Why We Call Time-Out on Timesheets

Disruptions in tech and media have radically altered the way organizations work and collaborate with one another, quickening both the pace of production and the need for new content. These changes are driving many partners to focus and measure their efforts on results, highlighting a need for organizations to optimize their infrastructures and workflows right now. One way for these service-providers to go leaner is to shed timesheets from their practice.

While timesheets work perfectly fine for some organizations, they’re not a hard-and-fast rule to which everyone must subscribe. Working without them has been great for us because we’ve designed a more qualitative approach to data, built around velocity rather than placing our focus on individuals’ use of time.

The no-timesheets policy has been built into our culture since day one. “Filling timesheets isn’t how we want to be treated as an employee, so we’re not doing it as an employer,” says ter Haar. But he found industry pushback as MediaMonks grew. “The number one piece of feedback we would always get from people is, ‘You can’t have 20 people without timesheets. Oh, you can’t have 50 people without timesheets.’” Despite this, ter Haar found that a focus away from tracking time can be beneficial.

This didn’t mean grasping at straws without the right data to make decisions; rather, “if you’re a well-run operation company all of the data you need comes from your operations model,” says ter Haar. “The data needs to come from how you organize your company, not the people doing the actual work.”

The Jury’s Out on Timesheet Data

Velocity is a chief concern for most organizations, so it may seem counter-intuitive that time tracking doesn’t necessarily equate to achieving a high rate of work. The reason for this is that time tracking often isn’t accurate, which can actually disrupt your efforts to allocate resources in the most efficient way.

“Focusing all your attention into timesheets is a bit misguided because we know that the data is faulty,” says MediaMonks ter Haar. They’re often so complex that they leave a lot of room for error, and workers can often forget details when inputting the data. In addition to this, the process takes time and can whittle away at morale. “Timesheets can make team members feel like they’re just assets,” says ter Haar. In the worst-case scenario, they may feel pressure to lie about how they spend their time, “even if you say the data won’t be used in a way to negatively impact them,” says ter Haar. Think about it: rather than explain why a task took longer than expected and why the estimate was wrong in the first place, it’s easier for a worker to lie about time taken.

So how do you remain certain on the resources, time and budget needed to complete a project? One solution is to switch your focus away from micromanaging hard numbers and activities. According to ter Haar, the most important questions to ask at the end of a project is whether the work got done—and if it didn’t, why? “Look into that, which timesheets aren’t prepared to define,” he says.

Instead, organizations would do well to employ their operations team with people who have direct experience from the production floor. Drawing from this experience and their understanding of the process in concepting and executing a project, you can trust the operations team to make an estimate on what’s needed without outsourcing a time tracking burden onto the rest of the organization.

How Can You Stay On-Track without Time-Tracking?

For some organizations, timesheets are essential to how they plan out projects and resources. MediaMonks began without timesheets, so unlike other companies we never had to make a transition away from them. So how can you envision your organization’s workflow without them?

A value-based organization thrives on providing team members with a sense of autonomy and ownership, which encourages them to solve problems to reach a deadline successfully. The important thing is that teams feel they truly own a project. “Teams like to win together,” says ter Haar. “With a culture around a constant state of striving, everything else will fall in place.”

A sense of collaboration and closeness is essential for such a team to thrive. Rather than order that a task be completed by a certain time, it can be much more motivational to remind a team of each role’s value and the whole team is affected by members’ ability to follow through. Instilling this sense of camaraderie and an opportunity to win together drives a sense of enthusiasm to do their best work.

It also behooves you to encourage close, daily communication that ensures all members of a project are on the same page. When everyone reports to one another about what they have and have not been able to accomplish in a day, there’s little need to keep track of time—what matters is that the project is completed by the deadline.

And this loops us right back to the initial question posed by ter Haar: “We’re asking if there’s a way to be more efficient without impacting our talent and our clients,” he said of the overview procedure. “Maybe there’s a process we can optimize. Maybe there’s a library or framework we should be using because it allows us to be quicker.”

At a project’s completion, the operations team can draw on the qualitative data from your team’s collaborations to understand what worked, what didn’t, and what that means for subsequent projects for that team. With this infrastructure in place, any organization can develop a workflow and model that result in higher-quality work at a faster velocity.

There are more ways to try something new this year besides eliminating timesheets.