How to Get Your Team's Buy-In for Time Tracking

Lafiya gets modern contraception to women in underserved communities in Northern Nigeria, through trained community health workers it calls Lafiya Sisters. It is connected to Ambitious Impact. Alex Catalán Flores, its former Director of Operations, ran a five-person, fully remote team there.

Alex had wanted to track time for years. The harder question was how to introduce it without the team reading it as surveillance. This is how he did it, mostly in his own words, for any manager who wants the data but is unsure how to ask for it.

You can't manage what you don't measure

Alex's reason was simple: time is the resource every team spends and almost none of them measure.

"My philosophy is that you can't manage what you don't measure. If you want to optimize the way your team is using their time, then you need to know what your team is spending their time on. You can't manage it otherwise. For people to just tell you, their understanding of what they're spending their time on will be completely warped."

He learned that the hard way as a consultant, filling in weekly timesheets after the fact.

"It was so inaccurate. I was just guessing the numbers. It was quite literally random numbers that I was putting into a spreadsheet. People are fooling themselves when they think that people can just remember."

"Most organizations should really care about managing time. They care a lot about money and they measure money. We have accountants and we have bookkeepers. Why wouldn't you measure your most important resource, which is time?"

Decide, then bring people along

Alex did not put it to a vote, and does not think a manager should.

"A lot of it was driven because I really wanted it. That's the classic executive buy-in problem. I was given freedom to run my team the way I wanted, and I really wanted to record time. So in many ways the team had to adapt to that wish."

"If you want it really badly, your team will have some questions and perhaps even some doubts, but ultimately they will adapt to your needs. You're running the department. Organizations are not democracies. You say what to do and they do it."

A clear decision is not the same as a silent one. Most of the work went into how the change landed.

"Obviously you want to bring them along, so as to not inspire a rebellion, and that's what we did. We did a lot of work around that. But ultimately it all came from a foundation of: this is happening, let's talk about how to make it happen in the best way possible for you."

Start with a pilot

He kept the scope to the team he ran.

"It was easy because we were just doing it in my team. It would have been a much harder sell organization-wide. I think running pilots is always the best way to do change management."

Set expectations early, even before hiring

Nobody on the team was surprised, because Alex had been saying it for a long time.

"I had been talking to people about tracking time for a while. I'd been saying, look, I'm really keen on tracking time, this is something I'm going to start doing at some point. Even for at least one person, I remember saying that to them before they got hired."

He is candid that this may have shaped who joined.

"It could be that there's some self-selection here: people who are like me are part of the team, and they're also interested in tracking time."

Information went out in advance, individual questions came in on Slack, and then everyone met once.

"We had a session in person where I showed them everything, I explained it to them, and I answered all their questions."

Be honest about what it sees

The first questions were about privacy, as they always are. Alex answered them before anyone asked.

"Some of the concerns the team had were about data privacy, as usual. They wanted to know where the data went and how it was saved. I installed it myself, and I had a couple of chats with you, and you sent me resources about where the data was saved, how the model dealt with the data, whether you kept recordings or screenshots. All of that was addressed, and I was able to communicate that to them, because they had the same questions."

The second worry is the feeling of being watched, and he chose not to talk around it.

"As soon as they think that, they think it's my eyes watching their screen. I think it's important to be honest and just say yes, there's an AI-driven thing that is effectively watching what you're doing. Is that my eyes? No, it's not. I'm not monitoring you. But there will be data generated about what you're doing on your computer."

Be honest about the purpose

Alex holds managers to the same standard on why they want the data.

"People should be honest about the purpose. If people are deploying this with the purpose of monitoring people, then they should just say that, and say it to themselves most honestly. That is a failure point."

"But I actually do think that most people want to do it for the reasons I wanted to do it: to gauge effort and to measure how long things took. I really wanted to know how long it took to onboard somebody, so that we could plan appropriately in the future, or request additional resources, like an additional staff member. If I see that a lot of people are spending a lot of time on a particular task, I can invest in getting an agent to do that, or automating it in Zapier."

"I really hammered that down, because it was true. I didn't have the time or the interest to spy on people. What I cared about was results. As long as you're achieving what you're supposed to be achieving, all I care about is the total amount of time being spent in different areas of the organization."

Use it yourself first

Before showing the team anything, Alex ran DoneThat alone for several weeks.

"I used it myself for a number of weeks before I showed anything to them, because I wanted to know what I was talking about. It's all about inspiring confidence. If people come to the meeting and see that you don't really understand the app yourself, then of course they're not going to want to use it."

That meant he could show the real settings, what his own data looked like, and exactly what he would see once the team was using it.

Put a face to the tool

It also mattered who was behind the product.

"It was useful for them to know that it was you behind it. If I'd said there's this app from Meta or from Google that's going to start tracking your stuff, that would have been much less exciting. There's a face to the app, and if they wanted to reach out, they could. Nobody did, but I think that makes it more human."

Go first on transparency

Everyone could choose how much of their own activity the team saw. Alex chose everything.

"I wanted to put my money where my mouth is. I was very transparent. I said, look at everything I'm working on. I think that was reassuring. And people could set higher privacy levels if they wanted to."

He deliberately did not turn it into a leaderboard. Seeing each other's time was not really the point, but it still changed how it felt.

"It felt like we were all doing something together."

Leave people in control

In the end, the team's questions came down to two things.

"For people it was mostly about knowing how the information was going to be used: in terms of privacy, and then in terms of their jobs. It's so easy for them to use. They don't have to actually do anything."

Several people worked from personal laptops, so being able to stop tracking mattered.

"Folks preferred, at the end of the day, to go down to the taskbar and turn it off for the day. People were grateful that was a possibility, also because people use their personal laptops for work a lot of the time. I never did. I just left it on."

Better one-on-ones

Alex left Lafiya not long after the rollout, so the bigger process changes did not happen. Even a few weeks of data changed how he managed. Two people on the same small team could have completely different days: one switching between ten things, another spending six hours on a single project.

"I could have one-on-ones and say: I noticed that you're really scattered. Is that on purpose? Some people say that's fine, that's what I need to be doing right now. Others say, I'm so glad you raised it, I do feel scattered and I wish I could give some of these things to somebody else."

"Or: you're only doing two projects, are you bored? They might say no, this requires a lot of deep work. Or they might say yes, I'm actually just killing time. As a manager you can prepare much better for those one-on-ones, and just manage better, to be honest."

Office or remote, it's about outcomes

The team was fully remote, which Alex says changes less than people expect.

"What I'm trying to achieve is understanding the outcome of people's time. You spent half a day onboarding somebody, why did it take so long? That is the question I'm trying to answer. It doesn't matter if they did that in the office or at home. I also don't care when they work. If they do four hours in the morning and four hours at night, I don't care, as long as they're turning up to the meetings and being efficient with their own time."

Alex's advice, in short

• Decide, then do the work of bringing people along.
• Pilot it in a team you run.
• Set expectations early, even in hiring conversations.
• Answer the privacy questions before you introduce it, and be honest about what it sees.
• Be honest with yourself and the team about why you want the data.
• Use it yourself first, and share your own data.
• Let people set their own privacy level and switch tracking off.