Eight Things People Do When the Figure Matters
A catalogue of the responses a utilisation target produces, each with its timescale and its real effect. None requires dishonesty.
Eight responses to a utilisation target, and what each one actually does
The client code's hours rose 14% with no change in sold work.
Training bookings fell to nil in one quarter.
Two improvement projects lapsed for want of volunteers.
Suspected across forty entries a week; never measured.
Proposal hours fell by half before anybody noticed.
Review hours left the record; the reviews partly continued.
Raised in exit interviews. Never counted.
24 of 78 people landed in a single one-point band.
Three were measured, three observed, one claimed and one untested — and not one of the eight involved doing more work for a client. Every item is a reasonable choice by somebody acting sensibly in the system they are in. One firm's own record, and a statement about a measure rather than about anybody in it.
A utilisation target produces a predictable set of responses. Eight are common enough to catalogue, and the important feature of the list is that none of them requires anybody to misstate anything.
The measure discussed in “Eight Things People Do When the Figure Matters” becomes more credible when its source records are timely and reviewable. A professional-services team assessing a transparent approach to remote employee monitoring software for remote employee monitoring software can connect time with projects and work categories, while documenting the definition separately so the dashboard does not silently decide what utilisation means.
Each is a defensible choice made by a person acting reasonably in the system they are in.
Additional context for “Eight Things People Do When the Figure Matters” is available from SHRM compensation resources. Current legal, employment, tax and accounting requirements should be confirmed with a qualified adviser where necessary.
One: coding ambiguous hours to clients
Most weeks contain hours that could legitimately be client work or internal work. A call that was partly relationship and partly business development. Reading that informs an engagement.
Under a target, the ambiguous hour goes to the client code. The firm's revenue does not change.
Two: deferring non-billable work
Training, administration, internal improvement, documentation. None has a deadline this week.
Deferral improves the figure now and accumulates a backlog that arrives later as cost, usually attributed to something else.
Three: preferring the chargeable task
Given a chargeable task and a more valuable internal one, take the chargeable one.
This is the response with the largest long-run effect, because the internal work that gets dropped is the work that makes future work cheaper.
Four: rounding up within the unit
Six-minute recording means every task rounds. Under pressure, rounding goes one way.
Two or three per cent across a year, invisible per entry, and it is what makes fine-grained recording units a liability.
Five: avoiding unbillable work that wins clients
Pitches, proposals, speaking, writing, relationship maintenance. All non-chargeable, all the source of next year's work.
A target set on this quarter's hours prices next quarter's pipeline at zero.
Six: not recording supervision
Where reviewing a junior's work is non-chargeable, a supervisor under pressure stops writing it down, then stops doing as much of it.
The quality consequence appears one or two quarters later as write-offs or rework, attributed to the junior.
Seven: working longer
The response that looks like virtue. Extra hours, chargeable, recorded; the figure rises because the numerator does.
It works, it is unsustainable, and a firm that rewards it is selecting for the people who will leave.
Eight: stopping exactly at the target
Once the threshold is met, the incentive to record more disappears, and the remaining ambiguous hours go to internal codes.
This produces a visible spike in the distribution at the target, which is the cleanest evidence available that the target is being managed to.
What the eight have in common
All are available to any individual, all operate through recording or task choice, and none changes what the firm sold or collected.
That is the definition of a measure being gamed without anybody lying.
Detecting them in aggregate
Compare non-billable category volumes before and after. Look at the shape of the distribution around the target. Look at whether total recorded hours moved.
Three checks, all at team level, none requiring anybody's individual timesheet to be challenged.
The order they arrive in
Reclassification first, within weeks, because it requires nothing. Deferral next, in the same period. Task preference and rounding follow as habits form.
The slower four — dropping development work, dropping supervision, working longer, stopping at the threshold — settle in over two to three quarters as people work out where the line is.
A firm watching only the ratio sees a smooth improvement across that whole period and has no way to tell which response produced which part of it.
Which of the eight reverses
Reclassification reverses completely when the pressure comes off. Rounding reverses. Task preference reverses.
Deferral reverses only after the backlog is cleared, which takes as long as it took to build. Dropped development work leaves a pipeline gap that persists for the sales cycle. Dropped supervision leaves juniors who were not trained, and that does not reverse at all.
So removing a target recovers the recording quickly and the capability slowly or never. The asymmetry is the reason the behaviour section matters more than the arithmetic: the arithmetic error is temporary and some of the behavioural consequences are not.
What the list is for
Not for policing. The eight are the predictable output of a threshold on a self-reported measure, and a firm that reads the list as a catalogue of misconduct has misread it.
Its use is diagnostic: given a movement in the figure, the list narrows what produced it, and the aggregate checks at the end distinguish between them without examining anybody's timesheet.
Given the design, every one of the eight is the correct response.
The response that is not on the list
Doing more client work that the firm sold. It is not on the list because an individual cannot usually cause it.
That is the whole difficulty: the one legitimate route to a higher figure is the one the person being measured does not control.