I work in advertising. I don’t know of a single person who works in marketing or advertising who doesn’t do timesheets. I also don’t know of a single person who enjoys doing them. I think it’s time for companies to abolish them. Here’s why:
- They will never be accurate. Unless you are someone who writes down every start and stop of work and every job you work on, your time sheets will not be accurate. When someone interrupts you for 5 minutes to talk about a job, should you put that in your time sheets? Should your timesheets reflect the momentum lost on the job you were working on from the interruption? These are questions for the ideal scenario. MOST people I know don’t have this problem because they are filling out time from the last four weeks and are hopelessly trying to remember what they did for several days 3 and a half weeks ago. In other words, most people’s timesheets are horribly inaccurate.
- They don’t reflect what matters. We don’t sell our time, we sell our results. We should be working on finding away to price the value of those results, not the time it takes us to produce them.
- They don’t reflect what we bill. Most companies will quote on work (based on erroneous timesheet data…see #1 above), then when the work is delivered, they will look at the timesheets and figure out what should have been billed based on time spent. Then they tell the client what that number should have been, but never charge them for it. Sometimes this gives an account manager some leverage to ask for more money in the future, but for the most part timesheets never actually affect the final bill.
- They encourage people to work to time goals rather than client goals. When someone knows how many hours they have for a job, they tend to stick to them (or at least falsely report they did in their timesheets) regardless of how much (or little) work a job may need. This often leads to poor work being delivered because people ‘ran out of time’. It also keep focus on time goals rather than results. All people think about is that if their timesheets reflect a good work effort, then they will be rewarded–which is mostly true!
In all fairness I do see some value in timesheets. IF you can get good data, they help you estimate future work and avoid surprises. And when you get that rediculous client that demands to see the time applied to their account, you have something to produce. But if you cannot get employees to enter their time accurately, and you cannot get them to understand why they matter, then timesheets can only hurt you.
IMO, the best way to help with the timesheets problem is to make them DEAD simple.
- Timesheets are a quick snap-shot and don’t need to be hyper-precise, so let employees round to the hour.
- Drop all other information beyond beyond the job and the time.
- Don’t track sick days, holidays, doctor appointments, etc. if you can avoid it.
- Get rid of your crappy software RIGHT NOW. Write your own. KEEP IT SIMPLE.
And I think a healthy reminder to employees from time to time about how timesheets help the company get paid is a good idea too but it should come hand-in-hand with a reminder that results are ultimately what a company gets paid for.
