Most workers are familiar with the concept of business input; by simply turning up for work, you’re contributing to the business! It’s about time and attendance, clocking in and timesheets. It’s not about what you did, what you worked on or what got done. There are many different applications out there that allow a user to input their timesheet. They act as a central repository where all timesheets can be stored and retrieved for any employee at any time. The reporting side of this gives managers and business owners an idea of what their payroll costs are going to be.

It does not in any shape or form give an idea of how productive people are. It does not provide a measure of business output. Some applications allow users to attribute their time to a cost centre, task or project code. So for example, if someone spends 2 hours working on a specific task, they can enter those 2 hours into a timesheet. This gives a good indication of productivity but there are a couple of problems with this approach. Firstly, it takes a lot of time to attribute time to a task. In any working day, a person may switch their attention across a number of tasks and tracking that time requires much effort and diligence that would be better directed elsewhere. The second problem is such data is still manually entered and is subject to all the usual nuances of human data entry.

In the current “somewhere near the bottom of the recession” environment, organisations are focussing on productivity, competitiveness and getting value for money. As one senior IT manager commented to me recently “The days of people getting paid to just turn in for work are fast coming to an end”. In addition, individuals themselves want to know how they’re spending their time. Only detailed information on activities can provide this. Contractors want to show that they have been diligently working on behalf of clients. Professionals are more and more being asked to show a time breakdown of work.

Providing this information by matching the tasks assigned to a person with their actual activity and then reporting on the results is the business of RWorks. We aim at the remote worker as remote working draws attention to more fundamental work management issues applicable to all.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010 at 9:32 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.