Stop beating Creatives up to do timesheets. I said what I said.
I didn’t say ‘stop them doing it’, I just said ‘stop beating them up about it’.
Working with a company who had an extensive creative studio, my avatar was Roz from Monsters Inc. We even had a Slack emoji made of the character with her clipboard, just for me.
Ask yourself, what are you actually trying to achieve with very detailed timesheets? What data do you NEED (and cut out the 'nice to have', you'll never use it)
When I first started, I stopped the team logging how long they took for lunch or a coffee break. I looked at how many subcategories they had access to (‘Meeting: one to one’ or ‘Meeting: ritual’ or ‘Meeting: whole company’ etc).
Choice often stalls a process. Knowing how much time they spent in one to ones was not essential, and frankly, the data on it never interrogated. We agreed on five obvious categories, (no subcategories) to choose from. The main one being ‘Creative Production’, of course.
What happened? After I monitored progress across two quarters, completion of timesheets increased and we were able to answer key questions such as:
How long on average does it take to produce that deliverable?
How long did that project take to accomplish?
What's the reason for any key delays in the process that caused issues to our team?
How does our resourcing fit our budget?
Does it still make sense to have an internal Studio?
This is enough. Time wasted discussing how long they spent on lunch disappeared. Beating talented people up to log every minute is not valuable and wouldn’t result in you making different decisions. Getting good solid averages is just fine. And having happy, productive, inspired Creatives do their best work is absolutely priceless.
You do need data, of course, to help set your pricing, amongst other things. Even agencies charging by the hour should have no issues with getting Creatives to log their actual productive hours once they stop asking them how long they spend in meetings and (please no) loo breaks.
You need to invest a little time to help them do it. These are some ways I've employed, I'm sure there are loads more:
💡 Slackbot reminders are very easy to set up
💡 A little research into, and discussion with the team on time logging tech or techniques that might help them
💡 Set up a data dashboard which instantly flags gaps, sample the data regularly and work with individuals (one person missing sheets for a sustained time) o how you can support them better
💡 Keep it light hearted - acknowledge it’s not a task they like. Roz was my idea
💡 Share the headline data with them. Make sure they know exactly how it’s used and the value of it
💡 Focus on getting the true production time logged as accurately as possible, don’t get sh*tty with them over not logging any other kind of time
💡Ask the people who do it how to make it better for them
💡 Never put value on using it to check up on your team. They are there to do a great job, not log the most possible hours…that’s a subject for another post
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