Turn your registered time into a strategic management tool
Time spent by your employees is your company's most important resource. That's why insight into your tracked time is a powerful management tool for you as a manager.
Has your company bought a time-tracking system that you use solely for invoicing your customers?
Then you are not alone.
Many companies that invest in a time-tracking system never see it as anything more than a tool for logging and managing billable time.
But that's a shame - and those companies are missing out on an excellent value for their investment.
Internal and external registered hours
Many companies only track external time - that is, time spent on customer projects. Often this time is billable, but it doesn't have to be.
Internal time covers all activities that are not directly related to a customer. It can be knowledge building, internal meetings, strategy, etc.
If you only register external time, you miss out on all the insights into your own business that internal time can give you.
The recorded hours contain unique insights that you can use to develop and manage your business on both strategic and tactical levels.
I use the tracked hours to support and follow up on our strategic decisions. How good are we at product development? Are we too late to finish the scoping phase of projects? Or have we underprioritized it compared to the time spent on development? Are we spending enough time talking to our customers when we need to get smarter? I need answers to all these questions. And I can only find them in the time tracked by the employees.
Time is the measure of successful strategy execution.
If you ask any well-functioning sales team what is crucial for them to meet the company's strategic goals, you will almost certainly come across practical metrics such as:
- Number of calls to leads
- Number of emails sent
- Number of meetings held
The sales team knows that working hard is the only way to reach their strategic goals. Without targets and hard work, they won't reach them.
This means they must invest a certain amount of time in that process.
If it takes an average of three hours on the phone to move two sales processes, then a salesperson needs to make sure that there are 12 hours in the calendar prioritised explicitly for calling leads.
The same goes for a consultant who may need to spend four hours a week on their skills training to keep your company ahead of the competition.
Hours are half of your strategic investment; the other half is financial.
And your time-tracking system shows you whether you're realizing that investment - or if you are doing something else entirely.
Getting a data-driven and comprehensive overview of what I, as CEO, want to do with the company, what I have promised customers and what employees spend their time on - that gives me a good night's sleep.
You need to quantify and advocate time registration if your strategic tool to work
It makes perfect sense that strategic targets also require that you set aside time to realise them.
The most successful companies in realising their strategies, also allocate a time budget to the objectives. And they make sure to communicate that budget to their employees.
For example, We want to be X% better at delivering on X. Therefore, each department must allocate X hours per week to it (which must be prioritized in relation to other work).
Of course, it is important that this does not become an exercise in time bureaucracy for bureaucracy's sake.
But without a time budget and a follow-up, it is hard to establish clear priorities that employees can align their work with - and to find out whether this is happening in practice.
Without this exercise, strategic decisions often become good intentions that nobody has the time to realise.
The entire organization can learn
It's not just for your senior management that tracked time provides insights.
- Where are we spending our time away from the strategic objectives?
- What activities is the time being spent on? Do they add value?
- Where do we have potential for development?
- Which employees are pulling the load and need to be relieved?
Insight is the key to achieving your goals
The production chain is usually controlled, monitored and automated in companies that produce physical goods.
In knowledge businesses, however, the production chain is your people.
Because of this fact, all our business knowledge is hidden in the time spent by our employees. If you understand how you use time, you will also understand how to use it better.
This is fundamental for you to adjust your business when necessary - and to realise your strategic ambitions.
