Accountants often think time tracking is 100% necessary for service based businesses. How else will you know what projects are profitable and what employees are performing? Project managers feel it’s necessary to see how their projects are doing. Your employees hate it, but it’s the “only wayâ€.Â
I get the accounting and project management point of view. Hell, I’ve spent time in my career extolling the virtues of time tracking. However, I also see that it’s a culture killer.
- Great employees feel stressed to be super efficient, but also do excellent work. You know what happens when faced with that conundrum? They work longer hours without recording it. They slowly burn themselves out. They begin to resent the job and everyone who clocks out for the weekend. Eventually, they will move on.
- If you’re billing hourly, employees see no point in finding a better way, being more efficient, or stopping the clock for non-client work. Non-performers can look like heroes in this environment. Continue down this path for long and you’ll end up with a culture of non-performers and find it difficult to win work.