How do you spend your working hours?

The allocation of working hours is scheduled to start at the Department of Computer Science at the beginning of June. However, as there is no English user manual available yet English-speakers start allocating later when announced.

It is not connected with clocking-in control, assessment of individual performance, or any other basis for salary payment. All employees must allocate their working hours, including part-time employees.

Are we not reporting enough already?

Research backers such as Tekes are adopting total-cost models, where they fund projects according to their full expenses. Naturally, the hours worked for each project have to be itemized, as is already the practice in EU-funded projects.

In addition to research backers, the Ministry of Education also wants to monitor university expenses, of which staff expenses are the largest item. Teaching and research staff will allocate their working hours to the three main duties of the university, and at the same time, we will learn how much time they spend on administrative work.

The research done in projects need support services, such as IT support. The expenses of these services will be allocated to the projects in the total-cost model. Once we have learned how much work is carried out in projects and support teams we can calculate a percentage of overhead expenses. With the help of this percentage, we can allocate the support expenses to the project backers.

How we report our working hours will affect our future research funding.

The benefit for us

University people work hard. There are many who are not aware of how hard. Allocating our working hour honestly can be a wake-up call that helps us avoid future burnout.

Researchers whose salary is paid out of project funding are working in the projects, but most projects at our department are headed by professors. The professors follow the 1600-hour annual work schedule, and are paid from the university's coffers. So far, it has not been possible to charge a project for the work of the professor/manager. This means that we could say that the Department of Computer Science has sponsored funding bodies like Tekes and the Finnish Academy . As we start to allocate our working hours, we will gain the potential of charging the backers for these project expenses, too.

For employees following the 1600-hour annual work schedule who are not project members, the allocation of working hours will be singularly easy. They will only have to make a schedule in Sole once or twice a year, and that is it. Employees do not have to touch the schedule after that.

Project researchers and those working weekly hours are recommended to allocate their hours at least once a week, entering their real working hours, because it can be hard to remember what you have been doing for longer than that.

Computer scientists can read more about the beginning of allocating working hours on the department info page, which also contains links to further reading: https://www.cs.helsinki.fi/henkilokunta-intranet/tyoaika.fi.html

The Sole TM system: https://sole.it.helsinki.fi/tyoaika/

Sanna Kettunen