It’s that time of the week again – Test time!

Last week I asked you – what does the acronym FTE stand for?

We had 424 responses to this one, I am blown away by the increasing participation and seeing so many people playing along is so cool!

Of those 424 responses, 90% got it correct – FTE stands for ‘Full-Time Equivalent’.

Full-time equivalent (FTE) is a unit of measurement that indicates the number of full time hours worked by all employees. This is used to help make workloads or headcounts comparable across various contexts for reporting, budgeting, planning or forecasting purposes.

So, let’s do the maths (mmmmm my favourite )…

If your business considers 40 hours per week to be full time, then an employee working 40 hours will have an FTE count of 1.0

The easiest way to calculate an individual’s FTE is to divide their work hours against the standard full time hours
(40 ÷ 40 = 1) 

Therefore, if you have a part time employee who works 20 hours per week, they will have an FTE of 0.5.
(20 ÷ 40 = 0.5)

If you have a part time employee who worked 8 hours per week, they will have an FTE of 0.2
(8 ÷ 40 = 0.2)

If we look at these three people combined – they have a;

headcount of 3
but an FTE of only 1.7.

Although there are three people, they are equivalent to only 1.7 full time employees.

And that’s it! Although it’s unfortunately not always that easy in practice as I am sure many of you will know

Would love to know how and why you use FTE in your business too if you want to share below in the comments

Right, next question, back to NZ employment law this time

Under NZ law, how many days does an employee need to be absent from work without communication for it to be considered abandonment?

• 1 week
• 3 days
• 5 days
• there is no legal requirement