Calculate Manhours

A man-hour is the amount of work done by one worker in one hour. Ten
people working for eight hours would do 80 man-hours of work, for
example. If you know, from experience or prediction, how many man hours
it takes to complete a certain project, you can estimate how productivity will
be affected by adding or removing workers. This does not always work
perfectly; doubling the amount of workers on a construction site might not
halve the building time because you only have one working crane, for
example. Still, man-hours are an important concept in managing teams of
workers efficiently.
Difficulty:
1.

Calculating man-hours
Determine how many people are working on the project. For our example,
we will say that we have 20 workers.
Calculate how many hours each person works, not counting break time,
holidays or vacations. Multiply the number of hours per day by the number
of days worked. For our example, we will assume that all our employees
work 8 hours a day, minus a half hour break time, five days a week. This
means that each employee contributes 37.5 man-hours per week.
Multiply how much each person works by the total number of workers. In
our example, 20 people working 37.5 hours a week equals 750 man-hours
in one week.
Calculating how long it will take to complete a project
Determine how many man-hours it takes to finish the project. This will
either be known from experience or will have to be estimated, and is
specific to each project. As an example, let's say our 20 employees will be
planting corn by hand. We want to plant 30 acres of corn by hand, and we
expect this to require 800 man-hours.

Divide the number of man-hours required by the number of workers. 800

man-hours divided by 20 workers is 40 hours. Since our workers put in a

little under 40 hours each week due to breaks, they will be able to finish
planting in just over five days.
o

Perform the same calculation with a different number of workers to see the
effect of hiring extra help or taking people off the project. If we cut our
workforce by five people, for example, it would take 53.3 hours, or just over
seven days (800/15=53.3).
o

Divide the number of man-hours needed to complete the project by the

amount of time you want it to take. This calculation will tell you how many
people must be put on the job to finish it within a certain deadline.
Let's say our corn needs to be planted within three days, because we want
it to be finished by the time it's forecast to rain. Since one worker does 7.5
hours of work a day, he or she would do 22.5 hours of work in 3 days.
Divide 800 by 22.5 to get 35.6. We would need 36 workers (or 35 full-time
workers and 1 part time worker) to finish the job in time.