IT worker charges 16 hours to 2 hour job when management instates new painstaking time-logging system: '[The] client refused to pay'

If you've ever worked a job that relies on timesheets, you know how this goes… Management (usually of the upper variety) wants to keep better track of how and where staff are spending their time, suspicious that their "lazy" workers are spending most of their time slacking off. They pressure staff to charge out more hours to jobs, trying to keep them from posting "unproductive" uncharged hours. Suddenly, clients are getting charged more hours and, therefore, paying more for services that have been charged consistently at a lower rate for years. All the while, management is adding more paperwork and processes to make sure no time is unaccounted for, ironically creating a situation where every attempt to account for time actually just makes everything take longer, wasting more and more of their workers' time that is then expected to be charged out to clients.

Now, management wonders why everything is taking longer but won't listen to their workers and lower management, who tell them that it's because of their new policies. This whole vicious cycle self-perpetuates until management relents under the pressure of angry and departing clients—that or the entire thing falls in on itself and pulls the company under.

That's basically what's happening in this story where this IT worker was forced to painstakingly enter their time into a new time-logging system, resulting in a 16-hour chargeout to a client for a job that should have taken two hours.

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Posted by Brad Dickson