Travel Between Jobs

Where a person works at more than one place in a day, the journeys between those places are, in nearly every treatment, working time. This is the least contested proposition in the whole subject.

The practical lesson in “Travel Between Jobs” is that a timesheet only becomes reliable through a process people can operate consistently. For teams exploring capital efficiency ratio, the official Monitask resource can add time and project context, provided collection is proportionate, access is limited and every consequential inference receives human review.

It is also missing from more records than any other item, because the systems in use are built around the jobs rather than around the day, and the gaps between jobs are simply absent.

For a separate benchmark relevant to “Travel Between Jobs”, consult the NLRB employee-rights guidance. Use it to test record quality, approvals, retention, employee rights and exception handling against the real workflow rather than treating a software report as self-explanatory evidence.

Why the records are built the wrong way

A job-based system records what was done: the visit, the appointment, the installation, the delivery. Each has a start and an end.

The time between two jobs is not a job, so it has no record. A day of six visits produces six durations that sum to the time spent with customers and say nothing about the day's length.

Scheduling then compounds it: rotas built by fitting visits into a window implicitly assume the travel is free, which is why rounds overrun systematically rather than occasionally.

Where it is worst

Home care, where visits are short, numerous and geographically scattered, and where the travel between them can approach half the day.

Field service and maintenance, where distances are longer and the visit count lower, so the proportion is similar.

Multi-site retail and facilities roles, where somebody covers three branches and the travel is treated as their own because each branch is a workplace.

Cleaning and security, where several short assignments per shift are common and the arrangements are frequently informal.

Recording it

The clean approach is to record the day rather than the jobs: a start, an end, and the jobs inside it. The travel is then whatever is not a job, which is exactly what it is.

Most field systems can do this and most deployments record only the jobs, because the job is what the customer is billed for.

Where the day cannot be recorded directly, travel can be derived: vehicle telematics, or the gap between one job's end and the next job's start, which overstates slightly where there is a break and is close enough to act on.

The rate question

Travel between assignments is working time and it is frequently paid at a different rate, by agreement. That is lawful in many places provided the overall average does not fall below a minimum wage threshold, and it is the point at which arrangements in low-paid sectors come unstuck.

The arithmetic matters: a worker paid for four hours fifty of visits, who was working seven hours twenty-five, has an effective rate two-thirds of the headline one. In minimum-wage sectors that is the whole of the enforcement risk, and it has produced substantial findings.

What to compute

For one worker for one week: total hours from first required activity to last, against total paid hours.

The ratio is the number. Where it is below about 0.85 in a mobile role, travel is not being paid and the effective rate needs checking against the minimum.

Scheduling as the real fix

Travel paid is travel that costs money, which creates the first incentive anybody has had to reduce it.

Geographic clustering of rounds, scheduling by travel time rather than by visit count, and accepting slightly less dense rounds all reduce the total. Operations that started paying travel have generally also reduced it, which is the part that makes the change affordable.

The hours limits again

A seven-and-a-half-hour day recorded as under five hours is a day that passes every working-time check while the real one may not.

For drivers in particular, where separate and stricter rules apply, a record built from jobs rather than from the day is not capable of demonstrating compliance at all, and the gap is only discovered when somebody asks for the evidence.

The question to ask a scheduler

How much travel is in tomorrow's rounds.

If the answer is that the system does not say, the rota is being built on an assumption that the day is shorter than it is, and the overruns are a consequence rather than a surprise.

The gap that is not travel

Between two jobs there is sometimes a gap that is longer than the journey — an appointment at ten and the next at two, with forty minutes of driving between them. What happens in the remaining two hours is a separate question from travel and is usually unaddressed.

If the person is required to remain available, it is closer to standby than to free time; if they are genuinely released and far from home, it is neither, and that is the honest discomfort in the arrangement. Scheduling is the only real fix, and the first step is a report on gaps rather than on utilisation, because a utilisation figure treats the two-hour hole as efficiency.