Boutique healthcare consulting, for context. My work team got shuffled around to a vertical that suddenly gives a lot more of a shit about how we look on paper. Among our new metric under scrutiny is billable % as in how much of our 40 hours per week goes to client projects as tracked in our mandatory time sheets which let us get down to the minute.
Apparently other parts of the company are posting 80+ percent billable. We average way lower than that but see reasons for it including helping other teams with quick tasks to be good to our neighbors, and several larger workstreams we reserved people for are getting delayed by rounds of client scope revisions and contracting quagmires. Not sure if these reserved ppl actively turned down confirmed work, but something else to explain why we are billing lower than we would have thought.
Our leadership keeps telling us billable % isn't part of performance. It's meant to avoid burnout and spread work fairly. The unspoken universal flip side of this I assume is chronically low billable % teams or individuals will be put under a microscope and made redundant if low numbers continue.
My question... are yall actually managing to balance selling in of work to new clients (zero guarantee of winning proposals/contracts, inevitable delays and so on), while somehow also consistently having JUST enough work to be billing almost exsctly all your time to something client related?? How? Time and material scopes or just not being too precise about tracking time?