My company sells employee time tracking software that automates client billing, project accounting and payroll. We have repeatedly implemented these systems for customers where the employees were previously unaccustomed to accounting for their time. This has occasionally generated some intense emotions. Some people really don't want to track their time even though their managers are very firm on the subject.

Why is this? Why do people find tracking time so unpleasant, so maddening?

And how about you? Do you like entering data into forms? Why or why not? Is tracking time any worse than filling out other forms?

My experience has shown that this attitude towards tracking time exists for several reasons.

Reason #1: Reporting time may threaten status.

Reporting time can make salaried employees feel as if they have been demoted, especially if they are still traumatized by prior experiences in an hourly "time clock" environment. Conventional wisdom—though I disagree—is that "professional" people are more trustworthy and less in need of supervision than "blue collar" people.

Reason #2: "What if I find out that I don't work as much as I like to think?"

Some people, often the most productive ones, garner self-esteem from the large number of hours they work. Sometimes, however, they're not sure if they believe their own braggadocio, and are afraid to find out the truth of the matter.

Reason #3: Time is an imperfect metric for effort or productivity.

Knowledge workers know that managers, who have the power to reward some people over others, often forget the vague and aggregated metrics of real productivity in favor of some simple, tangible numbers, such as time records. They fear that their managers will be unenlightened enough take the easy path of rewarding based on time spent rather than develop more subtle and appropriate metrics of real productivity. (I wouldn’t do this if I were you.)

Reason #4: "I'm too busy"

Even the most responsible, productive employees whose time is in highest demand will all, sooner or later, have to stop working towards the primary mission of the company to fill out a timesheet. Yet many of these star employees tend to either procrastinate, subordinate the task or even refuse to do it. Worse still, they might create flawed records. On the other hand, the idlers and marginal producers will often create perfect time records and never submit them late. This causes both parties to believe that the whole exercise is worthless.

Reason #5: "I've procrastinated too long, and now I don't remember what I did last week."

Procrastination results in useless time records. Who remembers what they had for lunch eight days ago? When misinformation about how much time was spent on what is recorded, it can understate the real accomplishments of the workweek, and reviewing this record will be demoralizing.

So - newsflash - it's an imperfect world. There are many reasons why people hate tracking their time. But how can you possibly run a project-oriented organization, especially one that bills for its time, without efficient time accounting? The answer is that in this increasingly competitive world, you can't. If you don't get every hour billed that should be, or don't know which projects are profitable and which ones aren't, you're going down. Hard. Because somewhere in your numerous and growing array of competitors is a company that's getting it right. All that is left for you is to follow or fail. Or – and here’s a novel idea – you could lead and be the first one to get it right.

So let's look at some ways to overcome all this employee resistance to time tracking.

Education and Buy-In: I am a free market capitalist, so naturally, I always think that the most effective way to get people to do something is to make sure they understand what they will get out of it.

•       For hourly workers, the desire to get paid for every hour they work is incentive enough.
•       In the case of billing automation, it's revenue, which means a successful company. Most people can understand this, and they care about the success of their company. If your employees do not care about the success of your company, you’ve got bigger problems than time management. You need to go back to the basics of creating a compelling and moral vision of how your company helps humanity so your employees can feel like superheroes. In the absence of a strong vision, giving employees bonuses for their successes is usually helpful, although often fraught with opportunities to misstep.
•       Project accounting is more abstract than payroll or billing. If done badly, it can lead to nasty things like unnecessary overtime, stressful blown schedules, bad estimates and cancelled projects. Relate specific examples from your company in which good time collection could have prevented problems in order to get employees on board.

Adoption Dashboard: It helps to include graphs that clearly illustrate which departments and people are entering their time consistently and completely, and which are not. This helps managers understand early on who they need to badger about getting their time recorded, or who to reward for doing a good job in this area.

Phased Rollout: Adopting a multiphase rollout approach that leads to per-person per-project profitability allows you to change the culture in more manageable steps.

Incentives: Linking bonuses or other benefits with complete data collection is often used in customer relationship management (CRM) tools to adjust sales commissions. The same can be done for other forms of data collection. My company, Journyx Inc., has a patent—we call it the 'frequent flyer patent'—that automatically rewards your employees on your behalf for timely time reporting.

Email Reminders: Getting an automated reminder that your time has not yet been entered produces results… usually! Some percentage of people will, as a result, become more timely with their data entry. Just be careful about how many automated emails you send, otherwise people will naturally start ignoring them.

Implementing Project Accounting: If you have more than five people in your organization and they are working on many projects or within many processes, it is time to start thinking about implementing time tracking. If you have 100 people in an R+D group and you're not tracking time, then you're wasting the lives and work of a significant percentage of your employees. You might have them working on projects that the market will not reward you for, which are over budget or otherwise in the ditch, and you don't know that today.
 
About the Author
Curt Finch is the CEO of Journyx. Since 1996, Journyx has remained committed to helping customers intelligently invest their time and resources to achieve per-person, per-project profitability. Curt earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from Virginia Tech in 1987. As a software programmer fixing bugs for IBM in the early ‘90’s, Curt Finch found that tracking the time it took to fix each bug revealed the per-bug profitability. Curt knew that this concept of using time-tracking data to determine project profitability was a winning idea and something that companies were not doing – yet… Curt created the world's first web-based timesheet application and the foundation for the current Journyx product offerings in 1997. Curt is an avid speaker and writer. Learn more about Curt at http://journyx.com/company/curtfinch.html.