Skip to main content Link Menu Expand (external link) Document Search Copy Copied
Treefrog Handbook

Hours of Work

The standard work week consists of 40 paid hours, Monday to Friday, 9:00 am to 5:30 pm each day (“Normal Office Hours”). Any exceptions to the standard work day hours must be represented and approved by your Pod Leader.

(Frog salaries cover all hours worked up to 44 hours per week for Non-Exempt Frogs, Exempt Frogs have no limit).

Flexible Hours

Flexible Hours does not mean, “I work whenever I want”. Flexible Hours means, “I have the flexibility to be accomodated for my lifestyle by setting specific hours for when I work, and only where my chosen and approved Flexible Hours do not hurt or limit the effectiveness of the team”.

Treefrog offers an alternative of flexible working hours for most roles at Treefrog. For those individuals who wish to have flexible hours, a request for these hours must be approved by management who will reasonably and appropriately allow for these flexible hours.

  • Core hours are not “flexible day to day”, but rather “you can set a schedule of when you will be working”. The rest of the team needs to know where you are consistently, so we can work around and with you.

  • Core hours of 10:00 am to 3:00 pm are required as part of a flexible working hours request. Please note that although every effort will be made to accommodate the request for flexible hours and granted flexible hour schedules, client and/or internal meetings will supersede these scheduling exceptions.

  • For customer service and safety reasons, the office policy requires that 2 people be in the office at all times during core hours.

  • Additionally, there should be one person from each client-facing Pod available at all normal office hour times, to ensure that client requests can be handled promptly. Please schedule your time, meals, and breaks accordingly.

Punctuality/Tardiness

See Punctuality/Tardiness.

Absenteism

See Absenteeism.

Minimum/Maximum Weekly Hours

Our company has a higher than average minimum expectation of 40 hours of work a week. Most companies expect you to be on site for 40 hours a week (the old 9-5 rule), and then not pay you for lunch and breaks (i.e. 37.5 hours).

Treefog does not pay for breaks or lunch. After 5 hours of work, all Frogs are entitled to a half an hour meal period. This meal period is unpaid. As you are paid for a minimum of 8 hours a per day, you are actually required to be on-site for a minimum of 8.5 hours a day.

You may, however, have a working lunch, if you wish. Since we usually talk about work during lunch and/or eating at our desks and since there are no physically demanding roles that require physical rest, the suggestion is that if you wish, you may multi-task your lunch break to continue specific work-related discussions and thus combine lunch and work. Talking about people who work here is not a work-related discussion. Talking about a project is a work related-discussion.

Overtime

See Overtime.

Work from Home

Bottom line, working from home is a mixed bag of value. Although you may feel more efficient in accomplishing specific tasks at home, the overall effect on communication, access to correct resources, confusion by others, need of other’s to take on additional responsibilities when you are not available, and so on, can impact overall team productivity and Treefrog’s potential combined success. We are much more holistically efficient if we are all working together in the same space.

See Work from Home.

Exceptional Circumstances

The exception to the rule is if there are “extraordinary circumstances” - for example, an “emergency”. An “emergency” qualifies as something unforeseen that interrupts one of the processes of Treefrog’s business:

  • Equipment or Software failures that affect the business
  • Computer failure - hardware or software
  • The phone system fails
  • A server goes down
  • A website stops functioning
  • Weather-related issues; for example, snow storm

In these cases, if an emergency happens, you might be required to “work” more than the standard 40 hours per week. In other words, if the file system stops working, as a salaried employee, you are not theoretically paid for the time you cannot do your work. There is no “overtime pay” in the event of an electricity outage - you are only paid for hours you are actually working. We are all in this together. We are all managing our own time, we are all managing our own fates, and we all have to put in extra if there is a failure in the system that we have created and that we support.

Also note, Non-Exempt Frogs cannot work more than 48 hours a week, and Exempt Frogs shouldn’t either. If you do this, you will eventually kill yourself and that is not good for anyone. This has only happened a few times with people in non-emergency scenarios, and it has prompted a discussion in every case.

Staying up Late and Not Dying Tomorrow

Use your Common Sense about when to come in.

If you end up intentionally working until 4 in the morning, you should not really come in for 8 hours. This means, noon the next day. If it is an emergency, this may not qualify, but it is fair logic. To clarify, intentionally is being defined as the result of planned and required late-night work, not because you want to complete something and cannot sleep until you do.

Please adjust your thinking if you are not already thinking this way. Everyone on the team is a salaried employee, and everyone is responsible for doing their part to keep the boat floating.

The Individual Effect

Now, let us do some quick math:

When 25 Frogs bill 1 extra minute a day, this is the equivalent of 25 minutes a day or 2.5 hours a week. Adjusted for seasonality, the “opportunity value” of that production minute, inclusive of all in the team, is (1min x 25peeps x $125/hour x 5days x 52weeks /12 months /60mins);

1 Billable Minute a Day for a Year = $1128/month = $13,541/year

ONE minute of extra paid work by 25 Frogs pays enough to keep 50 orphans fed for a year.

When 25 Frogs work 1 extra hour a day, let us again say content inputting because everyone can do that, this is the equivalent of 25 hours a day or 125 hours a week. Adjusted for seasonality, the “opportunity value” of that production hour, inclusive of all in the team, is (1min x 25peeps x $125/hour x 5days x 52weeks /12 months);

1 Billable Hour a Day for a Month = $67,708/month in Productivity = $812,500/year

Another way to look at this is if we lose 1 hour of work due to an Internet failure, or we work 39 hours a week instead of 40, or an emergency server issue costs us an evening of grief, or we mis-allocate 1 hour a day into Administration time - we are cutting off our opportunity to grow and succeed as a team. Working less than 40 hours is stealing from our potential success.

That little extra bit of time and/or effort is the difference of getting us to the next level, getting us into position to give out raises, or putting us in a position to hire more help to take stress away from you.

This is not a call to work hours of overtime. It would be preferable for you to work exactly 40 hours every week and maintain a critical and meaningful focus, accomplishing error-free and client-loving work, and keep your energy intact. However, please do not watch the clock - watch the team and our future. Be wary that excessive admin time, an emergency scenario, server failure, computer failure, or abuse of the unique flexibility we offer can threaten our very existence by taking away from our forward momentum. We have to rise above these issues if we are to achieve the remarkable.

Some Rules of Thumb

Some other relevant information about hours worked;

  • Depending on your role, if FrogWeb shows more than 2-3 hours a week of “Admin” time over and above your 40 hours, and your role does not necessitate this by definition, there are red flags. You are possibly putting time in for work that you should not; such as, “computer failure”, “lunch”, “an error on a specific site [you] should have fixed”, or “cleaning up after a client when [you] should have billed it under a project”. Questions are raised about how you are using FrogWeb and what you are hiding. You can and should track this type of activity under Admin, and your activity should balance out to some degree with work and/or 40+ hours. If your computer is not working properly, you should be trying to do other work that is effective rather than sitting around twiddling your thumbs burning admin time.

  • We support the flexibility of going and getting your license renewed or your teeth cleaned during the day so that you do not have to on your weekend - that is stupid. If you do not catch up on the time in a meaningful way, however, you are hurting the person sitting next to you by not carrying your weight.

  • If FrogWeb shows you below 40 hours of work in a trailing quarter, there are red flags. You will not even be considered for a raise for the hour of time required to dig into your time expenditure and overall contribution to the team. Other people get the conversation first. Your fewer hours of negative value as equivalent to an unrealized cash bonus you have self-assigned.