| Topic Name: |
Average hours/week |
| Message Name: |
I would add . . . |
| Date Posted: |
02/26/2006 |
| In Reply To: |
I work for GCT, which is the less business oriented (and more technical oriented) support group that supplements the operating groups. As a result of our status as supplemental resources, we usually travel 80 - 100% of the time.
Many of the engagements I've been on have a 4-day or a modified 4-day at the client schedule. This means flying out late Sunday night or very early Monday morning and staying in the client city until Thursday, then catching a 7 or 8 PM flight home Thursday night. You usually put in approx. 41 to 44 hours M-Th unless it's crunch time. You make up the remainder of the time on Friday or over the weekend.
Friday we have the option of working from home or going into the local ACN office to work. Usually Friday is a half-day. You catch up on remaining work (which you can also do on Sat or Sun) and make yourself available for conference calls with the client and answering email inquiries from the client or the local ACN staff on the project (who work Mon-Fri at the client since they are local). The rest of Friday is devoted to internal stuff like completing your timesheets, doing internal paperwork, and internal projects (e.g., helping a partner with a proposal or organizing the next Accenture sponsored Habitat for Humanity house building project, or putting together marketing material or creating reusable contributions for the internal knowledge base site).
Some projects have a modified 4-day week. You work a half-day or 3/4 day at the client one or two Fridays a month and go home late Thu night the rest of the month. During crunch time, you might fly home on Fridays on that 7:30 PM flight or even stay over the weekend at the client city.
If you are staying in a long-term residence place (like Amerisuites) or one of those studio apts that ACN sometimes leases for long-term projects with big ACN teams, then you can fly in leisurely on Sunday at whatever hour you like and get a good night's sleep. This is because it doesn't cost the client any different if you stay extra nights since the price is not by the night but by the week or by the month.
If you are staying in a hotel, they usually want you to fly in early Monday morning to avoid paying for a Sunday night stay. Also, staying over night Thurs cost hotel money, so you are often encouraged to leave late Thu night (resulting in only 3 nights at the hotel) and working from home (or the ACN office) on Fri and Saturday. The client also charged a smaller per-diem for 4 days than for 5 days.
Some clients don't like paying OT, so you may enter 40 hours on your time sheet while actually working the normal, 45 - 50 weeks. During very slow periods, you may end up working only 40 or 41 hours, so you can put in 10 hrs Monday, 11 Tues, 11 Wed and 8 on Thursday, take an earlier plane (say, 6:30 PM) and have no client related work on Fri - Sun. This gives you some time slack to work on internal ACN tasks or go to community meetings on Fridays and still have Sat and Sun for your personal life.
The nice thing about being out of town is that you sometimes end up working less hours than the local ACN resources. If you are working from 7:45 AM to 7:45 PM, the locals end up working 7:45 AM to 7 PM, 45 mins less each day, but they also work the same long hours on Fridays while you are putting in a half day at home or at the local office. During crunch time, when everyone is working until 9 or 10 PM, the out of towners have a less than 15 min commute back to the hotel (sometimes only 8 or 9 minutes) while the locals still have to make their way home each night.
That's the story of travel and the 4-day work week. |
| Message: |
The whole 4-day week for out of town engagements gets a bit screwed up when you travel coast to coast.
If you live in the west and have client in the east, you need to fly out Sunday morning because it takes all day to get to the east coast. If you take a 9 AM flight on Sunday morning you will arrive at your hotel in Boston or Philly or Baltimore at around 7 PM. Figure 5 hours for the flight (not counting getting to the airport by 7:30 AM) plus an hour to get to the hotel from the airport, plus the 3 hours time difference. So it's a 12 hour trip (by the clock) or a 9 hour trip (in reality) counting the airport travel and waiting. You have to leave on Friday, but the reverse flight is slightly better. You take a 9 AM flight on the east coast and arrive home 6 or 7 hours later, which is 4 PM in Baltimore, but only 1 PM in LA. You can even work until noon at the client, take a 2 PM flight, and be home at around 7 PM. The end result, tho, is that you only get one full day at home, Saturday and you have to get to bed early Sat night.
If you live in the east and have a client in the west, it's still tough, but better than the west to east commute. You can take a 6:45 AM flight on Monday morning and still make it to the client's office in LA, SF or Phoenix by 10:30 AM (due to the time difference). But Friday is an entire day lost. You take a 9 AM flight and get home by 6:30 PM. But at least you get both Sat and Sun at home.
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