One thing I don't miss about agency life is timesheets. The panic at the end of the day when you realise that it's 6:00pm, you thought it was 4:00pm, and you have no idea exactly how long you've spent on anything that afternoon. The realisation that the four hours you sat in a traffic jam on the M6 returning from a client meeting have to be assigned as 'admin' even though it was the client's fault that you were there in the first place ... It's hardly surprising that a survey published today claimed that 90% of practitioners completed timesheets incorrectly.
I could tell many tales about the wonderful works of fiction created using the platform of a timesheet but I won't. If you work in an agency, you've seen them. And there's a more serious debate here regarding professionalism and trust.
Since lawyers and accountants complete timesheets it's hardly surprising that, in their quest for professional status and desire for accountability, PR agencies should want to do the same.
Students sometimes complain that they "spent three weeks on the essay and got 45%" while pointing out that their mate did it in an evening and got 75%. Unfortunately, time and effectiveness are rarely related. An agency can spend weeks creating and implementing a useless campaign and achieve nothing, while another makes a couple of timely calls to key influencers, or has an exchange on Twitter with a journalist and achieves results beyond the client's dreams.
Unfortunately (and here's the tricky bit) the people who argue that timesheets are meaningless and that results should speak for themselves could be shooting themselves in the foot. While some PR campaigns are required to produce immediate results, others, looking perhaps at conative change, are longer term, and measurable, results may not be seen for a year or more. And that's without talking about the time spent researching and thinking about new campaigns. That time isn't producing results, but in the hands of a good agency, it's not unproductive.
So perhaps it's all about trust. However fees are assigned, a client should trust an agency enough to do a great job without having to check that they've completed their contracted 30 hours that month. And the agency should respect the client's trust in return, work intelligently and deliver great PR.
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