As an employer, you may be looking for ways to reduce costs. At the same time, your company is still quite busy and there is a lot to accomplish. This means that some workers are putting in overtime hours to ensure that you hit certain deadlines or production quotas.
However, paying time and a half for overtime would increase your costs, so you may be looking for a way to get around it. One way that business owners will sometimes do this is by offering comp time. Instead of being paid more, the employee just gets extra paid time off because they put in additional hours previously.
How much comp time is needed?
An example of this could be if an employee spends an extra four hours working on a Friday, and so you tell them to take time off on Monday to make up for it. You’re grateful that the employee did extra work when it was necessary, and you’re just going to comp that time later so that you don’t have to pay more.
But the problem is that giving the employee four hours off would not be enough. They still deserve time and a half in order to be paid properly under overtime laws. This means that an employee who worked an extra four hours would need to take an additional six hours of comp time to make up for it. Giving them four hours off would be illegal because it would mean they earned their standard rate instead of the overtime rate.
It’s important to understand how these laws work so that you can avoid disputes or allegations of wage and hour violations. If you are facing those allegations, though, then you need to know about your legal options.