The Work Week - AccountingTools

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Work Week Definition

The work week definition is a fixed period of 168 consecutive hours that is recurring on a consistent basis. The beginning and ending start and stop times and dates can be anything management desires, but it should be consistently applied. Whatever the work week is defined to be, it should be listed in the employee manual to avoid confusion about which hours worked fall into which work week, not only for payment purposes but also for the calculation of overtime.

It is unwise to alter the stated definition of a work week, since it may be construed as avoidance of overtime payments. For example, a company may have a history of experiencing large amounts of overtime at the end of a month in order to make its delivery targets, so company management elects to change the work week from Monday through Sunday to Wednesday through Tuesday right in the middle of the final week in a month, thereby reducing much of the overtime hours that employees would otherwise earn to regular hours. This would be a highly suspect change of work week that might be construed by the government as being intended to avoid wage payments.

However, different work weeks can be used for different departments and locations. This is particularly common when a company is acquired, and elects not to conform the acquiree’s work week to its own. If there are many of these acquisitions, a centralize payroll department may find itself tracking every conceivable variation on a work week, all within the same organization.