Thursday, May 27, 2010

Filling Timesheet is Painful

The most annoying task for any resource in the month end would be filling in their time sheet. Having worked for some of the largest companies, I have seen really monstrous time tracking systems. Every employee thinks that they are frankly Painful, horrible, soul crushing, and pointless. No one likes time sheets.

I have seen those tensed faces during the month-ends as people have to clock the each and every minute they are in the office and also have to justify their work for those hours. I am not sure why managers think that any resource can actually justify his work for all the 8 hours.

I have also seen some managers resort to public humiliation to get their employees to submit their time sheets on time without any discrepancies. Even though we are at work busy doing a task given by the same manager, he still insists in submitting the timesheet on time.

Below is one such conversations which I have actually had on the floor.

Manager: Where is your time sheet Sudheendra?
Sudheendra: I’ll get it to you.

Manager: But it was due two hours ago.
Sudheendra: Yeah I know. Look, I’m really very busy, and I don’t really have time to figure out all that I did in the past week and fill it in the time sheet.

Manager: Do you want to get paid?
Sudheendra: Do you want me to work or not. Of course I need the salary. Look, I’ll get it to you, I just need some time to finish some things given by YOU.

After all this struggle, one questions that always recurrs while filling the time sheet is:

Hey buddy, Do you remember what we did last week?

In a place where we do multi tasking and work on many projects, I guess our memory about the tasks done would often become blur. I know we all are intelligent and have started writing about all these tasks in a Excel sheet to have it for reference at the end of the month.

But after doing all these exercises, justifying all those tasks each day for all 8 hours would always be a very big & tedious task for the employee.

I am now ready for the comments from the managers :-)