>>In a typical 40-hour work week, what is the minimum number of "productive" hours you would consider acceptable from an employee? My definition of "productive" would be any time doing work for the company: working on assigned tasks, helping others, answering phones, whatever. I would also include a reasonable amount of time spent improving skills, such as reading books, magazines, and forums such as UT. "Non-productive" time is essentially time not doing work: taking breaks, surfing the net, shooting the bull with other employees, etc.
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>>I was recently promoted, and I need to communicate company expectations to employees. I want to be sure that my expectations are reasonable and not out of line. I know this is subjective, but I would appreciate your opinion. Please be honest. It would be very easy to take the hard line and demand 100% productivity, but I don't think that is realistic. A certain amount of non-productive time is to be expected and is healthy, IMO. The question is how much? Thoughts would be appreciated.
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>Where I work we both do work for "clients" and we work on our "baseline product" both are considered billable - one to the client the other to inhouse. For programmers we are expected to be 90% "billable".

90% seems pretty high to me. 80% seems to be typical. I figure out of an 8 hour day, 2 hours of that is going to be spent doing administrative stuff, surfing the net, etc etc etc.