Overtime: recording it so it does not become a person-by-person argument
Echipa HR 365 · reviewed 2026-09-04 · 5 min read
Hours beyond schedule only become a problem when they are discussed from memory, at month end. The flow that prevents that has three steps and one principle: they are recorded on the day they happened, by the person who worked them, and confirmed by the manager the same week.
Why the argument lands at month end
Because nobody writes it down on the day. The person stayed an hour and a half on Tuesday, remembered on Friday that it was two, and the manager remembers nothing out of the ordinary. It is not bad faith on either side: memory for short intervals, three weeks later, is simply poor.
The second reason is subtler: without a current record, nobody sees the accumulation. Twenty extra minutes, almost daily, never feels like an event — but it makes ten hours a month, and those ten hours show up somewhere, usually as tiredness or as a resignation.
The three-step flow
What happens and when
- The employee — records it the same day: how much, and what for — a five-word reason, not a justification
- The manager — confirms or disputes within five days; anything not disputed stands as confirmed
- HR — at month end, only the unconfirmed cases and those over threshold come up for discussion
The rule in step two — anything not disputed stands as confirmed — is what makes the flow sustainable. The alternative, where every hour needs active approval, jams in the first busy week, which is exactly when overtime happens.
The five-word reason matters more than the hour
| Common reason | What it actually means | What you do |
|---|---|---|
| Finished what I had started | Tasks are sized beyond the working day | They get redistributed, not compensated indefinitely |
| Something urgent came up | Urgencies have no margin in the plan | Reserve capacity for them, if it recurs |
| I covered for somebody | The team is sized with no margin for absence | A headcount problem, not an hours problem |
| The meeting overran | Meetings have no fixed end | Solved in the meeting agenda, not the timesheet |
| A client or an external deadline | A real and predictable cause | Planned for in advance next time |
Every row in the middle column is a problem solvable somewhere other than in the hours record. Which is why the reason is the most valuable field in the whole flow: the hour says how much, the reason says why, and why is the only thing you can change.
The monthly threshold and what you do when it is exceeded
What “a little over schedule” means over a year
Somebody who stays, on average, 25 minutes beyond schedule every working day. 21 working days a month.
- Per day
- 25 min
- Per month
- 21 × 25 min = 8.75 h
- Per year
- ≈ 105 h
- Equivalent in working days
- ≈ 13 days
- What never shows up as an event
- nearly three working weeks a year
Nu intră în calcul:
- hours worked at home in the evening, which usually reach no record at all
- the cumulative effect on tiredness, which is not linear with the number of hours
The result figure is the argument for recording small intervals too. Nobody reports twenty-five minutes; everybody notices when somebody resigns, and the reason is often the sum of those intervals.
What you do not do
- Do not require prior approval for every hour. It gets bypassed in real situations and survives only on paper.
- Do not compare people on their overtime count. The one with the most is often the one badly sized, not the most devoted.
- Do not keep the hours record in the same place as performance appraisal. Once hours affect the rating, they stop being reported accurately.
- Do not close the month with unconfirmed hours. An hour disputed in February and discussed in May can no longer be settled.
Compensation: what the company decides and what has to be written
Compensation rules come from applicable law and from the contract. What is left to the company is the operational part, and that has to be written somewhere everyone can read it rather than explained case by case.
- Within what period time off in lieu can be taken, and who approves it.
- What happens to accumulated hours at the end of the reference period — the rule, not a decision made at the time.
- Who can request overtime and from what threshold prior approval is needed.
- How travel and journey time are treated, if the role involves them.
The absence of those four written rules invariably produces different treatment between teams — and the difference becomes known. A one-page document, updated once a year, removes most individual arguments.
Distribution between people
In any team, overtime concentrates on two or three people almost every time. The cause is not volunteering: they are the people who can be relied on, so they are the ones asked. The effect, at six months, is that exactly those people burn out and leave first.
The check is worth running quarterly: who accumulated the most hours and how often they, rather than somebody else, were asked. If the distribution is heavily skewed, the problem is not the rota but the skills matrix — too few people can do that work.
Where to start
Ask for recording on the day, with a five-word reason. With nothing else changed, that alone gives you a picture in the first month that you have never had.
After a month, read the reasons, not the hours. Every category in the table points to a repair somewhere else — task sizing, margin for urgencies, headcount, meeting agendas.
Check the distribution between people quarterly. If two or three accumulate most of the hours, the problem is that too few people can do that work — and that is fixed by training, not by the rota.
Hours recorded with a reason and a confirmation, not just a number
Every interval beyond schedule carries its reason and the manager’s confirmation in the same week, so at month end there is nothing left to reconstruct from memory.
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