Working a salaried (exempt) and hourly position at the same company

[sware2cod]

If you want to work on the backlog and stay longer, then do it. Don't expect any kind of extra pay for it. When you are salaried, you work as long as it takes to get the job done.

Be careful about taking on extra work, thinking it's temporary. Upper management might decide to add that work to your plate permanently, and not hire additional people. And you would then have to figure out how to squash extra work into your day or start working longer hours just to get all your work done. This is very common in corporate America today. It's become an expectation and folks that mention it to their managers can be labeled as whiners. Often the response is "we are all busy" or "everyone works extra hours".

To be honest, if I was in your shoes I wouldn't open a can of worms and offer to do this work or bring it up to management. Instead, I would pitch in temporarily when I could, until the new team members are hired. Else your open position might get closed out because the work is being handled by the team (cost savings!).

[johnp292]

Originally Posted by Zeromus-X

What problems would it possibly be opening up from an employer perspective? Genuinely curious on your statement.

Upper management is doing everything they can to get more manpower in place. Losing so many at once was the factor in this. This seemed like a decent suggestion of a temporary fix. I do agree that it may bring up a discussion on other ways that can get the team meeting expectations working within our currently salary; that doesn't seem to be much of a risk though because I fail to see how the answer would ever be "yes, do that, but for free". Maybe I'm too optimistic about that.

Once your employer starts paying you additional wages based on you working extra hours, you could no longer be considered exempt, and that could mean you were never exempt. This potentially opens the employer up to the possibility that they'd be liable to pay you hourly for all the hours you worked while classified as exempt. It also is foreseeable that other managers in similar positions could make a claim that they are miscategorized as well, and seek additional compensation. Not a can of worms an employer would want to open.

[Zeromus-X]

Interesting.

I do have the option of working the extra hours and using them to accrue comp tome, so I might just go that route in order to not open up potential problems. Thanks for the insight on this, everyone who replied.