Top 7 Ways to Get Employees to Complete Timesheets

Reporting becomes spotty with all these gaps in critical timesheet data, and any useful analysis is practically impossible. Ultimately, employers have little good data with which they can make helpful business decisions.

Missing data and watered down analyses are frustrating issues for any organization. But research from Harvard Business School shows that incomplete timesheets cost the U.S. economy billions of dollars per day.

But research from Harvard Business School shows that incomplete timesheets cost the U.S. economy billions of dollars per day.

For individual companies, that could mean being unable to invoice a client for billable time because they don’t have all their time reported. Or for a nonprofit, it could result in the denial of a grant request because they can’t substantiate the time spent on a prior grant.

Clearly, the consequences of incomplete timesheets can be serious. So, how do you get employees to turn in complete timesheets?

7 Ideas to Encourage Employees to Submit Complete Timesheets

As managers, it’s our job to instill good practices in our teams and to measure and monitor their performance so we can coach them to success. Below are proven strategies you can use to help employees turn in completed timesheets, gleaned from over 20 years of experience in the timesheet software industry.

1
Encourage Personal Habits

Scouring your brain to recall an accurate, complete record of your daily activities in the past two weeks is really hard. But recording a few hours at a time is easy.

That’s how you should frame tracking time for your employees.

Encourage employees to adopt a twice-a-day technique as a personal habit:

1. Enter all the morning’s hours before eating lunch.

2. Enter the afternoon’s hours before going home.

Performing this routine only takes a few minutes per day. And it makes the task of filling out a timesheet seem like less of a time-consuming burden at the end of every week.

2
Use Automation

Using timesheet software to automate your time tracking processes is one way you can make filling out timesheets easier for both employees and managers.

At the very least, time tracking software can take lots of manual math off your hands by tallying up every employee’s hours and rounding off to whatever increment your organization uses.

But beyond arithmetic, digital timesheet tools can automate many other timekeeping tasks:

• A stopwatch feature can track time in the background as you complete tasks.
• You can set up your system to auto-fill timesheets with projects employees have recently worked on.
• Calendar integrations can automatically import your appointment schedule into your timesheet app.
• Setting up automated reminders can help you give forgetful people a gentle nudge before timesheets are due.

By letting software do some of the work for you, you can help employees fill out completed timesheets on time and start to develop those good habits.

3
Create Incentives

Filling out a timesheet will never be the most entertaining task in the world. But you can do a lot to create some fun around the idea of completing timesheets. Wunderman Thompson Brasil’s strategy — where every employee gets a free beer after the company’s timesheets are turned in — is just one example of how you can reward employees.

Team incentives are a great way to harness the powers of positive reinforcement and social pressure. When everyone cooperates to get timesheets completed together — usually by the end of the week — you can reward the group with drinks, snacks, or gift cards.

And for people who succeed in building great habits on their own — and who sustain those habits over long stretches of time — more significant rewards are in order. Many firms offer bonuses for consistent on-time performance in timesheet reporting.

Giving employees a concrete goal to work toward can motivate them to submit complete timesheets on a regular, consistent basis.

4
Impose Consequences

Unfortunately, organizations will sometimes have to resort to negative consequences to encourage timesheet completion.

Let me be perfectly clear: it’s illegal to withhold wages or other duly owed compensation from employees. However, it’s perfectly fair to withhold or reduce a performance bonus if the terms of that performance haven’t been met. And timesheet completion can be one of those terms.

Every job carries its own obligations, and managers need to ensure those obligations are met. Imposing negative consequences is a last resort to encourage obstinate or consistently forgetful employees to fill out their timesheets.

5
Make It Part of Your Annual Review Process

If your organization depends on accurate time reporting, then getting timesheets done is a significant measure of employee performance. As such, you should make it a significant component of employees’ annual reviews.

If you decide to include timesheet completion in reviews, here are some questions to ask to evaluate performance:

• What was their on-time reporting average?
• How well were they utilized?
• How well did they stick to the estimates that were planned for them?
• How did they contribute to profitability?

Timesheet data can tell you a lot about employee performance. Timesheet completion is just the tip of the iceberg. So don’t be afraid to link compensation and promotion to timesheet performance and what you learn from those timesheets.

6
Simplify Your Time Tracking Process

If all of your employees seem to have an issue with getting timesheets done, it’s possible that your time tracking process is too complicated.

If you’re watching employees struggle with any of these problems, it’s a good sign you need to simplify your timekeeping:

• Coding their time to thousands of different tasks.
• Hunting through vast menus looking for their projects.
• Submitting timesheets that routinely need to be corrected.
• Constantly asking their managers or HR what the company’s policies are.

Using a system that allows employees to only see the tasks or projects that are relevant to them can speed up the time tracking process dramatically. And using a system you can customize to your organization’s needs can cut down on employee questions or confusion.

7
Show the Benefits of Accurate, Complete Timesheets

Contrary to some of your employees’ beliefs, tracking time isn’t some abstract corporate obligation. It’s the lifeblood of your company. Everyone should want the company to succeed, and tracking time is one way to help.

Demonstrate that importance for your employees. Put the firm’s billings up on a dashboard. Show visual progress against projects, goals, and budgets. If a funder or government regulations require you to track time, explain the risk to everyone’s jobs if you fall out of compliance.

Let everyone celebrate the quantitative success of the company, and let everyone share concern when things fall off the path. This transparency not only results in a better timesheet compliance, but it builds better results for the business as a whole.

Incomplete Timesheets Impact Your Whole Organization

When you lose employee timesheet data, you lose money — bottom line. You can’t accurately bill clients, record time worked toward a grant, or make data-informed decisions about your organization’s performance.

Completed timesheets, on the other hand, can help you increase profit margins with accurate billable hours, maximize federal grants through proper time and effort allocation, or use time tracking data to improve your business.