Update Full-Time Equivalent (FTE)¶
Many businesses and organizations use 'full-time-equivalent employees,' or 'FTE,' as a unit of measurement for counting employees. A full-time-employee is usually considered one who works 40 hours per week (although this number may vary by organization). Using FTE to describe the human resources allocated to - or needed to perform - a particular task lets you compare apples to apples. A department that has six half-time workers and a department that has three full-time workers both have three FTEs, as an example (because six half-time workers equal three full-time workers).
While volunteers are generally classified differently than employees, FTE can be a useful method for leaders of volunteer programs to describe the amount of service performed by volunteers (overall or in a particular area) in terms understood by human resource professionals and board members. In Volgistics, Service Details and Service Summary reports can translate the number of hours served by volunteers into an FTE value for this purpose.
Volgistics uses the FTE measurement to describe the number of full-time workers that it would take to serve the same number of hours as an individual volunteer or group of volunteers (not the number of volunteers who individually serve full-time).
How Volgistics calculates FTEs¶
By default, Volgistics calculates FTEs at the rate of 40 hours per week, although you can tailor this rate to your organization (see below). So, every 40 hours served by volunteers in a one week period equals one FTE.
When you include the FTE hour statistic on reports, the system determines how many hours a full-time employee would have worked in the time frame covered by the report and compares that to the number of hours served by volunteers.
For example, if you set up a report to show the FTE for the month of November and have set a rate of 40 hours per week for a full-time employee, the total hours a full-time employee would have served in that time period is 171.43 hours:
30 days in November ÷ 7 days per week = 4.29 weeks in November
40 hours per week x 4.29 weeks = 171.43 hours
So every 171.43 hours served by volunteers in November is equivalent to one full-time employee. If your volunteers served 1,000 total hours during November, the report would show that volunteers were equivalent to 5.83 full-time employees:
1,000 hours ÷ 171.43 hours per full-time employee = 5.83 FTEs
Setting your FTE rate¶
Volgistics defaults to an FTE rate of 40 hours per week. You can change this if your organization uses a different rate (such as 38.5 hours per week). To change the rate used to calculate FTE: