I frequently hear this - “Fill up your time sheet before xxx date because it affects the company’s billing to the clients”. Now, this is fine, looking from the company’s perspective. However, even though all employees know what is good for the company will eventually trickle down as benefits for them, usually in the form of higher pay or bonus, it’s still not as enticing and you’ll find employees are not 100% motivated to fill in their time sheet. Weekly reminder emails will still need to be sent out.

Fact: people are an emotional and self-centered lot. Given a logical and emotional explanation, people tend to react more profoundly to an emotional one, especially if it is related to themselves. Managers should capitalize on this to get things done. Rather saying how filling up the time sheet will help the company’s billing, an emotional reasoning would be something along the lines of how time sheet can improve a consultant’s review and visibility, by tracking the amount of work done over time and by filling them up by xxx date is useful because you’d still remember it.

Gets exactly the same thing done, but I bet if you pitch it the latter, it’ll work better. Try it.