“DON’T KICK THE KITTEN”

It became a phrase to a group of employees in one newsroom. There was no kitten. Nobody was kicking anything but the competition’s rear end. However, desperate times call for desperate measures.

In every News Director’s life, there is the painful task of doing timesheets. It’s a thankless job with eye rolls and excuses on one side and corporate HR pressure on the other. At one job, I was being onboarded, like literally in my first 30 minutes of being at the station and the HR person was lecturing me about people who don’t fill out their timesheets. I didn’t even know where the bathroom was yet.

I liked to say as News Director, I graduated from schedules (another thankless task) to timesheets.

Every Monday, or every other Monday, or some arbitrary schedule issued by corporate, we had to approve the timesheets of all hourly employees. It was due by a certain time of day and made the day start with stress.

You’ve got the people who are the “Most Serious Offenders”, or MSO’s, as I called them. The people who never fill out their timesheets correctly or on time. They always forget something. I always have to call them.

That’s where the poor kitten comes in. I told one MSO that every time he didn’t fill out his timesheet correctly, a kitten got kicked. I even printed a sign and taped it on his desk to remember.

The “day before” reminders helped a little, but never quite fixed the problem.

I had to get creative. Being a producer, this was easy and actually quite fun. I’d make up memes to send to the staff.

One time I even created a QR Code and had an email title of “Can you see if this works?” to the staff. They checked the code only to have it open to the timesheet system. Even my boss said, “Well played!”.

Another MSO fixed her issues when I let her know she was an MSO. She said, “Am I really that bad?”. “Yes,” I said without offering any cushion. Problem fixed. Guilt works.

Yet another station, I put Timesheet memes on every single door. The front door. The back door. The door to the bathroom. The backside of the stall. On the mirror where people get ready. Everywhere. You couldn’t walk by an egress without seeing a timesheet reminder sign. But apparently, you could. 5-10 people habitually didn’t do it correctly. Yet people always gave me confused looks when I told them their timesheet wasn't done correctly.

One system I used was done by fingerprint only. People had to clock in and out using their fingerprints. If they forgot to clock out, say, on a Tuesday, the time was missing. But here’s the rub. The system would show the next CLOCK IN time as the CLOCK OUT time, not being smart enough to know that doesn’t make sense that someone worked 23 hours.

I would sit there, like a NASA scientist, trying to figure out which day they missed a click to balance it all out. It was painstaking. It was as hard as figuring out the name of this trail I once hiked.

Another rub? I couldn’t just say “Oh well, you didn’t do your timesheet! You won’t get paid!”. By law, we have to pay you. Even if you cause a mental crisis as I’m trying to make a budget meeting and you won’t answer your phone and your timesheet sits empty.

In another system, people had to fill out their timesheets manually and to the minute. We were also a station doing that dreaded “Crackdown on overtime.” These smart journalists learned, much like a Nielsen meter click, that if you stay until 5:08, it pushed the pay to 5:15. If you put 5:07, you went back to 5:00. So, there was all this “death by a thousand quarter hours” of OT racking up. I wasn’t going to monitor people minute by minute, but it always posed a problem when trying to explain OT to corporate.

There’s another thing – when corporate controllers go to close out timesheets and they see empty spots, they don’t blame you. They blame ME. I can’t tell you the nasty or passive-aggressive messages I’ve gotten in my career over timesheets. The same HR guy who lectured me on Day 1 would come by with his slow-talking condescending tone and say “You are missing some timesheets and we can’t close payroll. You are holding the process up.”

Then there are the great excuses you get as to why the time wasn’t put in. Some of the most common.

1.?????“I did put times in. I guess I didn’t save it.” (said 15 times over the course of several months).

2.?????“My internet was down at home, and I couldn’t put the times in.” (Ok, just text me your times next time so I can fill it out for you.)

3.?????“I can’t remember when I worked.”

4.?????“I was out of town and extremely drunk.”

5.?????“Are you sure?”

6.?????“I went out early on a shoot today, I’ll do it when I get back”. (Nope, need it now, and fill it out day by day so we don’t end up here.)

7.?????“You didn’t send a reminder email” (I did, but I shouldn’t have to)

8.?????“I started to do it but then got distracted.”

Now I haven’t been an hourly employee since 1998, so I don’t know the pain of filling it out each day, but I know the pain of people who don’t and the impact it has up to the corporate level. It does seem to me that the one thing that helps you get the money you earned should be up there with remembering to put on pants.

I once offered that if the timesheets were filled out correctly for all people, I would host a pizza party. It took us 6 months to get to that feast.

Then as a manager, you have to have an incredible memory and those schedules you wanted to leave behind creep back into the process. When someone forgets to put in a sick day or vacation time, you are left to have to remember they were out sick and change their hours for that day.

Then there are the Stealth MSO’s. They are the people who forget to do their timesheets, and your deadline is approaching, and you reach out to them to finish their timesheet via email or text (because Lord knows they won’t actually ANSWER the phone). They DO it, but don’t say “It’s done!”, so you have to refresh and scroll to the letter R to find out if Robert got his act together. I begged people to let me know they had fixed the issues. I can’t find that needle in a haystack when I’ve got a Zoom interview coming up in 10 minutes that goes past the “Corporate will scold you” moment.

One vocal employee would say “These timesheets are a pain in the ass” loudly as she filled hers out. (She never forgot, she wasn’t an MSO, but she made sure we all knew she didn’t like it.) She had no idea how intense the pain was from my end of things.

Hourly employees, this is ONE thing you can do to get in the good graces of your boss. It’s simple and tied directly to that paycheck you are living off of every two weeks. Please, fill out your timesheets.