One of the important and critical aspects of every business is to ensure that employees are productive. One of the critical measure of employee productivity since World War I has been to measure time spent on doing a certain specific activity. In most industrial environments this measure is often used for time & motion studies to establish the mean time taken by a pool of resources for a particular activity. This measure is then used to identify the upper & lower limits considering other human factors like skills, experience, and education. In ITES industry this practice has been widely used primarily for transactional and repetitive tasks.
In engineering projects organizations, time sheet is an important aspect to measure actual vs. budget hours for completing a particular task. Since in most engineering projects organizations, including most offshore IT setups, such time is billed to the project or client, this is a critical measure of employee productivity.
Over the last decade however the work environment in all these industries and others has become more complex. Employees have access to multiple tools, work and task variety has increased, thus making the ability to track and measure time spent on various activities is very critical.
Time sheet is a simple and easy way to have employees self-report the time spent on various activities during the day. It could also involve manager assigning specific tasks with pre-defined time budgets to employees.
Let’s look at some of the benefits this has for employees:
1. Knowing where you spend your time during the day; is a great eye opener for most employees. It’s a great tool for improving self-effectiveness and productivity.
2. Once employees know where they are spending their time they actively engage with activities that they really want to focus on & work towards minimizing “distractions” thus improving overall engagement & productivity
3. In work environments where employee time is billed to internal or external customers; time sheets help them understand their contribution to the overall project in direct financial terms. This helps build more accountability and improve the overall project profitability.
If the above mentioned benefits start to play at individual level you also start to realize group or organizational level benefits like:

1. Most time sheets create transparency in terms of what is being charged back to the internal or external customer. This transparency helps in facilitating constructive dialogue across functions based on data thus improving overall collaboration across functions.
2. The access to timesheet data over a period of time gives managers the ability to convert passive data to actionable insights. Thus enabling organization to streamline their activities and make use of available resources effectively & efficiently.
3. Timesheet data is a valuable source for defining project or task budgets in future. Most organizations today are on the journey of continuous improvement. Time sheet data gives specific & measurable information to work groups ensuring they work towards continually improving their performance.
Time sheets when integrated with other applications like time & attendance or leave management give a comprehensive view of the employees work day to his or her manager thus ensuring that work teams and organizations can plan their activities more effectively.
All of us have just 24 hours in our day and how effectively and efficiently we use these 24 hours determines the outcomes we can achieve in our personal and professional lives. Being able to track what we do on a daily basis, analyse the same to identify patterns and taking corrective action to improve our effectiveness is a simple step in achieving personal & professional success.
So if you are now considering implementing a time sheet process in your organization, consider the following aspects in your implementation
1. Time is not the only metric – while timesheets will help you measure the time spent by employees in doing a particular activity, ensure that managers and everyone else is not just focused on this one metric and other parameters of performance are equally clear and considered in the process.
2. Start Top Down – Typically people start with time sheets from bottom up, however since managers need to ensure that employees in their team make best use of the system, its better if you start with managers & ensure that they understand the system & its benefits before it reaches a wider audience. Doing a pilot run gives you a good idea about typical challenges the time sheet system is likely to face in your organization.
3. Take time to train & explain why it is important. Most organizations assume that introducing a time sheet activity is common sense & people would just understand why it is required. It’s imperative that you allocate sufficient time here to ensure all queries, questions and doubts are clearly answered.
4. Design interaction forums around time sheets – While you implement timesheets ensure that data from time sheets flows into every conversation and report that gets reviewed internally. This ensures that everyone including managers sees the benefits, people share success stories across groups and helps you in successful implementation of timesheet.
There are multiple benefits of having a uniform time reporting system in an organization. Such system ensures you have a common language across functions and helps you allocate resources effectively. If you work with remote workers or part timers, these benefits are further accentuated.
If you are looking to engage employees, make them more accountable, and increase your organizations efficiency & profits, look at designing & implementing a time sheet solution for your business while keeping in mind the tips offered here in your implementation.