You don’t need to interpret tea leaves stuck in a cup, to understand that people who work sitting down get paid more than people who work standing up. Ogden Nash, 1902 – 1971
Comp time is time off earned for time worked over a certain amount, usually 40 hours in a week. What comes as a surprise to many employers is that there is no such thing as legally paid comp time for non-exempt employees unless you are a municipality. If your employee exceeds the 40 hour work week limit, you must pay overtime.
But let’s say you have exempt employees that you would like to set up a comp plan for. It’s your plan – you don’t have to offer one – so you may be very creative in how you establish your plan.
You could reward your exempt employee and yet minimize cash flow by offering a comp plan for them to take off hours based on hours worked over 40, 45 , 50, etc. in a week. You could base the plan on billable hours that exceeded a weekly total. When you award the hours, you could reward hour for hour or at time and a half.
You would want to be consistent with your exempt work force by creating the same plan for employees who could be classified together. And you would want to track comp time earned as well as comp time used – preferably on the employee’s check voucher.
Comp time is a tool to reward your work force. It just can’t be used for your non-exempt work force (unless you work for a muncipality and even then there are rules to live by).
Cheers,
Bryan Dear
