Challenge

The company I work for is a consultancy. We charge our clients for hours each of our consultants  spends on a project. Each employee is responsible for ﬁlling out the number of hours worked on  particular project themselves at the end of each week. Once the timecards are submitted the  company can then charge our clients based on number of hours each employee has submitted. If  timecards aren’t submitted in time we cannot charge our clients, meanwhile business still has to  issue salaries and cover other day to day expenses, leading to debt. The company has tried  various methods to motivate it’s employees ﬁlling out the timecards in timely manner, but as the  consultancy is big, there are always few people who forget to submit their timecards for whatever  reasons.

Tools selection

Storytelling has been selected, as a best tool to deliver the message of how important to the  business timely submissions of billable hours are and what kind of ﬁnancial consequences  business suﬀer because of delays. On the other hand to encourage people to share their own  stories of why such a simple task can be so easily dismissed, which in return we hoped will help  us provide necessary solution to make this task easy, accessible and make it part of the routine  for every employee.

Application

Financial team put together a presentation, which was included as part of the induction for new  employees, as well as presented to existing colleagues. It went into details of what consequences  such a small postponed billing on a massive scale can lead to. It explained that company is  unable to bill their clients in time and how it aﬀects cash ﬂow, ability to borrow money for  business growth as well as budgeting for social events and fun activities for business employees.  This story highlighted how much company was relying on it’s employees and how much in trusted  them to do the right thing in time. On the other hand company wide email thread has been started, where everyone was encouraged  to share their stories - why it is so easy to forget or miss the due date when timecards are  supposed to be submitted. People that work for this consultancy are quiet opinionated and willing  to brainstorm and challenge each other and the company stakeholders. Stories started coming in  through the email thread. Each story encouraged more people to come forward with their own  story or identify with already shared idea.

Insight

Since the new session has been part of the induction, gathered statistics show that new starters  are almost never appearing on the ‘list of shame’ of people who missed the due date for  submissions. However the list is still not short enough. Few common problems have emerged from the public thread and shared stories, such as inability  to submit on mobile, complicated authentication to login into the app, reminders being sent at the  wrong time and few others. Storytelling helped to bring both business and it’s employees together to solve this issue. Given a  space to share, people were empowered to participate and even brainstorm possible solutions.

Approach

Storytelling was appropriate tool in this case as it delivered a deeper understanding to company’s  employees about why timecards submissions and billing is important and showed that it is not  just one of those bureaucratic rituals that stakeholders like to nag about for no reason.   However stories shared by employees on public email thread were the most valuable outcome. It  highlighted main pain points and gave business understanding on what improvements to make to  tackle this issue.

