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Time Tracking: more about measurement than control

16 June 2021 | By
Ankur Dhingra, CEO, ProHance

Time is a precious and finite commodity and how it is spent can have a profound impact on individuals and organizations. One of the biggest unsolved problems of scale in the modern world is how are people spending their professional time for which they are paid. Are they spending it on things that are important for the business and their own professional development? For people who do traditional work in factories and machines, this problem has been solved by extensive time-motion studies, building repeatable and structured work where the outputs can clearly be measured. However, this remains a big challenge for new-age organizations, where people spend most of their time on their desktops and laptops. This makes it very hard to compute time and effort in a systematic and automated way across the enterprise. This lack of information leads to poor decision-making and an inherent inefficiency that exists in the enterprise.

As we currently service large and mid-sized corporations across a spectrum of industries, the realization has come quickly that most organizations don’t have clear and precise answers for the following questions –

1. If this time spent time in front of the machines is actually translating into expected business outcomes.
2. How some team members do much better than others. Is there a sustainable way to reduce variations in performance?
3. I know there is latent capacity in my organization and I know that our organization can become more productive. Is there an elegant systematic way I can make this happen?
4. There is so much variation across my team. In some areas, teams are overworked and in other areas they are underutilized. Is there a way for us to load balance more effectively across teams so that we can collaborate better?
5. Why is it that some employees spend so little or so much time? Is there a way to provide a more equitable work distribution across teams?
6. I really want to reward my team members on objective and transparent outcomes. Is there a way for me to measure and compute performance without any bias or human intervention?
7. How should I think about transformation? Where should I put my investment dollars that give the best sustainable ROI (return on investments)?

All these challenges which the modern enterprise face, are now further accentuated post the Covid pandemic as the teams are working remotely and operations have become distributed. When people were working in the office there was better control and visibility. Now with a remote work setup, these questions have become further compounded.
These challenges stem from a fundamental problem: we don’t have an automated and sophisticated measurement system that can provide these deep insights to grow to operate your business more effectively. There is a quote from British national Lord Kelvin (William Thomson, who formulated the first and second laws of thermodynamics, which says, which says “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it”.
When we think about time tracking, we think of a measurement system that allows individuals and companies to get a better understanding of how time is spent in the enterprise. This information really enables companies to manage their operations a lot more effectively.

Some tips to always keep in mind include:

1. Be transparent about the deployment and position of the usage of the time measurement software correctly. This is more imperative than the features and functionality that exist in your software. Many enterprises don’t even bother telling their employees that a technology like this is being deployed or consciously do this in stealth or silent mode. This is the wrong approach and the software gets misconstrued as Big brother watching or spying software. This creates havoc in the organization and creates a very toxic culture of mistrust and always covering your actions. It stifles creativity and employees become very risk-averse. The correct way to position this is to ensure that employees are fully aware that their professional time will be measured to ensure that they better understand how they spend the workday. They also get an understanding of how they compare to their peer and expected performance from them. This self-awareness will help them improve. ProHance has built-in additional functionality where the end-user has full control of this measurement system. They can turn it off or suspend it if they were doing some personal work. Making the users aware of why they're doing it and giving them control is critical for any time measurement software to succeed.
2. It is not really about tracking individuals but it are about measuring where time is being spent in your Enterprise. Like any athlete at the top of his game will measure all parameters of his body for his game to get better similarly organizations all need a measurement which is grounds up, consistent, and automated to know how time is being spent by various individuals, teams, divisions, and operating units in a business to deliver the desired outcomes. Where are there gaps which need to be improved to increase the overall performance of the Enterprise? Running a large enterprise requires objective data which is available at speed and on-demand to make smart decisions and this can only be facilitated through a robust measurement system.
3. The process of measurement should be fully automated with minimal intervention from the end-user. This ensures that there is no scope for data accuracy and integrity issues because data is manually collected. In most Enterprises today a lot of data is collected through multiple systems, it is aggregated or normalized and then presented. A lot of vital information gets lost in translation because of the inability to either collect data in an automated way at the source, requiring manual inputs because people work in different environments like client-side systems or machines where data collection isnot possible and identifying the right performance indicators. Ideally, a good measurement system should ensure that the data that is used by the front-line associates at the same data that is seen by the CEO of the business. That drives immense confidence across the enterprise that the data that is being used to make the decisions is consistent and accurate.
4. Empower users with their own data and help them get a better understanding of their work habits. The data that is collected must be used to heighten the awareness of the users for their own workstyle. We should think of this as a Fitbit. Just as a Fitbit helps you set some health goals and allows you to put in place a measurement system that ensures that you measure what needs to be done on an hourly and daily basis so that you meet your long-term objective. A measurement system allows you to do the same with an Enterprise. True improvement across an Enterprise can only happen when the lowest common unit across the enterprise has the awareness and the insights to improve. That lowest common factor is every individual who is a part of that enterprise. The biggest mistake companies make is that they don’t freely share this information with end users and this is used by team leaders and managers for performance management which could be rewards or penalties. This doesn’t empower the teams to self-correct and improve. A lot of enterprises also take the data and put it into a gamification algorithm to improve further engage the individuals. ProHance has an end-user dashboard that allows users to know how they are performing and how do they compare to their peer group.
5. In the post covid world a lot of people work from home. The measurement system should have the robustness to also collect the data when users are not connected to the company network or have a poor connection in an offline mode. Then push the data back to the central servers when the connection is available. This will ensure there is no data loss on account of poor internet connection. Also in Enterprises, multiple IT environments can exist. Sometimes the users work on client machines and there can be a lot of complexity with the systems and the networks used. The measurement system should seamlessly be able to deal with the complexity of a global distributed Enterprise. The system should also work across all types of operating platforms like Linux, Mac & windows to provide a holistic view of what is happening across the Enterprise. The measurement system should be all-encompassing and very robust so that the end-users and leadership have full confidence in the data that is provided by the system. Often, companies don’t stress test the measurement system that leads to a loss of faith in the system when they see that the data collected doesn’t reflect the reality on the ground.Data reliability and agreement from all stakeholders that it is reflecting what is happening on the ground is supremely important.
6. Use the measurement to design rewards and ensure these are well articulated to all. What an effective measurement system allows you to do is to sharply segment the performance and reward the right kind of behaviors. E.g., if you want to reward time spent on production systems and not just total hours logged you will be easily able to do this with a good measurement system. How people get measured and rewarded really helps in the alignment of the team to the Enterprise objectives.
7. Provide flexibility to the employees to design their own workday if the nature of their job allows that flexibility. If the employees are not working on time-sensitive transactions they can choose their own hours of work and design their workdays. This is very beneficial for all as you can do 2 to 4 work sprints in 24 hours to meet your requirements for an 8 or 9-hour workday. The measurement system will be able to measure the very accurately and employees won’t also have this question at the back of their mind whether their leaders know of what exactly are they doing. This flexibility drives much greater motivation and better outputs across the Enterprise. It also is a very strong value proposition around work-life flexibility which Enterprises can offer to their employees and still ensure there is no drop in productivity.
   
   Time measurement also helps you understand the dynamics of your team: This allows you to segment performance across multiple dimensions. So how does performance vary based on tenure, skill set, education, managers, or location of employees? This rich data gives you insights that are needed to run your operations a lot more effectively. Your ability to make decisions is a lot more based on facts and also provides good inputs for smarter management across all levels of the enterprise. The end-user can understand their work style and what needs to improve, the manager can understand the skill and will issue in his or her team and what kind of coaching needs to give, the director or senior leader understand the utilization and how loads are distributed across multiple teams, where should they invest in automation, what kind of profiles should they hire, what impact is tenure having on performance and any many more such questions which will on their mind.
8. A robust measurement system can allow you to set your strategic direction for transformation. It can basis the variability in processes and tell you the following –
   • What part of your enterprise needs to be just realigned or organized. How by simply reallocating capacity you can better match your supply and demand curves.
   • Which part of the organization needs to be re-engineered by eliminating the demand for that kind of work. By either deploying better technology or changing some upstream processes. Eg. By better feeds into systems the need for KYC can be significantly reduced. Now with an API-led framework, this has become a lot simpler.
   • What part of the organization needs to be automated? These are tasks or processes where the variation is minimal and the “coefficient of variation” is very low.
   
   
   We see a lot of organizations dive headlong into automation without having a full understanding of what does on in their operations. A measurement system allows you to get this understanding and approach your transformation more thoughtfully.
   
   Currently a majority of people work from home and the operating model has been more distributed. Having a measurement system allows you to ensure that all, where the team members are connected, engaged, visible, and optimized. You can get to know how many team members you have available to manage your daily workload.
   
   Measuring how time is spent can help enterprises unlock significant value. You would be surprised to know that the average productive time for an employee daily is approximately 83 minutes. During a typical workweek, employees spend around 8 hours in non-work activities, which include being interrupted by others and checking their phones for notifications. Keeping this in mind, now let’s do a rough calculation: in the US, the hourly wage is around $25. In the way, a company is potentially not getting value worth $10,000 per employee annually.
   
   As the future for work has changed, we expect many hybrid work arrangements to develop over the next few years. As people work in more flexible and distributed arrangements having an automated measurement system of how time is spent in an Enterprise will become a very critical component of the post-Covid technology stack. This is the only way enterprises will be able to stay future-ready and manage effectively in this VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Chaotic, ambiguous) world we live in.
   
   A good measurement system that is easy to deploy, flexible, provides accurate data can deliver the right actionable insights to enterprises across multiple stakeholders at the right time. The biggest challenge which I had spoken about earlier is not to view this as a monitoring, spying, big brother system. At ProHance, our belief that if positioned correctly and used in the right way, this can unleash tremendous ongoing productivity for the enterprise and help set a culture of meritocracy, transparency, and collaboration.

Consolidate Time, Don't Fragment Time..!!!

20 Mar 2018 | By
Sandeep Nanda , Executive Assistant to Chief Regulatory Officer (CRO) India & South Asia, BHARTI AIRTEL LIMITED.

For the next one week, keep a log of all the activities the content you do during every half an hour of your time and analyse. you may notice that you have been interrupted throughout the day by various events. In between interruptions you might have had some time to do what you wanted to do. some interruptions may be functional and related to your job. But most of the interruptions will be non work related. you will notice that you never had major chunk of time and your day was fragmented.

You have to do something to consolidate you time and concentrate on activities which you have to do. There is no point in saying that you did not have the time. The fact is that the available time went to do an activity which is not related to task what you had to accomplish. One way to consolidate you time is to create "unavailable time" which you need to invest on activities which you have to do. An open door policy may be nice to hear. But if you do not know how to implement the same, you will get into problems since your time will be fragmented by various interruptions all through the day.

Use the weekly and daily schedules to your advantage. Make people know when you will be available and when you will not be available. But do it with elegance. Next time when you meet a successful person, notice whether he follows the above principle, you be amazed to find that any successful person knows when to do what work and how much time he should allot for what activity. He will find a way to consolidate his time for major use.