We transitioned our agency to track weekly billable hours on our Scorecard to protect our margins, but we suspect our team is padding their time sheets on Friday afternoons just to hit their targets. How do we measure actual productivity without encouraging our people to game their hours?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When you measure raw billable hours as a standalone metric, you incentivize employees to work slower or pad their time cards. This is a classic example of gaming the Scorecard. To prevent this, you must pair your activity metric with a quality or efficiency metric.

Instead of tracking billable hours in a vacuum, add a second metric for labor efficiency ratio or average project margin. For example, track the ratio of billable hours against estimated project budget hours. If a designer records thirty-five billable hours but only completes twenty hours worth of scoped project milestones, their efficiency is poor, and they are blowing your project margins.

Another powerful pairing is client satisfaction or revision rates. If a team member is padding hours by over-complicating client deliveries, your revision rates will spike or client retention will drop.

Ensure your managers are doing random spot checks on time entries throughout the week rather than accepting a bulk dump on Friday afternoon. If the time sheet entries are not tied to verifiable project management milestones, they do not count. When your team realizes that their billable hours are scrutinized alongside project delivery timelines and client satisfaction, the padding will stop because they cannot game both metrics at the same time.