Contributors Monthly Time Reporting

[MoeNick]

3- Human resources procedures.

We don’t overpay full-time people in the team if they work more, of course if I, as a product manager, ask team to spend more time or work on their free time or on the weekend, or to fix a bug, I can’t compensate it with payment tools.

The only thing that makes them do this is the feeling that they are full time and responsible for what they do. Naturally, we should not be sensitive to the times when people do not work, because this is a mutual sense of trust between employer and employee. In my opinion, filling the time sheet, unintentionally damage this trust in the long run. I’m sure that DAO OPS has good intentions and that they have no intention of doing this, however I can only imagine how stressed someone would be to fill out a time sheet if they wanted to work a slow, stress-free week.

Some freelancers are used to this, because the nature of their work brings freedom that they can not take responsibility and work only when they want, but we are dealing with the phenomenon of team building, responsibility, leadership and engagement, which in many aspects it affects some human feelings.

[Griff]

I feel like we are mostly talking past each other in this thread.

No one is promoting a culture of clock in clock out, log your hours and thats life. We are all against that culture, this isn’t a fast food restaurant.

I don’t think we need to all use clockify in the same way… but to satisfy several business requirements of Giveth, we need ESTIMATES of hours for each working group and each GM external project.

How you get those estimates, how often you make them, whether you use percentages, or you use clockify and log every second, or you make a spreadsheet weekly, or you do a guestimation at the end of the month, I feel like this is a personal decision.

A lot of people… i’d say over 1/2 are getting some of their hours billed to clients sometimes. To do that billing we need your help! You need to tell us how many hours you spent on it. Clockify is by far the easiest way to coordinate that.

WGs are now asking for budgets, we are trying to transition to the point where these groups to have financial sovereignty. A lot of people are floating between groups and the easiest way to coordinate the billing is to use clockify.

It is a hard task to track your contributions… for full time people especially, if you want to estimate with percentages, thats cool, and it works. For some people that are really well organized they like to track it daily. That works too!

I don’t think its fair to the GM clients or to the WG leads to just flat out refuse to use clockify. We need to do it. We need it to help us wrap our heads around the complex system that is Giveth. We need it so we can hold ourselves accountable for our contributions.

As far as the “Penalty” I am actually for it… but not as a Penalty, as a reward for the people that are making our systems work smoothly. I think Mitch’s framing of it as a penalty is the wrong framing… cause it’s not like Giveth would keep the GIV… the GIV would actually just go to the people who are using clockify, so it would be a clockify bonus.

I don’t think it should be retroactively applied to Q2 however. I would vote it starts now going forward. Retroactively changing the rules doesnt make sense to me.

[Danibelle]

@Griff

As far as the “Penalty” I am actually for it… but not as a Penalty, as a reward for the people that are making our systems work smoothly. I think Mitch’s framing of it as a penalty is the wrong framing… cause it’s not like Giveth would keep the GIV… the GIV would actually just go to the people who are using clockify, so it would be a clockify bonus.

Heard.

So in this new framing, the context is that Giveth needs better data for budget allocation and forecasting. Our culture favors incentivizing this work, and the recommendation is to divert from an existing GIVtoken pool for that purpose.

The proposal would present a reduction in the standard GIVtoken vesting of 20%, to create a pool that is distributed to those who use a time-tracking tool to help Giveth collect data that makes for better resource management.

I can get behind that, although I’d need to see what 20% looks like in order to vote yes.

[freshelle]

After considering the feedback shared, I believe rewarding contributors is the way rather than imposing penalties. I think this aligns better with our values and culture, and encouraging participation and transparency.

With the subDAOification shift, one of the major goals is to empower WGs to manage their own budgets, so it’s crucial for WG leads to have a clear understanding on the cost being charged. To compute for this cost, we need some level of organization to gather hours allocation, and ultimately to make informed decisions.

Clockify is the most fit platform that addresses our needs for now.

If we recall, we were previously using Typeform to gather time reports, but it involved too much manual work for us to convert text responses into numbers in spreadsheets, transferring data from one source to another, manual computation, and sending a summarized data to WG leads.

With Clockify, it simplifies the reporting process and it’s all in one place — contributors report hours, automatic computation of costs, WG leads have access on who, how many hours, and how much are being charged to their WGs real-time. Less human error, less manual data processing, better accessibility, and more efficient in financial reporting.

On top of that, as we are working on setting up a paid version of Clockify, we can integrate Time-Off balances directly into the platform, streamlining another aspect of contributor management.

I also want to emphasize that best estimate for your hours allocation is enough. It doesn’t need to be the exact number of hours, what matters is the proportional allocation of your total hours.

[OyeAlmond]

Thanks @Griff @mitch @freshelle!

I’ll keep doing my best to track my hours as best as I can. Let’s keep moving forward. Thanks for the hard work on this!

[MoeNick]

I also want to emphasize that the best estimate for your hours allocation is enough. It doesn’t need to be the exact number of hours, what matters is the proportional allocation of your total hours.

I don’t think people did not contribute to reporting these allocations, the discussion here is mostly around tools rather than the willingness of people to help form better data. We did it before very well with typeform. But struggles only happened after day-to-day and hour-to-hour data, not the allocation.

So I think it’s irrelevant that we even incentivize using Clockify. We can incentivize the cooperation of people to build data. In Development Chapter, we do these resource management timesheets that we can share weekly. Also Im down with any help to facilitate this format.

The only thing that I vote no is reporting hourly because of these side effects I mentioned.

[surbhiaroraa]

I wanted to add my opinion to this ongoing discussion. Tracking and clocking time hourly is not a step backwards, nor is it an archaic practice. It is just a fundamental business hygiene practice - it helps make sure our financial decisions are wise and justifiable.

I understand that to many, it may seem unnecessary and very uncomfortable. But the benefits (to Giveth or any org for that matter) of tracking time hourly outweigh any discomfort it may cause. Besides a lot of benefits mentioned above, which I agree with, I believe tracking time is very important for making financially wise business decisions. Understanding where we as a team invest our time will help Giveth as a whole to evaluate if resources spent on Project X make sense at a particular point in time or not. All of this just helps WG leads make data-driven decisions (and not rely on intuition) to deploy team members to projects where value>cost (time and cost). Sometimes, we’re passionate about some specific projects. However, not all projects have the same impact or align equally with our mission or short term goals. Hourly time tracking allows us to evaluate which projects provide the most value and satisfaction.

Incentivising instead of penalising definitely aligns more with Giveth’s culture I believe.

[mitch]

Thank you everyone for your comments, this has been a spicy one!

Although it’s challenging as DAO Ops lead to have to process and navigate amongst such varied and strong opinions, I am inspired. This is proof that our DAO is alive and well; that people feel empowered to say what they think and engage in important discussions.

My post regarding mandatory clockify has been up for 8 days at time of writing and has received 25 votes on the soft-poll!

Based on comments/poll results and our discussion in the DAO Ops crew we have come to these conclusions:

• Clockify will be mandatory for all contributors getting paid from the Giveth DAO.

• The rewards scheme related to GIV vesting will be applied beginning the Q3 vesting round.

• Everyone needs to use Clockify themselves, nobody else will enter your hours for you. You have many options of how you choose to go about it, just look at Griff’s comment above.

• The new Clockify workspace will focus much less on tracking time spent on tasks and more on the broader categorization of where you spent your time. Specifying your task is not required but specifying the project (WG/Chapter/Project/IRL Event/PTO etc…) is required. This should be much easier given that you might have only 7-8 categories of where to log your time instead of 30-40, much less overwhelming.

We’ll be publishing more content and guides around Clockify to make things straightforward for everyone. DAO Ops greatly appreciates your patience around this matter as we continue to experiment and iterate on our subDAOification process.