The Ultimate Guide to Increasing Staff Utilisation
Staff utilisation is ultimately the ability to turn non-billable time into billable.
Discussions about non-billable time differ widely among professional firms. Some perceive it as a significant issue, others deem it as an uncontrollable outcome as a result of running a professional services firm. Despite these differing views, there's consensus among firms: they wish to reduce non-billable hours and increase net utilisation of staff. Ideally, they'd prefer staff members to self-initiate this reduction, rather than resorting to carrot and stick methods.
Few organisations truly excel in this aspect; achieving this balance is challenging, yet the benefits are profound. Below are some strategies we've identified as effective in numerous professional services firms, which might be of value to you:
1. Understanding Non-Billable Time Categories
Many companies grapple with ambiguous or too many timesheet codes for non-billable hours. Common codes like "Administration" or "Staff Continuous Improvement" often lack clarity.
What's vital is determining:
What was billable time (i.e. time on a job)?
What was the time where a fee earner had nothing to do ?
What was non-billable time that a fee earner had to do that was critical and essential to the business process?
While most firms manage the first type adeptly, the second—representing idle time—is frequently overlooked. Often, employees associate idle time with job insecurity, leading them to misclassify their hours under different codes.
Such misclassification affects the third category: essential non-billable time. This typically involves infrequent yet crucial tasks, such as training sessions for newer staff.
2. Engaging with Your Team
It's pivotal to communicate that timesheets aren't tools of surveillance but means to gain insights. This message should resonate consistently across the organisation, and the leaders’ behaviour across the firm should reflect this.
Further, fee earners should be motivated to log time to the "nothing to do" category. Emphasising that this isn't a redundancy criterion but a tool for enhancing organisational efficiency. Transparent logging helps business more clearly capacity plan, rather than “believe” that there non-business critical tasks which are being presented by staff as essential.
3. Ensuring Timesheet Consistency
Aiming for comprehensive timesheet entries is crucial. A frequent contention is that if billable hours are logged, why bother with the rest? To counter this, organisations can argue that should default to the "nothing to do" category. It's vital for firms to discern between essential non-billable tasks and idle periods. The position should be that without complete logs, the assumption leans towards more idle time.
Rolling out these notions can be challenging and may require time. However, inaccurate non-billable codes can hinder a firm's forecasting ability and reduce efficiency, potentially causing staffing mismatches and overall organizational strain. Regular monitoring, coupled with fostering a non-intimidating timesheet culture, can lead to a reduction in non-billable hours, and dramatic improvements in efficiency - or at the very least, reveal untapped capacity.