Our technical team members always hit their billable hour targets exactly, but our project margins are shrinking. How do we stop employees from padding their timesheets to make their weekly metrics look green?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When employees hit their targets perfectly while results decline, you are witnessing the classic gaming of scorecard metrics. If your technical staff are measured solely on total billable hours, they will find a way to make their timesheets show exactly forty hours, regardless of actual productivity. They are protecting themselves, not the company.

To stop this, you must change what you measure. Billable hours is a self reported metric that is easily manipulated. You must pair it with an objective, counter balancing metric that measures efficiency.

First, add project budget variance to your scorecard. This metric compares the estimated hours for a project phase against the actual hours logged. If a technician pads their timesheets to hit their personal billable target, they will push the overall project over budget. This immediately turns the project variance metric red, exposing the inefficiency.

Second, track task completion rate on time. This measures whether milestones are met on schedule. If hours are being logged but milestones are slipping, you have a productivity problem.

Third, hold your operations leader accountable for auditing timesheet data. They must ensure that the hours logged match actual deliverables and client approvals.

When a metric is gamified, the solution is not to yell at the team. The solution is to refine the scorecard so that gaming one number makes another number turn bright red. Use your weekly Level 10 Meeting to review these balancing metrics. This forces the leadership team to look at the complete operational picture and eliminates the hiding places for padded data.