TIME KEEPS ON SLIPPING I may be wrong, but telling creative people to document their every minute of their working day is probably not as popular as HR might think. Id guess many of you might agree that as Architects our work days are pulled in many directions as we deal with Building Minutiae on multiple projects. At my last firm, we were hammered with turning Time Sheets in ON TIME, or face not receiving our paycheck. And I was put in charge of making sure everyone turned theirs in, which made me oh so popular. Especially with the other Principals who told me (after I reminded them to turn their time sheet in): DONT EVER REMIND ME AGAIN. I asked what I thought was the obvious question: Why are there Time sheets? Most of us worked more than 40 hours every week. In fact at another firm I was told that I could only report 40 hours on my time sheet, no matter how many hours I worked. The one main reason I was told Time Sheets are important was that we would use that historical info to better plan our fee proposals. But I can tell you as the person who put together more fee proposals than most, I was told when I offered what another project of similar scope cost us in time Gary, the client is only going to give us this much money. We can either tell them we cannot do it for that, and lose the job, or do the job. Although the phrase We are losing money on this project was a common refrain, in fact since we did not pay our salary employees for working more than 40 hours, then the office was getting free work. It just seemed an effort in futility, with not many good outcomes. I was more for making sure projects got designed and built correctly and making sure clients stayed happy then documenting my existence for the Time Sheet Nazis. https://youtube/watch?v=Wb9By-lODgk
Posted on: Tue, 07 Oct 2014 01:13:30 +0000