by Darryl Sparey, co-founder
Most folks who’ve started a PR agency in the last two decades will have read Neil Backwith’s seminal book “Managing Professional Communications Agencies”. It’s 304 pages long. About 289 of those pages mention “timesheets”. Whilst I’ve enormous respect for Neil Backwith, I personally think timesheets are, frankly, a waste of time.
Stephen Hawking managed to cram much of the sum total of our knowledge of the cosmos into about 48 pages less than Neil Backwith managed to condense his understanding of what it takes to run a PR agency. I’ll leave it to you to decide which is the more worthy subject matter… But in “A Brief History of Time”, Hawking explores the most profound questions that have faced us all: How did the universe begin—and what made its start possible? Is the universe unending—or are there boundaries? What will happen when it all ends? Today, I want to go one step, and six letters, further. And give you "A Brief History of Timesheets".
Originally conceived by Genghis Khan, the founder and first khan of the Mongol Empire, timesheets were initially used as a form of torture for captured prisoners from opposing armies. As the armies of Khan conquered opposition from the Adriatic Sea in one direction and the Pacific coast of China in the other, surviving captured prisoners of war were kept in brutal, isolated conditions, on limited rations. Like many working in consumer PR in the entertainment sector today. But, at the end of every month, Khan would have an even more cruel punishment in mind. He would make every captured prisoner to meticulously account for every cruel minute of time spent in the last month. The horror, the horror!
Let’s start with the most important stakeholder: The clients. Timesheets or a time-based system of buying services like PR and communications are most often requested from clients where they have a procurement department. It’s done because hourly rates create a unit of price and comparison point for procurement professionals to negotiate with. Procurement professionals are trained to boil down a process to two providers - the perceived “best”, and the cheapest. Once selected, their job is to try and get the perceived best provider at a cost closest to the cheapest. And that’s understandable, and it’s their job to do this. But, ultimately, it’s an inefficient way to buy a service. It’s not linked to outputs or outcomes, just the amount of time spent trying to achieve them.
The day-to-day contact within clients who manage the relationship with the agency will usually hate time-based systems for buying services too. In the largest companies where procurement requests this type of commercial relationship, the main day-to-day point of contact for a PR agency is typically the Communications Director, Head of PR or Chief Marketing Officer. And believe me, they don’t want to spend their own valuable time pouring over monthly time sheets to understand if there is a potential overstatement of time spent on a specific task.
A timesheet-based system hampers agencies too. It removes their incentive for innovation. Research by Microsoft has found that the average knowledge worker can be 28% more productive using AI. AI could potentially reduce the amount of time it takes to carry out routine, monotonous tasks by nearly a third, to allow creative services professionals to spend more time thinking and less time doing. More front work, less grunt work. But if you’re paid by the hour, and the job took ten hours for the client last month, you’ve got to make it last ten hours this month, otherwise you’re losing money for the business. The incentive for innovation is removed.
Any finance staff of any agencies I’ve ever interacted with also dislike timesheets. At the last agency I worked for, typically 50% of folks hadn’t filled a time sheet out by the end of each month. There was one Account Director who worked on the company’s biggest client who hadn’t filled out a timesheet for ten years! Agency finance teams spend many hours of their valuable hours each month chasing up staff to fill them in. Can you honestly tell me with any degree of accuracy on the 15th of June what you did on the 1st of May, hour by hour, for 7 or 8 hours of the day.
It goes without saying that staff of agencies aren’t fans of timesheets either. We’ve talked about our “no timesheets” approach on our website and I discussed this last year in an article for The Times. I’m still grateful to Harry Wallop for making my Mum very proud of me by featuring me in a national newspaper, and giving me a way to try and explain to her what it is that I do… The number one question I’m asked most frequently by staff interviewing at Hard Numbers is “is it true you don’t use timesheets”. So timesheets are often left unfilled and hurriedly filled in at the end of each month. Or after chasing from the finance team. Or copied from last month’s timesheets, because “that looked right”. Which might have been copied from the previous month’s timesheet… You can see how, quickly, timesheets don’t provide *actual* management data about how people in the agency are spending their time, and what they’re doing for their clients. They are, at best, a simulacrum of management data, and a highly unreliable one at best.
The question I’m most frequently asked by agency leaders once I’ve systematically torn the comfort blanket of timesheets from them is “what can I use instead”. So, in my next couple of posts I’ll write what agency owners can use instead of timesheets, and what clients and procurement professionals should ask for instead of time-based billing systems. But I hope that this brief history of timesheets and their many failings have made you think “perhaps there’s a better way of doing things”. And that maybe, just maybe, timesheets are a waste of everyone’s time.
