How to roll out a time-tracking solution to your team

Tracking time for teams can be a touchy subject. If you think about it from an individual employee’s perspective, why does management want to know what I’m doing? Are they going to use the data to beat me up the one day that I’m not as productive as they want, and ignore all the days that I worked crazy hours to get a key initiative to the finish line in time for what everyone considered an impossible deadline?

Fears like this can derail even the best-intentioned efforts to track the time of a team. 

I have learned many valuable lessons while rolling out time-tracking systems and new workflows to different teams over the years—and each learning has been incorporated into the CapEx Copilot platform and methodology, making it more and more resilient, dynamic, and flexible over time.

Below is a distillation of the key learnings from these experiences with regard to what makes new time-tracking rollouts successful.
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Lesson #1: Keep the “why” front and center

This is certainly going to be front and center in your employees’ minds. Why are you doing this? What will you do with the data? Do you expect the team to track everything? What about…time in the bathroom? Does management expect everyone to be 100% focused, every minute of the day on “creating value” for the company? Where’s the humanity in that? 

It can be scary, and that’s understandable. And so, it’s important to keep the “why” front and center. 

From the very start, it’s important to emphasize how everything in the rollout plan serves the “why”.  It’s easy to forget the human elements of a dynamic system - and it’s easy to get caught up in the mechanics of a plan; many of us are drawn to the tools we’ll use, the reports we’ll generate, the adjustments we’ll need to make to a workflow, rather than the interpersonal and political dynamics at play (because those aspects are much trickier to get a handle on). And while the tactical specifics are important, no one will embrace them without a clear “why” - and a “why” that makes sense to the team, as that.

For example, in one rollout I facilitated, management saw that the then-current system of tracking time simply wasn’t working for them. 

At the start of every month, management would try to get the team to account for their time the previous month in a timesheet system that required employees to add “buckets” of time to a variety of codes that corresponded to parts of projects they had worked on. 

This effort itself was compared to “herding cats”, and despite herculean efforts to explain, assist and cajole, the final accounting of time would always be incomplete. 

When time was tallied on the quarterly report that was sent to finance, a much smaller percentage of total time than expected was able to be accrued to capital initiatives - which was not only capital-inefficient but also affected the department’s budget and bottom line in a very negative manner.

I helped management see that the mandate to track time simply for tracking time’s sake didn’t have a clear “why” that would make sense to the team, and so getting the expected results would be much more challenging than it would be if the team could see why the effort was important. 

Despite the surface-level dryness of the topic, capital efficiency is actually a great “why” to rally behind! 

To make the topic real, I took the time to explain to the team why the organization cared about classifying time as capital and expense. 

I explained that when time is spent building an asset, it’s similar to buying a car. If you spend $30,000 on a new car, you don’t suddenly lose $30,000. Rather, you have exchanged $30,000 worth of cash for an asset that has comparable worth (at least until you drive it off the lot! But no need to get too far into the weeds here). 

Keeping with the analogy, the taxes and fees you pay on that purchase - and later on, maintenance costs like oil changes, etc… - are not considered “capital expenses” because the money spent isn’t converted into an asset. Rather, they are true operating costs that result in money flowing out of the organization. For example, a car with newly-changed oil isn’t worth any more than a car with an oil change due. 

Time spent building software is similar. I helped the team see that when time and payroll dollars spent building a software asset is capitalized, it affects the finances of the organization differently than when it’s simply accrued as an expense. The financial team of the organization needs the ability to use these designations for the financial health of the company.

This made sense to the team - and it helped them see that the goal was not micromanaging the time they spent on a particular task. Rather, the aperture was much, much wider.

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Lesson #2: Leadership needs to walk the walk of the “why”

Remember that the biggest fear of the team is that the data generated from time-tracking will be used punitively. And once this is done, it’s very hard to regain the team’s trust. 

As such, it’s important to understand that the goal isn’t to penalize people for the specifics of their tracked time. Rather, tracked time needs to be seen as an instrument (like a compass) that can be used to navigate toward specific objectives. 

For example, if you have set a goal for some percent of an employee’s time to be put toward a particular initiative, and that objective wasn’t met - then the approach should be one of collaboration and curiosity rather than a reprimand. What would need to be true to achieve the goal next month, for example? A delta between the plan and actuals should be fodder for this productive discussion. As changes and adjustments are made, you continue to compare actuals to the plan to see how successful the efforts have been and continue to iterate.

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Lesson #3: But that doesn’t mean that anything goes

There is one time-tracking specific that can and should be tracked and called out as a metric, however: completeness of time. You certainly don’t want your team to feel like they’ll get in trouble for working on something that needs to be done, even if it’s not the stated “top priority” (because the reality on the ground is often different than the strategy).

But you do want your team to track all their time, and ideally in real-time, as they work it. 

This is a discipline that takes time to build, just like a muscle. And you probably shouldn’t demand that 100% of your team’s time be tracked on day one. Rather, you can set goals for your team. For example, on week one, set a goal that <i>some</i> time is tracked. If that goes well, then week two’s goal can be to track 50%. And after that, 90%, and after that, 100%. 

I generally don’t advise that you demand exactly 40 hours to be tracked every week. After all, you probably don’t want bathroom breaks in your time-tracking data. But 85% of a work-week has generally proven to be doable - so at least around 35 hours for a full work-week.

You might actually be surprised by the results. In my experience, many employees work far more than 40 hours a week, and tracking time gives them the ability to show how hard they work with data. During one recent rollout, after seeing the data, management realized that the team was burning the candle at both ends and working at an unsustainable pace. Objectives for a more management workload were then engineered, and the team saw how tracking their time had the opposite effect of their fears. Rather than micromanaging their time and using the data to demand more, management was able to thank the team for the hard work and help each team member develop a plan for a more sustainable schedule.

But this isn’t possible if all time isn’t tracked - and so that needs to be the primary goal from the start. Untracked time as a percentage of total time becomes a metric that can be reviewed each week with the employee, and that percentage should go up over time. 

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Conclusion:

There are countless other smaller lessons that I’ve learned in the trenches, but I’d say that these three are the most important. 

Keeping these points in mind will make for a much smoother rollout of your time-tracking system and workflow. And because there will certainly be challenges and difficulties, one thing is for sure: you’ll need to take advantage of anything that will make the process easier, not only for the rollout’s success, but the team’s (and your) sanity, as well!

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