Judging Employee Efficiency - Check the time!
Vikash Goel
Founder @ Omnifin | Valuation Expert, Consultant, CA Business Leader 40under40, CA, IIM-Cal
Businesses are often faced with a dilemma. Their staff are always overworked and the managers feel that the team would have a lot of down-time to be able to work more.
How do managers ensure that their teams are working effectively and efficiently? How managers of large teams ensure that they can keep a tab on who’s doing what? Very often managers are found to be in an argument with teams (and sometimes even management) to justify the time taken for tasks and carrying out a variance analysis.
The answer lies in what some of the consulting companies do. I used to frown upon the idea of a Time-sheet when I was required to fill up multiple time-sheets during my rookie years at a Big4 company. I realised the importance when I started managing large teams (up to 42 people).
Companies can set up the concept of a time-sheet to keep a close watch on employees’ activities and ensure that people are efficient and results come in time. The idea is to set realistic “standard time” and measure results against the same. More important is to do a robust review of the time sheet to identify where additional time taken is realistic or the expectations were too high. It is the best way to identify where some of the extra time leaks away in a day.
Honest maintenance of time sheet has numerous advantages for the employees:
- It helps people assess how they are spending their time.
- It helps in self-assessment on a task – did I really need this long to complete this task? Or have I just not been focussed enough. If the time taken is realistic, I need to change the expectations accordingly.
- How much time am I spending on non productive activities like checking mails (is usually non-productive time – yes!), social networking, office gossip, Office Admin etc.
- Can I ask for more work (if I am a progressive employee)?
- People forget during year end appraisals as to what they have done during the year, the time sheet just helps them recall things that may be otherwise crucial.
It has huge benefits for the management
- Keep a continuous tab on every employee
- Get exception reports to manage attendance- it must be filled by every employee everyday
- Get reports of how much time is spent on projects
- Compare productive across employees and measure who is more efficient (compare time vs work done across employees). If people have taken less time but have charged higher – it affects their efficiency; on the other hand, if people charge less time, they have to justify what they’ve been doing at other times or more work can be allotted to them.
- It has known to change company culture as well – if people are charging too much time on Emails, take corrective measures to ensure the email-time is justified such as do an email etiquettes training.
- Use the time sheet to evaluate performance during year-end appraisals.
Academic Services Officer
10 年Hi Vikash, time sheets can be a great helper in getting work done - if you can convince your team that rather than being a control measure to find out if they are grinding away or procrastinating, it is put in place to make tasks, timelines, buffers and deadlines transparent. I worked in an e-commerce environment where time-sheets were used by employees and consultants. The biggest issue was that granularity went against transparency. Tasks would either fit into several accounts or none at all. Both employees and consultants loathed filling out time sheets as it would require hours on a weekly basis. Most of the time was spent shoehorning tasks into time sheet accounts, hoping that this would be accepted by the line manager. We actually ended up having heated discussions with line managers who were obviously overwhelmed with explaining to us why time sheet procedures were put up the way they were. In my opinion you cannot put together a decent time sheet without the input of those affected.