>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.

Congratulations on the new job!

Perhaps you should also think of the overall productivity, not only productivity based on individual.

For example when I'm in development mode if I get a phone call for whatever reason (support, information for a possible client...) this gets me out of my development bubble. It'll take me a while to get back in my bubble. So my productivity is affected by the phone calls. I don't have the choice because I'm alone. But for a business perhaps everyone is answering the phone from time to time. If this is the case then perhaps it would be better to have one person dedicated to phone calls. And do something else to fill the gaps. This way developers do what they're supposed to do and stay in their bubble longer.

Perhaps one thing to consider would be to have a good time management system. Preferably with a software. Yes I know that nobody likes to enter what seems to be useless information but that could be the starting point leading to establishing what to do to increase overall productivity. The hard part is to have everybody understand that you don't do this to control them but to possibly improve their jobs.

After a while you'll probably see who's losing his time for what reasons.