The Overtime Ceiling on a Fixed Contract
You lead a 9-person customer service team on a 12-month contract with a service level of 80% of calls answered within 60 seconds. Two team members resigned last month and recruitment is frozen until the next quarter. For three weeks the team has run at 78-79%, and you have covered the gap with voluntary overtime averaging 6 hours per person per week. Absence has risen from 3% to 9%, and two experienced staff have told you informally they are 'getting burned out'. Your manager has asked you to hold the SLA without further overtime because the overtime budget is 85% spent with four months remaining. One team member has asked to reduce her hours to 25 per week for family reasons, and you have no spare capacity to absorb it.
1. What is the central trade-off you must surface to your manager, and how would you frame it?
Read the worked answer
The trade-off is between three things that cannot all be held: the 80% SLA, the overtime budget, and the wellbeing/retention of the remaining team.
Reasoning steps:
- Quantify the gap. You are 1-2 percentage points below SLA, which is roughly the call volume of one full-time equivalent. Overtime is currently buying that FTE at a premium and at a cost to absence.
- Show the causal loop. Overtime masks the shortfall, but the resulting absence (3% to 9%) removes capacity, which increases pressure to use overtime. This is a reinforcing loop, not a stable fix.
- Present options, not just problems. Options include: temporary re-prioritisation of non-urgent work (e.g. outbound callbacks, admin), a short-term agency or loaned staff request, a formal, time-bound SLA renegotiation with the client, or accepting a managed dip with a recovery plan.
- Name the risk of each. Continued overtime risks losing more experienced staff, which is more expensive than the overtime itself. A silent SLA breach risks contractual consequences.
A strong answer makes the manager choose between explicit, costed options rather than asking them to solve your problem.
2. The team member requesting reduced hours is one of your most experienced. How do you handle the request?
Read the worked answer
Treat it as a retention decision, not a rota problem.
Reasoning:
- Legal and policy position: Flexible working requests should be handled consistently and within policy timescales. Refusing is possible on genuine business grounds, but the grounds must be evidenced and applied consistently.
- Business case for agreeing: Losing this person would cost recruitment, induction and lost productivity, and would deepen the capacity gap. A 25-hour week retains roughly 70% of her output and all of her knowledge.
- Practical mitigation: Model the 10-hour weekly loss explicitly. It can be offset by redistributing her caseload, adjusting shift patterns, or reallocating the simplest transactional work to less experienced staff with a quality check.
- Conditions: Agree a trial period (e.g. three months) with a review, so the arrangement can be adjusted if service levels suffer.
A weak answer simply approves or refuses without modelling the capacity impact or considering the retention cost.