BuzbyTimeRead the requirements guide

Getting people to record · 1.4

What a manager should do with it

What a manager should do with it. What decides it, what it costs, and what usually goes wrong. For another implementation reference, see Monitask's reference.

Somebody has to record theirs tooThe cheapest intervention

The single strongest predictor of whether a team records time is whether the person asking them to does it as well, visibly, with the same categories and the same corrections.

This costs a manager four seconds a switch and it removes the reading that this is something done to people below a line. For another perspective on the surrounding workflow, see ClickUp.

What a manager should do with the data

Three uses that work

Notice a pattern and ask about it. Somebody spending half their week on something nobody knew about is information, and the response is a question rather than a correction.

Make a case. For a hire, for dropping a client, for fixing the thing generating interruptions.

Protect people. A record of a genuinely full week is the strongest available answer to somebody demanding more from a team.

Three uses that destroy it

Comparing individuals. Querying single entries. And using it in a performance conversation, at which point every subsequent entry is written for that audience.

Any one of these, once, is enough. The data does not recover, because people do not forget what a system was used for.

The manager who wants more detail

Usually a symptom rather than a requirement. Behind the request is generally an unanswered question: whether a client is profitable, whether somebody is overloaded, whether a project is going badly.

Answer the question and the demand for detail disappears. Supply the detail without answering it and the demand grows, because the detail never quite settles what was actually being asked.

Reviewing it with the team

Monthly, on aggregate, shown to everybody. Where the hours went, what that says about the month, what will change.

An organisation that shows the team what its own data produced gets better data the following month, and one that collects silently gets steadily worse data with no visible cause.

The question worth asking annually

What decisions did we make last year that this record informed? If the honest answer is none, either the data is not being used or the wrong things are being recorded, and both are worth knowing before another year of entries.

The one-to-one where it comes up

If time data appears in a one-to-one, it should be the person raising it rather than the manager. A record showing an impossible week is the strongest thing somebody can bring to a conversation about workload.

Managers who ask for that conversation get it. Managers who produce the data themselves get a defensive one.

Aggregation levels

Report at the level the decision is taken at. A project decision needs project totals; a hiring decision needs team totals. Neither needs individual detail, and pulling individual detail into a report about something else is how the data acquires a reputation.

Who else sees it

Decide explicitly and tell everybody. The commonest unpleasantness in this area comes from somebody discovering that a third party has been looking at their record, which is almost always innocuous and is never received that way.

Handling an entry that looks wrong

Assume a recording error before assuming anything else, because that is what it usually is. Ask what happened rather than why the entry says what it says, and accept the answer.

The first time a manager treats an odd entry as a finding, every subsequent entry in that team becomes conservative.

Sharing upward

A director asking for individual detail is usually asking a different question badly. Establish what decision they are trying to make and supply the aggregate that informs it.

Supplying individual detail once establishes that it is available, and the request recurs.

The manager's own record

Worth saying twice. A manager who records their own time, in the same categories, visibly, has removed the largest objection to the whole exercise at no cost.

What to do first

Record your own time for a fortnight before asking anybody else to. It tells you what the entry actually costs and it removes the objection before it is raised.

Protecting the record from your own organisation

At some point somebody senior will ask for something this data should not be used for. Having decided the answer in advance, and written it down when the system was introduced, is what makes declining possible.

Deciding it in the moment, under pressure, produces a different answer, and everybody finds out.

A closing thought

A manager decides what the data is for, and everybody works out what that is within a month regardless of what was announced. The decision is made in how the first unusual entry is handled.

The report that gets requested most

Hours by person by week. It is the easiest report to produce and the one most likely to be misused, because it invites comparison between people whose work is not comparable.

Where it is genuinely needed, for payroll or for capacity, supply it to the function that needs it rather than publishing it, and say so.

One sentence to remember

The data is as good as the reason people believe it is being collected, and that belief is set by what a manager does with the first surprising entry rather than by anything written in a policy.

The question a manager should ask themselves

Before opening a report about an individual: what decision am I about to make, and would I make it differently without this? If the answer is that no decision is pending, the report is being read out of curiosity about a person, which is the use that costs the most.

Also in getting people to record