Is it right to expect unpaid hours from your team
Richard Brewin • March 21, 2023
In 1981, when I first came into the accounting profession, unpaid overtime, in my experience, wasn’t really a thing. Office hours were 9am to 5:30pm with an hour for lunch between 1pm and 2pm. If people arrived earlier or left later it was generally because it suited them to do so, usually for travel arrangements.
If someone did work later, or, in practice, take work home because the office would be locked up, it would be because they felt responsible for taking too long on what they were doing and were looking to catch up. Compliance deadlines, for unincorporated businesses especially, were yet to really hit us and so backlogs were much less of an issue. The phrase, “A job takes as long as it takes” was commonplace, even if it was as wrong then as it is now.
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