Why It's Important to Capture Hours Worked, Even on Salary

This article quickly notes a few reasons why you, as an employee or an employer, will want the full hours of work recorded on any project, even for salaried employees.

Some firms have a practice of limiting the hours recorded for salaried employees. These firms want to ensure that the employee works 40 hours, but they do not want the employee to log additional hours. In practice, employees sometimes do go over 40. Even if employees aren't paid on additional hours of work, it's important to log those hours for a few reasons:

1. Estimating employee productivity on the assumption of 40 hours will overestimate productivity if the employee is working over 40 hours.
2. Hourly productivity estimates will have overstated variance for employees who always work at least 40 hours, but then work varied hours beyond 40.
3. Project work estimates in terms of days, weeks, months, sprints, and similar metrics, will be shorter-than-accurate if employees are working over 40 hours and yet the estimate assumes a 40 hour work week.