How H&CO Put 200,000 Hours Back Into Its Clients and Its People

THE CHALLENGE

Three Hours a Week, Per Person,
Going Nowhere

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For H&CO, work moves fast. Teams are distributed across time zones. Leadership expects both operational discipline and strategic growth. Client engagements demand high-quality output.

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Even though most of H&CO’s services are billed on a fixed, value-based price rather than by the hour, the firm still managed workforce time the way many professional services organizations do, through manual timesheets. It worked until it didn’t.

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Managers realized timesheet entry was consuming three hours per employee every week. Employees were clear too. Filling out timesheets was their least favorite, lowest-value task.
That context is what made the manual timesheet so hard to defend. For most of their work, the hours employees logged would never appear on a client bill. The firm needed the measurement, but self-reported timesheets delivered it slowly and inaccurately. The effort drained time without serving a client.

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Across the workforce, that added up to more than 200,000 hours per year spent not on strategic output, but on administrative overhead that produced data nobody fully trusted.

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The self-reported nature of timesheets introduced a second problem: accuracy. Employees estimated, rounded, and retrospectively filled in work they had completed days earlier. The data flowing into leadership reports was, at best, an approximation. At worst, it was wrong in ways that were impossible to detect.

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A third problem sat beneath both. H&CO’s teams span geographies, and leaders had no reliable way to compare how work was actually being done from one part of the business to another. Meetings, focus time, task allocation, and capacity were all invisible at the organizational level. Decisions about resourcing and team structure were being made without the data to back them up.

THE SOLUTION

From Manual Tracking to Automated Visibility

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H&CO implemented Insightful to automate time tracking across its workforce of more than 1,500 people. The initial effect was immediate. The administrative burden of manual timesheets disappeared.

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For employees, the relief was personal. No more stopping to log minutes. No more reconstructing a week from memory. No more second-guessing whether a task counted as billable or administrative. People could simply do the work and put their attention where it belonged, on serving clients.

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Putting that time to better use produced near-instant ROI. What came next was even bigger.

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Once Insightful was deployed, patterns in the data started to surface that no timesheet had ever captured. Leaders could see, for the first time, how work was actually distributed across the firm. Not how it was reported, but how it was actually happening.

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The Meeting Insight that Changed How H&CO Operates

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One of the first insights the data revealed was how differently time was being spent across the firm. Some teams were spending considerably more time in meetings than others. From the outside, the workdays looked comparable. Inside the data, they weren’t.

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This wasn’t a performance problem. It was a structural one. And it was invisible until Insightful surfaced it.

The insight prompted a meaningful change in meeting culture, calendar discipline, and the way teams structured their days. It was the kind of operational adjustment that tends to get deferred indefinitely when there is no data to justify it. With Insightful, the conversation was grounded in evidence.

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Moving Work to the Teams Best Suited for It

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A second operational shift followed. Insightful’s data-rich reports revealed the time spent per project and task. App usage and activity data made it possible to see, at a granular level, what specific teams were actually spending their time on.

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The finding was clear. A meaningful portion of certain teams’ days went to manual, transactional tasks that did not require senior professional expertise.

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The solution was straightforward once the problem was visible: move those tasks to the teams best positioned to handle them, freeing experienced professionals to focus on complex, client-facing work.

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The result was a more efficient use of talent across the organization. Work shifted to where capacity matched the task. Senior professionals recovered time for higher-value output. No team needed to expand. The work simply moved to where it could be done most effectively.

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Aligning the Right Work with the Right Tools

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The same visibility helped H&CO make sure people were spending their time in accordance with their roles. Client service teams, for example, should spend the majority of their day in client interaction tools, building relationships and staying close to the people they serve. When that time drifts into back-office or technical applications, it is a signal that something can be improved. Insightful became an early warning sign that lets leaders adjust before small mismatches turn into bottlenecks for clients.

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A Leading Signal for Teams that Don’t Send Invoices

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Not every team produces a number that lands on an invoice. Many of H&CO’s internal teams are measured by project milestones, KPIs, and other outcomes. Those measures matter, but they were arriving late. 

Insightful’s activity data gave leaders an earlier signal. It showed whether people were putting in the kind of focused input that translates into KPI performance. H&CO now uses Insightful’s input signals to support people and their leaders, to start the right conversation early, and to make sure teams have what they need to hit the outcomes that count.

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THE RESULT

200,000 Hours Put to Better Use, Growth Enabled

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The time savings are as simple as they are striking. Three hours per employee, per week, across a workforce of more than 1,500, returns over 200,000 hours a year to productive work. Those hours do not disappear into overhead. They go back to clients and back to the people doing the work.

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For a firm where client service and outcomes are the core of the business, that is not a marginal improvement. It is a structural shift in how the organization operates.

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The meeting and workload insights compounded that effect. Teams restructured their calendars. Others redirected effort toward higher-value, client-facing work. Capacity that had been absorbed by low-value tasks or unnecessary coordination was recovered and redeployed.

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H&CO has sustained roughly 30% growth a year for more than a decade. That kind of growth, across a distributed global workforce, does not happen without the operational infrastructure to support it. The company credits Insightful for helping make it possible.

H&CO is no longer just using Insightful to track what happened. The firm uses it to look forward, to spot where demand is outpacing capacity before a project goes off track. Those are the workforce insights that power bottom-line efficiency.

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A Tool for Support, Not Surveillance

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H&CO is deliberate about how it uses Insightful, and just as deliberate about how it does not. The platform is not used to watch individuals, track every keystroke, or micromanage how someone spends an afternoon.

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The questions H&CO asks of the data are different ones. How do we do this better? Where are teams stretched thin? What resources or support do people need to do their best work? Are we putting the right work in the right place? The focus is on the system and the work, never on scrutinizing the person doing it.

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That distinction matters, and it is central to how the firm operates. Used this way, workforce data protects employees as much as it informs leaders. And it results in teams that are well resourced, well positioned, and free to focus on clients.

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THE FUTURE

Visibility that Drives Decisions

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The H&CO story illustrates something that gets lost in conversations about workforce software: the difference between data you receive and data you can act on.
Timesheets generated data. That data was inaccurate, late, and drained employee time. It sat in reports that leadership reviewed without being able to do much with them. There was no signal in the noise.

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Insightful’s workforce analytics became an early warning system for workforce performance. Actionable data led to shifts in meeting patterns and task distribution. The capacity outlook became something a manager could check on a Tuesday morning and act on before a problem developed.

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That is the distinction between observing work and influencing outcomes. Tracking tells you what happened. Work intelligence tells you what to do next.

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For a firm that has grown around 30% a year for more than a decade, with teams and clients spread across many countries, the ability to act on workforce data in real time is not an operational nicety. It is how an organization stays ahead, by continuously improving outcomes at scale.

And because H&CO uses that data to support its teams rather than scrutinize its people, the capability strengthens the organization without costing the trust of the people inside it. 

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A Foundation for AI

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Artificial intelligence delivers the most value when it is pointed at the right work. That takes a real understanding of how work happens: which tasks are repetitive. Where time concentrates. Where bottlenecks form. Self-reported timesheets could never answer those questions. Insightful’s decision-grade data can.

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Because H&CO can see how work actually flows, its AI plans are now deliberate rather than speculative. The firm knows which tasks are the strongest candidates for automation, where intelligent tools can free people for higher-value client work, and how to measure the impact once those tools are in place. 

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It’s the same philosophy that underpins H&CO and Insightful’s entire collaboration: better data leads to better decisions.

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