Founder in Eleven

Within my peer group of other IT services founders, one item that we constantly discussed was how to solve the problem of late time reports, weekly statuses to customers, and written or conducted personal evaluations.  The benefits of timeliness for all of these items can include:

• Time Reports – Daily time reporting was critical for successful daily huddles as we wanted to know “who” was working on “what” so we could make changes day-by-day.  Also, we found that time reports were more accurate when completed every day rather than once a week.
• Client Status – Early and consistent weekly statuses were critical to avoid client trust issues as well as allow the team to “work the plan” and avoid missed deadlines or over-budget spending.
• Evaluations – Giving timely feedback to confirm or correct an individual’s performance can result in better-performing consultants, higher employee retention, higher quality work, and better staffing decisions.

Despite the above advantages to timeliness, in my career at Andersen (now Accenture) and with TSG, I often saw timeliness issues  concerning all of my “non-client” work.  This post will discuss the various ways TSG solved this problem through incentives, punishments, and accountability.

Solving Late Time Reports

Despite having a web-based time reporting tool, TSG constantly struggled with consultants entering time late.  The management team wanted time entered before 8:30 am the following day so that we would have accurate numbers during our 8:45 daily huddle meetings.   Each Monday we would forecast numbers for the week (ex. 1250 billable hours) and would check daily if we were on track (ex. 250 hours per day).  If we were below those hours, we would look at individuals’ time to determine if they were working on non-billable activities or needed to shift hours to the billable activities.  In this way, getting updates on the daily time report was critical to our process.

Even though we pushed consultants to enter their time before finishing work, we would constantly see late time reports.  We initially tried “the carrot” of paying employees $1 per day to enter time reports on time but didn’t get the results we needed.  In later discussions with staff, the $1 wasn’t enough to make a difference with too many consultants not caring if they got the $1 or not.  Our solution was to add accountability for both the management team as well as the company as a whole.  The two things we did that were very successful from both the “stick” and the “carrot” included:

1. When I noticed that a consultant was late with reporting time on multiple occasions, they would get an email from me asking if there was a problem that we should discuss.  While this sounds somewhat draconian, it did get their attention and could correct the behavior if caught in the short-term.
2. In preparing for our company ski trip, the management team offered to pay for attendees’ lift tickets (often $200/day) if everyone in the company reported 80% of their time on time.  In other words, for 4 out of 5 days a week, EVERYONE had to be on time to hit the goal.   

While both methods worked, the “carrot” approach got the team to self-police each other.  I found out later that one of the consultants had developed an application that ran at 8:00 to report any late time reports.  The team would text any late consultants to get their time in so they could reach the collective goal.  Impressively, establishing the habit of doing a daily time report resulted in continued compliance even after the 80% goal was reached for the week.

Solving Late Client Status Reports

Every Monday, TSG had a goal of sending status reports to all active clients.   Some clients varied status due dates based on their own reporting, but most were more than happy to receive an email every Monday that included:

• Costs and activities/accomplishments this week
• Issues or outstanding items
• Costs before last week
• Total costs to date
• Estimated Cost and Variance to budgeted numbers

See the Weekly Status post for more details.  On Mondays, project managers would accumulate details from the previous week as well as over the weekend to present accurate status to the client.

When talking to project managers, we stressed that we weren’t going to incent managers to submit status reports as this was an important part of their job.  The two rules we made to enforce the weekly status reports were:

• I, the company founder, was personally “CCed” on every status report.  This provided a level of importance to the customer as well as a tracking method for me to monitor weekly statuses being sent out.
• On Monday/Tuesday, I would review all billable time from the previous week and verify that status had been sent out for any billable client.  If any client was missed, I would push the manager to send out the status until all status reports had been sent.

While founders might say “that isn’t something I want to do every week,” I would caution that trying to delegate it might be difficult given customers perspectives.  I would routinely hear from clients about issues and could easily bring up past status reports to help resolve those issues.  It also gave me the opportunity to coach project managers how to report weekly statuses so that it was easily readable by the client.  Eventually, I got to the point where the checking of status reports took me less than 30 minutes a week, even while reading the reports myself.

Solving Late Evaluations

Late evaluations were a constant issue in my experience both at Andersen/ Accenture as well as TSG.  Some reasons why evaluations are turned in late:issues that drive evaluations to be late could include:

• Just like status and time reporting, evaluations are not part of the client service and may be deemed not as important as client work.
• Evaluations (and professional writing for that matter) are typically hard for newer employees or those who are learning to supervise. Because of this difficulty, consultants often avoid or delay evaluations.
• Evaluations with critical items of the employee are very difficult to write and often pushed aside as many consultants want to avoid conflict. Furthermore, these types of evaluations are the most critical to deliver on a timely basis, especially when considering performance improvement plans or potentially having to let the employee go.

At TSG, we found that giving timely evaluations were a key part of employee retention since  getting feedback on job performance and personal development was a critical piece of an employee’s overall job satisfaction and feelings toward TSG.

To enforce timely evaluations, we chose a variation of carrot and stick for the managers responsible for the evaluations.  TSG had a team quarterly bonus based on team goals that was distributed to the managers.  If a manager didn’t have evaluations completed by the end of the quarter, they were not eligible for the bonus.  In the history of this program (10+ years), no manager ever missed getting paid a bonus, although we often had to push individual managers to get their evaluations complete.  The enforcement of the evaluations was something that our HR director took responsibility for and worked hard at both the completion of the evaluation as well as coaching managers on how to write evaluations.

Summary

Building timely habits for time reports, statuses, and evaluations can be difficult given that these activities are typically not client activities and can be pushed aside for a number of reasons.  TSG found that establishing accountability and incentives/punishments was successful in building these habits.  For those wanting to engage more with workplace accountability, I typically recommend The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, a great book by Patrick Lencioni, that addresses accountability.