything. On the other hand, you don’t want to be viewed as an uncooperative malcontent. As a general rule, the more bullshit assignments you agree to do, the more credit you have to say “no” later on. So IOW you might want to take that Sunday flight instead of watching Desperate Housewives reruns so that later on you can let Johnson go instead for that conference during your wife’s birthday.
Well, they had a pretty good 50-60 year run, but it’s been all downhill now for a while. Didn’t some big slob make a movie about how well Flint’s been doing?
For those who complain about Sunday travel, 15 years or so ago the airlines gave big discounts for Saturday night stays, and we were invited to fly back from a Friday meeting on Sunday - the company covering lodging and meals, of course. I was never forced to, but I’ve heard that some people were. The airlines finally did away with it after a lot of pushback. Someone recently was trying to bring this back, but it looks like they failed. These days two extra nights in a hotel might be more than the ticket anyway.
For the Tuesday, I’d be expected to stick around til quitting time.
The real frustration with my job, travel-wise, is that when we’ve needed to be somewhere for a Monday morning meeting, we’re expected to travel on Sunday - on our own time. This is not time we can bill to the client or get credit for in any other way. Which sucks, as it’s time away from home / family. Still as others have noted, this economy is not one in which we can make waves.
If the meeting is 5 hours and I spend 4 hours driving home afterward, I would not be able to record more than 8 hours on the timesheet. So in that scenario I can charge some of the travel time.
For the OP’s scenario: don’t rush out the door at 7 AM - leave at 8:30. Then you’re at the office by 2 or so, and only 3 hours to the end of the day
What strikes me is the focus on hitting 40 hours a week and asserting you don’t have to work thereafter. It’s the same focus you showed in your earlier thread (it was yours, right?) about whether you had to work at your desk over lunch time or not, because you only wanted to work 8 hours a day.
To me, this whole mindset is completely inconsistent with good salaried workers. You work when you need to in order to get the job done and give value to your company; you take off when you have to in order to take care of yourself. And you take off when you want to if you can do so without short-changing your job or inconveniencing your company unduly.
IOW, there is a huge difference between the worker who comes in off a two-day work trip and says “Hey, I’m going to take the afternoon off because I worked fourteen-hour days the past two days and I’m exhausted” and the worker who comes in off a two-day work trip and says “I’ve worked 28 hours in two days, so I’ve worked more hours than I usuallly owe the company on a Wednesay, so I’m taking this afternoon off.” They both get the afternoon off, but the manager of the former is sympathetic – how hard the dedicated worker has toiled! – while the manager of the latter is irritated – damned clock-watcher, marking every second of work done, and working not one instant longer than strictly required. So note that there’s really no reason you can’t be Guy 1 instead of Guy 2 – a lot of that is attitude and how you present yourself.
Seriously – and respectfully – I think your attitude needs to be adjusted. If you think your employer is exploiting you such that you must jealously guard every second of your time, if you are not invested enough in your job or your company to just get the job done without thinking about what you should get in return, then maybe this isn’t the job for you. Because speaking for myself personally – the times that I’ve started to obsess over hours worked versus hours owed have been times when I’ve felt the company was taking advantage of me. That never bodes well for my future with any organization.
My managers routinely travel around the world, literally. They routinely leave on Saturdays in order to make Monday morning meetings in Asia. If they arrive home on Sunday afternoon, they are expected in the office by 9am Monday morning. 7:30am is their normal starting time so there is some latitude given for the time change. If they take a half day off to recover, they count it as vacation time.
They are paid well for their trouble. Very well. They also pocket millions of frequent flyer miles and hotel points for their personal use that were paid for on the company’s dime.
If you accept a job that requires travel, you should expect to travel. If you accept a job that requires selling, you should expect to take people to dinner and meet them after business hours. Niggardly counting hours worked will only leave you frustrated and unhappy. You’re not a 40 hour a week employee. You’re a salaried employee.
BTW, my husband doesn’t travel, but he’s also salaried. He routinely works 60 hours a week and only takes 2 weeks of vacation per year.
I am with msmith537 on this. I travel and many of my colleagues travel. I left home at 5:30 this morning and am still half-working in my hotel at 8:30 PM. If I got back to the office tomorrow at 11AM I would work the rest of the day. So would all my colleagues. Sure, if travel causes disruption such that leaving an hour early allows you to sort it out, then fine.
Especially in this economy, anyone going home at 11AM just because they had a long day the day before is going to fiind themselves very near the top of “the list”. And they should find an hourly-paid job if and when they can next find employment.
Not that I disagree with this necessarily, but there are plenty of employers who expect work to be performed when needed but don’t subscribe to the, “Sure, leave early, it’s slow and you’ve got shit to do” part.
To clarify, I meant “take off” as in “take time off,” not as in “just leave.” You can count my employer in the group that doesn’t let peope just leave early for no good reason. I guess you could do it, but you couldn’t do it repeatedly without seeing some raised eyebrows.
Is that a common expectation these days? One of my project leaders used to come up to me and be like “can I leave now (3:00pm)? I don’t really want to be here right now.” I’m like “are you out of your mind? Can you at least do me the common courtesy of pretending you are sick or something?”
Not to do a “me too” on this, but I’m on a business trip right now as I type this. Left San Diego early Sunday morning for a Monday appointment in upstate New York. It will take all day to get back Tuesday, and then Wednesday is a normal workday, despite losing all of Sunday to travel. If I have an appointment or work is slow, my boss (who is the company CEO) is cool about us knocking off early, but if the work demands it, we work our asses off.
Though I will confess I am a little resentful on this trip only becasue I won the company this new work, and now my reward is to do my regular job, PLUS this new work because they can’t find someone to hire to fill the position as yet. That seems a little odd to me considering that there are tons of qualified unemployed applicants available right now.
I always feel a little guilty about this, but my company makes the distinction between salaried exempt and non-exempt employees. When you are more entry level and thus are paid less (I forget whether that’s exempt or non-exempt), they will pay you for every minute you work - including travel. It’s really a great deal for me as travel on Sunday is double time and if I have to travel back on Saturday that time is usually straight to overtime. But that’s my company policy that I charge every minute so I do. But it does feel sort of wrong because I don’t feel like I am doing “work” when at the airport, etc. But the money is certainly nice.
You must be union. I’ve had four salaried positions since returning to Alaska and was expected to put in the number of hours required to get the work done, with no extra compensation. Ever. One of the jobs was as the COO of a Native Corp company and I had to travel to the east coast and gulf coast at least twice a month. I was paid very well at that job and wouldn’t have dreamed of asking for compensation over and above, even if it was possible (it wasn’t). Comp time was also out of the picture when I worked at AHFC, which is a quasi-state organization that operates under State labor rules. My department had a liberal excused-absence policy, however, and my employees could take up to four hours of unexplained absence (with notice to me, of course).
Well said. I accept that business travel in my own time is sometimes part of my role. If I have to do a lot of it in a short period of time, I request additional leave in lieu. It has never been refused.
Well. If it’s the type of job where someone needs to put in 12 hours days, they are probably so busy that they shouldn’t be leaving at 3pm. Right?
In this case, it’s a relatively 9 to 5 job. You don’t have to punch a clock, but just up and leaving because you don’t “feel like being here”? Do you feel like being paid?
It’s not important for me to be “cool” with my employees if being cool means letting them treat their job as if it is an afterthought.
