-
Image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.
An office worker focuses on tasks at his laptop in a bright and organized workspace. -
Manager insisted we log every single minute of 'non-billable' time, so I did exactly that until payroll blew up
I work at a mid-sized consulting firm where billable hours are tracked like they're made of gold. A couple months ago our new operations manager sent out a memo saying that any time not directly tied to a client project had to be logged in 15-minute increments under the new 'overhead' category. She said it was to 'increase visibility' and 'cut down on waste.' Most people just rounded or ignored it after the first week, but she started auditing timesheets and calling people out in team meetings if the overhead bucket looked light.
I decided to play it straight. Every time I got up for coffee, used the bathroom, answered a quick Slack from another team, waited for a slow VPN, or even read an internal email that wasn't client-related, I stopped my timer and logged the exact minutes. Same thing for mandatory all-hands meetings, the weekly 30-minute 'sync' that was basically just her reading the same slide deck, and the ten-minute walk to the printer when it jammed. I even started noting the two minutes it took to restart my laptop after forced Windows updates.
-
After three weeks my overhead total was sitting at 18.75 hours for a 40-hour week. My actual billable time dropped below the 75% threshold the firm likes to brag about in recruiting. When payroll ran, my manager got flagged because my utilization report looked like I was barely working.
She pulled me into a 45-minute meeting (which I logged as overhead) demanding to know why my numbers were so bad. I showed her the spreadsheet with every line item and timestamps. She told me to 'use common sense' going forward. I asked if that meant the policy was being updated and she said no, just to be reasonable.
Next timesheet I kept the same level of detail but added a note at the bottom citing the original memo. HR ended up getting involved because three other people on my team started doing the same thing after seeing mine. Last I heard the policy is still on the books but nobody's been asked to produce the granular logs in weeks. My manager now avoids eye contact in the hallway.
-
Once people heard about the employee's extremely detailed time tracking, they had plenty to say. A lot of commenters felt management got exactly what it asked for. Others jumped in with stories about workplace rules that sounded good at first but quickly became a headache once people started following them to the letter. As often happens with stories like this, the discussion ended up being just as entertaining as the original situation. Here are some of the reactions people shared.
-
Image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.
A professional checks his phone while taking a quick break at his desk in a modern office.
-
I worked a feild service job
Momentarily unscrambled the typo as "felid service job" and was briefly intrigued at what kinds of cats your job involved, and why cat work required such precise billing...
-
At some point in time the small company I worked for had 2 managers (I was one of them). The other manager thought he could pull one over on me (we never got along), and convinced the owner that my side of the Business was not producing enough to justify it's cost.so, we had an excel spreadsheet open at all times, and we had to change the status to whatever we were doing (Answering Phone call, meeting customers at the Lobby, working on jobs, etc) it totaled each item at the end of the day.
After a week of this I asked the owner why this was not being done on the other Manager's side of the business, and found out ALL of this was at the other managers insistence.
I asked the owner if he had any idea of time being wasted, logging our activities down to the minute, and also why wasn't the same requirement put on both sides of the business?, and at what point in time did he think that this requirement was saving him any money compared to when I managed the employees and kept them as busy as possible depending on the workload (which did vary)
the logging was no longer necessary after I made these points
-
Image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.
A businessman multitasks between a phone call and computer work during a busy day at the office.
-
I'm... I'm sorry, I must have read this wrong....
A TEN MINUTE walk to the printer when it jams?
What the h**ll kind of crazy layout requires a 10 min walk to the printer?
Why is it only when it jams? If it doesnt jam, does it wheel itself to you and present the printed document?
-
Sounds like you still aren’t being as compliant as you should.
You state that overhead is billed in 15 minute increments.
Restarted computer (3 min clock time) = 0.25 hrs time entry.
Status meeting (31 minutes clock time) = 0.75 hrs time entry.
Etc.
With the standard billable
-
one of my former employers demanded detailed time tracking, we all started recording an hour a week for time tracking, and one of my coworkers shared a spreadsheet that would scale exactly to 40 hours (we were not allowed to log more or less than 40 hours, had to account for exactly 40 hours.
IIRC it lasted a month or so before policy was canceled.
-
I worked for a vacation rental company in Oregon in 2019. Our regional manager sent down the policy that all time, regardless of length, had to be logged. So I literally logged every single minute of my day. Answering a call from my manager? Logged. Cleaning a house? Logged. Filling out my timecard? Logged. My direct manager complained that she had to approve so many different entries for me and that I needed to simply my timecards. I referred her to the email from regional manager..and logged the time that took too. I stopped hearing about it.
-
Years ago, I worked in a research division of a company that also did defense work and non-defense manufacturing. The research division wasn't big enough to have its own accounting department, so we used the defense division's, which meant we had to follow their rules, which included timesheets and properly ascribing work to accounts and tracking overhead.
There were about two dozen overhead codes. Meetings (account-related and not), unable-to-work (computer failure, power outage), and bunches of things I no longer remember. Every year we'd have a big meeting where they explained how to enter time, and every year people would bring up situations that we encountered, and the speaker would say "enter it as overhead," and because we were all the sort of people who cared about details, we'd say "WHICH overhead?" And they'd mumble.
-
What do you think? Was this employee simply following instructions exactly as they were given, or should there have been some room for interpretation from the start? Let us know where you stand in the comments. We'd also love to hear about the most ridiculous workplace rule you've ever seen backfire on the person who created it.
Want More? Follow Us and Add Us as a Preferred Source on Google.