How to Bring Hidden Work to Light and Save Your Budget
You know that feeling when a project spills over its budget? Sometimes the cause is obvious: An unexpected technical issue, or a critical team member leaves the business. Or it might be something less obvious but a lot more common – hidden work.
Hidden work is work your team is doing that isn’t accounted for or properly tracked, and it’s a silent killer of budgets. It sneaks in and damages your productivity, profitability, and planning. Without access to tools that produce accurate data, you can’t accurately understand your team’s capacity, make reliable project timelines, or understand the full scope of the work you do.
In addition to overspending, you may find yourself dealing with employee burnout if you aren’t able to identify hidden work and bring it into the light.
According to a survey by Deloitte, 77% of employees have been victims of burnout, and 70% believe their employers should be doing more to address this burnout.
The survey found that the biggest drivers of burnout were leadership not giving enough support and recognition, unrealistic expectations around results and deadlines, and working too many hours (including working on weekends).
Luckily, with the right tools, you can bring visibility to the invisible. Read on to unpack three ways hidden work is killing your budgets and discover a suite of tools that can make all the difference. You can also get more information by watching our webinar.
Three Ways Hidden Work Kills Your Budgets
1. Subpar planning tools provide an incomplete picture of how time is being spent
Everyone wants to rely on data-driven insights, but many companies are working with inaccurate or incomplete data. That leads to unreliable insights and poor budgetary decisions.
The best way to ensure you have accurate data is to use an enterprise-level dashboard and generate reports with information like:
- How much non-value-added work your teams are managing
- How much time is being spent on meetings and administrative tasks
- Which projects lack connection to core business strategies
- How often timesheet discrepancies are occurring
While you can ask your teams to report every single thing they do, it takes a lot of time to check and record that data. That’s why you need technology to support you and track where all your resources are going – so it's easier for your teams to report their work.
Ideally, a lot of reporting and tracking can be done automatically with powerful tools, integrations, or add-ons for project management software like Jira. By having your teams log issues and work with these tools, you can build better timeframes and project scopes.
Once you have that level of visibility, you can see what actions are taking up more time than the value that they bring, and – more importantly – you can get a far better idea of the true time and scope of your projects.
After all, your employees can't work non-stop on a project until it's completed. Even if they could, it takes time to get things from colleagues, and the review stage can take a while as well. You need to budget time for chats and meetings, and assess how much availability everyone has.
The complete picture that tech provides means better predictions, less stressful timelines, and a well-rounded picture of where your resources are going. That allows you to identify hidden work and bring it into the light so it can be accounted for.
2. Hidden work contributes to burnout, which costs organizations money
When your team is working too hard without enough recognition, they burn out. Hidden work goes unnoticed; therefore timelines get tighter and everyone gets more stressed out.
When employees feel burnt out, they are less productive and make more mistakes. This causes a domino effect, negatively impacting efficiency and output, ultimately costing your organization.
In addition to the impact on an employee’s performance during their working hours, burnout also causes them to take time off or even leave your team altogether.
When this happens, other team members need to pick up the slack, sometimes working overtime. You may even find that you need to hire to fill the gap – extending the project timeline as the new recruit is onboarded and trained up.
Overall, that hidden work cascades through your entire team and can devastate morale, productivity, and budget.
With half of all workers feeling burnt out, it doesn’t help that managers often give their best employees extra assignments – a phenomenon known as the “passion tax.” The upshot is, for every $1 million an organization spends on payroll, $350K is lost.
The reason? Stress and disengagement among burnt out employees.
Fortunately, there are several ways that employers can address burnout – and ultimately save money – including:
- Gathering feedback from employees, and then acting on it; this could involve surveys, two-way conversations about well-being and performance, and leadership tours
- Training managers to spot signs of burnout early, identify and adjust work that is causing burnout, and support employees who are feeling burnt out
- Reducing hours or making them more flexible, potentially through a hybrid/remote work model
- Promoting employee well-being with wellness days
Of course, accounting for hidden work also helps balance workloads, allow healthy work-life balance, and reward employees with promotions and other forms of recognition.
3. Siloed communication leads to disconnection and misalignment
One of the major culprits behind hidden work is siloed communication. When teams and individual employees are siloed from one another, communication breaks down – especially when different teams plan and work in separate software solutions.
This causes projects to fall out of alignment with overall company goals and strategies, which wastes time and money. The inability to communicate with coworkers is also a cause of burnout among employees.
Harvard Business Review explored the impact of employee silos and found that workers experience emotional strain and cognitive overload. How can you avoid silos? They suggested:
- Leveraging organizational support to help employees connect with each other and recover from burnout
- Ensuring silos that cannot be dismantled are able to collaborate with each other
- Creating ways for employees to check in with each other and, when needed, disengage from their work
Keep Budgets Alive With the Right Tools
Modern technology is the most effective way to shine a light on hidden work. At Tempo, we’ve been developing an award-winning toolkit designed to make time-tracking, resource management, and capacity planning as simple and powerful as possible.
While each of these tools is powerful (and fully featured) on its own, together they integrate seamlessly to take your project management to the next level.
1. Timesheets
Timesheets is built right into Jira, creating automatic timesheets showing what your team has been working on. It pulls from their issues and calendars to reduce manual input and chasing up.
It comes with multiple types of tracking, each of which is key to ensuring hidden work is a thing of the past.
- Time tracking: Save your team time and encourage them to track more accurately. Plus, you can see who is clocking in too many hours – or who has some capacity – and adjust accordingly.
- Project tracking: Capture every billable hour in Jira.
- Cost tracking: Keep track of your costs, including CapEx and OpEx, which can help you when tax season comes around.
- Progress tracking: Uncover insights with burn-up and time spent reports.
2. Capacity Planner
Get visualizations of your resources and capacity so you can understand and communicate where all your resources are at a glance. That means you can prevent burnout, use your resources more effectively, and ensure the right people are working on the right projects.
- Integrate seamlessly with Jira, Timesheets, Structure PPM, and more
- Choose the best team members for specific tasks
- Ensure you aren’t overburdening your employees
- Use the Planned vs Actual report to see how projects are tracking
3. Other Tempo solutions
Tempo’s suite of tools work together to give you a bird’s-eye view of your projects, enable big and visible communication, and stay in control of your entire portfolio.
Other tools in the suite include:
- Financial Manager: View your financial metrics in real time and forecast project spend.
- Structure PPM: Track multiple projects at once with custom hierarchies and formulas.
- Custom Charts: See your blockers and report on progress with Jira’s most flexible reporting solution.
- Strategic Roadmaps: Create boardroom-ready roadmaps in minutes.
Bring Your Work into the Light
The best way to eliminate hidden work is to choose tools that maximize visibility. With the right tools, you can spot signs of employee burnout and adjust your team’s workload. Effective tools can eliminate silos or connect siloed employees to increase alignment across your organization.
With Tempo’s solutions, you can take back control of your budget. Want to see how we can help your teams? Find out more at www.tempo.io or see if Tempo’s tools are right for you with a trial.
