Visibility in a World of Limited Resources
In a small company, everyone wears many hats, and employees often have a wide range of responsibilities. This can make it difficult to keep track of what everyone is doing, which can lead to confusion, miscommunication, and inefficiencies. While we know that this is a problem, sometimes getting the answer to what people are up to can be a tricky one to get a good handle on.
Why is that the case? Having worked in many small or growth companies ourselves, we have a decent sense of the challenges here. Most of the time people are scrambling to get their stuff done. People are busy making calls, writing code, answering RFPs, and so on. They aren’t thinking about tracking where their time is going.
So how does management and leadership get a handle on the the problem? We have seen two solutions here: weekly status reports and timesheets. Let’s talk about both.
The issue with status reports is that requires us to stop, look back, and re-aggregate what we did over some period of time. These reports often run their way up the org chart through their own game of telephone. The question then becomes, how timely or accurate are these reports by the time they find their way to the people who depend upon them?
When it comes to timesheets and time tracking tools, well most of them are just terrible. These are typically viewed as invasive and a violation of trust between managers and individual contributors. “I’m getting my stuff done on time, what does it matter when I’m doing it?”
The final point is that both of these take time, effort, and energy to roll out to the organization and continue to manage. Whether it be chasing people down to submit their (TPS) reports or convincing them to enter the time into the latest tool, the effort to track people’s time requires time tracking itself!
The irony here in our view is that much of that data is already sitting in everyone’s calendar. It’s natural. People are using their own calendars to manage their time. Using this data you can avoid weekly reports, or time tracking by leveraging the way everyone is tracking their time for themselves. It takes no extra effort from your employees and the Meeting Metrix reports give you an easy way to extract the insights you are hoping to understand.
Don’t waste valuable resources trying to understand what’s going on in your company. Sign up for Meeting Metrix and in minutes you’ll learn tons about your organization and your employees won’t need to change a thing about how they work. Sound good? I thought it would.