This article is about increasing the competence of employees to manage their own performance as opposed to top-down micromanagement. Employees who carry out their work with creativity and enthusiasm contribute to the well-being of the entire company. Seems logical, so far. In the real world, however, employees must follow organizational rules and practices, such as filling out the notorious timesheet, which is often perceived as stifling and micromanagement. Knowing the true value of time reports, leaders often struggle to sway the negative perceptions of their employees. This article highlights the importance of communicating the benefits of time tracking to your employees and offers advice on how to convince your employees that their timesheets are everything but a waste of time.
If we trust what we see on social media, everybody despises micromanagement.
Nevertheless, micromanagement is a common occurrence in the workplace. Such is the case, when a manager closely monitors and controls the work of his or her employees, often to the point of deciding how their employees should perform their work.
When employees are micromanaged, it can be detrimental to an employee’s success and overall morale. They feel as if they have no control over their work product and that they are not given enough responsibility, which often results in them feeling demotivated and unhappy.
Organizations are increasingly aware of this phenomenon and human resources departments are often promoting new approaches that focus on empowering instead of controlling.
In fact, there is one very common practice that is perceived as the epitome of micromanagement.
One of the most dreaded bureaucratic processes that plague even the most enlightened organizations:
Time tracking.
If everybody hates micromanagement, from interns to C-level executives, why then do organizations still ask employees to submit their daily, weekly, or monthly reports?
The Hidden Cathedral
The most obvious reason is that by recording the amount of time spent on work activities, organizations can see the true cost of their activities. This is a very good reason, but at the same time it presupposes that the value chain is crystal clear: every employee should be able to clearly see how his or her efforts translates into added value for the customer.
A very good way to think about this is the old story of the two masons who were doing the same humble work. When asked what they were doing, one mumbled that he was laying bricks. The other proudly replied that he was building a cathedral.
Easily said when your goals are as clear as „a cathedral“, easy to visualize and to identify with, as for example a new online platform. In this case, the link between the „bricks“ (e.g. a complex query, or some lines of code) and your „cathedral“ is clear to the programmer who is writing the back-end code.
But timesheets are the bricks of a different kind of cathedral! Is our developer seeing the connection between his weekly time report (the bricks) and the financial success of the whole project, represented by its business case (the cathedral)?
If you can make this clear to them, it will be much easier to convince them that this seemingly useless activity actually has value.
What if There is No Cathedral at All?
It can be difficult to highlight this connection, as it may include elements that must remain confidential. In some cases, there might be no “cathedral” at all, and the activities may be focused on achieving some internal goal, without any connection to a profitable project. In such cases, what other value can be emphasized to communicate to employees that their timesheets are not a waste of time?
Predict Project Performance
Whether you are using classic “earned value” KPIs or base your estimations on story points, the actual effort is one of four necessary values needed to express how much you have accomplished and to compare it to how much you should have accomplished at a specific point in time.
The point here is not to have a good formula for calculating a traffic light color or a percentage number for a report, but rather to ensure that resources have enough time to finish their work before they are asked to start a new task. This is valuable to the people who complete the time reports.
How to get it right:
- measure achievements (e.g. with story points), not just effort;
- communicate transparently, especially the negative, because here you have the opportunity to improve;
- keep the plan grounded, not in unrealistic expectations.
Get Better at Estimating
If we know how much effort we had to put into an activity in order to achieve a result, we can compare it to the initial estimation. With each comparison, we improve our ability to make better estimations in the future.
How to get it right:
- make sure that there is a clear beginning and end to the task, so that you can truly compare estimations with actuals;
- adopt agile practices, such as retrospectives to reflect on tasks as soon as they are completed.
Define Tasks That Make Sense
When you get emails with questions such as “Where should I book my time?”, take a look at your work breakdown structure (WBS) or backlog. Do these names and descriptions really make sense to project team members? Take it as a reality check: if the description is not good enough, how good can the specifications be?
How to get it right:
- talk to team members to understand how they typically describe their assignments, and consider their perspective when defining tasks in your plan;
- communicate your plan and how you created it. People will be able to see the connection between abstract planning entities (streams, objectives, high-level goals) and their daily work.
Help People Assess Their Own Performance
By collecting their thoughts on how they use their own time, people can get an objective report on their own effort. Sometimes the difference between the perceived effort and the actual number of hours spent on a task can be surprising. Don’t underestimate the ability of your colleagues to self-regulate their work style, habits and ultimately their own performance. The time report can be – above all – a powerful self-management tool.
How to get it right:
- define rules that are easy to comply with;
- make sure that the rules are the absolute minimum needed to create your reports;
- allow as much freedom as possible in the use of the tools – people will find a way to use them to their advantage –and yours as well.
Conclusions
In this article we reviewed a few reasons why time tracking provides value for your organization.
In my experience, these points – properly communicated and leveraged – are more than enough to motivate colleagues to be patient and comply with this annoying task.
At this point you might ask what your organization can do if these points do not apply to your processes, but you would still like to implement time reports. Do you have any additional value-adding points that were not covered in the article? If so, make them crystal clear to your employees (and leave a comment below!)
Otherwise, you have already answered your own question.
Stop micromanaging.
