The Most Abused Item At Work

What’s the most abused item at work? Copier? Computer? Stapler? Conference table(wink wink nudge nudge)? No, it’s the timesheet. You know it’s true. As soon as your company gets to the level where they Board starts asking for “time accountability”, you start having to fill out timesheets. Speaking from a technology perspective, I can tell you that what the Board sees, what the clients see, do not reflect “reality”. Let’s be honest, most white color support jobs are “hurry up and wait” jobs. That is, most time is spent waiting for something to happen so that you can spring into action. It’s a lot like being a Marine really. You sit around, honing basic skills and cleaning your weapons and gear until the “stuff hits the fan” and then they expect you to be able to “fix the problem”. In these jobs, people pay for convenience and for ability, not for 100% productivity. They know it too. They know when they hire you that you won’t spend 40 hours per week actually “fixing computers” or doing whatever job it is that the role requires.

So it’s often paradoxical when they come back and say that they need you to fill out a timesheet and be accurate. I mean, they know that if we’re accurate, the time sheet will reflect a ton of downtime and make us look like we are unproductive. We understand that the shareholders and clients need to see “value” for their investment and that one way to ensure value from every employee is to see their time maximized but what ends up happening? Do we show them real “value”? Not REAL value. We end up showing them what they want to see. We log an hour for a 15 minute job (or 5 minute job) or 2 hours for an hour of troubleshooting.  We fill in our “down time” with generic time buckets like “Desktop Support” or “Infrastructure Repairs”.  Did we spend 5 hours performing repairs on PCs?  No, we spent most of those 5 hours twiddling thumbs, chatting with neighbors, surfing the internet or reading (technical manuals in some cases, novels in others, non-fiction in yet others).

So what the “powers that be”, our clients and our investors, actually see is what they WANT to see, not what ACTUALLY happens.