Time is money – in-house time is no exception
It’s a bit of an eye-opener when you realise just how much money a small in-house project or meeting can cost. Learn why you should track internal time as well as external.
A common misconception is that time registration is only for companies who invoice hours spent on various projects. Granted, time registration is a necessity for these organisations, as the hours they invoice pay the bills. However, many companies and departments could benefit greatly from knowing exactly what they spend time on, and thus being in a position strategically to decide how best to exploit their resources. Affiliating costs with each employee provides a clear view of the profitability of in-house projects.
I, for one, believe that if you view time registration as a means of managing your organisation by prioritising resources and projects, many companies will experience a boost in productivity while achieving organisational transparency and facilitating informed decisions in the future.
Time registration is not surveillance
One thing is certain: we need to put the idea that time registration is a means of spying on employees and encroaching on their personal freedom behind us. Every company has the right to view how much time is spent on various assignments in order to provide a solid foundation on which to make key strategic decisions. Furthermore, time registration provides a clear view of the resources available – and thus whether there is a need to reallocate some to aid certain employees, etc. Our experience is that our customers rarely use time registration as a surveillance tool for keeping tabs on each employee. They use it as a means of seeing the bigger picture.
At TimeLog, we practise what we preach and track every in-house assignment we work on. In doing so, our sales department is now able to fully manage the number of hours they spend on new business compared to servicing existing customers, and on creating contracts and offers – we’ve now optimised these processes because we were able to see how costly they were. We prefer to spend more time on booking and holding meetings. Ultimately, this will lead to increased sales – which is the sales department’s primary task. And the list goes on … In short, we closely monitor our time here at TimeLog to assess whether there’s a need for process optimisation to fully exploit our resources.
After about six months, most of our customers are shocked to find that the key figures in time registration tell a different story than the one in their heads.
The question is: do you dare to challenge your idea of the truth – and act on it?
