The tyranny of timesheets

Every week, millions of people dutifully complete their timesheets, just as businesses have expected of them for decades. The tyranny of timesheets has been something that many employees have endured and been frustrated by for almost as long – we all hate timesheets.

Admittedly, there are some positive reasons for timesheets in 2020 – billable hours to clients, cost tracking for projects and activities. However, they are all rooted in a belief that effort – and therefore productivity – is directly correlated to the time a person spends on a task.

Is time spent a good indicator of value created?

Timesheets are predicated on the assumption that tasks will take a finite time that can be quantified. An expectation that if a person spent 4 hours on a specified task, that it equates to anyone else’s productivity in that time. An assumption that the person is completely dedicated to that task, and didn’t do any other productive work for another area in that time. Has the person been 100% productive, and did they create value during that time?

We all work at different paces, have different experience levels and capabilities. A person who spends longer on a task – does that mean they are slower or more inefficient? Should a person who completes a task rapidly and effectively be penalised for doing so?

“I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.” – Bill Gates

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/568877-i-choose-a-lazy-person-to-do-a-hard-job

Timesheets and the era of Covid-19

One thing that the Covid-19 pandemic has proven is that productivity is not necessarily directly linked to time in an office – it is probably the opposite; people are more productive when they have more flexibility for downtime during a ‘standard’ workday. Why are we still measuring timesheets based on the hours that people are sitting in an office? People are able to continue to think about work whilst they are putting on washing, walking their dog or doing other chores – if a person is actively thinking about work and potentially solving problems, they should be able to specify that they are working!

Task workers are obsolete

The continuous progression to Industry 4.0 has represented a transition from task work done by people, towards automation and digitisation. Jobs are changing from routine and regular activities towards the need for creativity, problem solving, collaboration and teamwork. So why are timesheets still required to measure task workers in hours, and not the outcomes of people and the value that they create.

Timesheets drive poor behaviours

Something that I have seen in consultants and government employees that I have encountered, is a trend towards ‘playing the system’ that timesheets create. I have seen people extend the time it takes them to complete a task – because it increases their billable hours. People are rewarded and recognised for working slowly and ineffectively, as this increases the duration of the engagement through billable hours.

People will stretch out their workday and hang around until their ‘clock off’ time, instead of going home early when they have finished a task. This also leads to people not taking time for themselves – for important tasks including doctor and dentist check-ups, events with children, self-development tasks including training – all because they are tyrannised by their timesheets.

This is something business first learned a long time ago. In the 19th century, when organized labor first compelled factory owners to limit workdays to 10 (and then eight) hours, management was surprised to discover that output actually increased – and that expensive mistakes and accidents decreased. 

https://hbr.org/2015/08/the-research-is-clear-long-hours-backfire-for-people-and-for-companies

My war story

I was working on a project where I completed all my tasks early. My manager at the time then asked me to assist my colleague John who had been working on solving a technical issue ‘for over three months’ and had not been getting closer to the solution. So, I went to assist John in diagnosing the problem, asking him to explain from the beginning what the business requirement was, what the technical environment contained, and what he had already discovered. Fortunately, during this process I identified a syntax error in a command that had not been updated when the software version was upgraded (the integration contained commands for deprecated functionality, which was not generating an error, but not completing either). So, I had been able to resolve the problem in mere hours, and we implemented the change and tested it before the end of the day.

My manager was angry. He was upset that John had spent so much time on an issue that I could immediately resolve, and was upset with me that I was making both John and my manager look bad. I was challenged as to how my manager was going to justify the hours that John had put on his timesheet to resolve the problem.

My solution was that I would not put any timesheet time to John’s project, and would instead state that I had been working on my original project, and that John would claim success on his work.

We all hate timesheets

It is not just employees who hate timesheets, managers who have to approve the timesheets also don’t like to have to do the process to go through them all, reject the ones they disagree with, and potentially approve timesheets from people who may be falsifying their information.