On Remote Working and Strategy

In the March 2017 Forbes piece The Real Reason You're Not Allowed To Work From Home, Liz Ryan argued that lack of trust was the underlying reason that, despite projections throughout the 1980s that the workplace would be working mostly remotely, the 9-5 office culture has relentlessly stuck around as the norm.

While this may be undoubtedly true for some organizational cultures, the more likely common cause is a lack of a clear strategy, desired outcomes, and means by which to measure those outcomes. While seemingly simple, few companies do this well. CEB found in 2016 that just 12% of communications teams think their strategic plans align with their company's top priorities.

What are the ingredients for an effective remote/flexible workforce? You need a solid understanding of your work breakdown structure; a transparent, shared understanding of your desired outputs for the team and for each team member; and clearly defined measures for success.

It also means ultimately means shifting from a timecard (hours spent) mentality to an output (goals achieved) mentality. And this required paradigm shift goes both for managers as well as for the employees. The organization must foster and enable a culture that values total output over hours spent in which managers understand what the desired outputs are, what they mean for the team, and what they mean for the organization at large. Likewise, the employees need to believe that simply showing up and logging as many hours as possible is not the goal. And measuring your own success by output and impact rather than hours spent can be a difficult concept for some to embrace. Hours spent on a particular activity is a far easier metric to focus on, regardless of whether the hours spent had any significant impact.

But if you're not measuring time-at-desk, what are you measuring? A manager must be very precise and transparent when it comes to objectives and measurements in order for remote working to be effective (or even possible)--and finding appropriate and effective measurements is difficult (and worthwhile). But if you don’t have these things nailed down, it seems far easier to simply keep your employees closeby in the office so that you are able to reactively assign tasks based on urgency, not strategy.

And if the manager doesn’t understand the objectives of the team and of each member of the team, you can be certain the team members aren’t sure of what they are either. And this will make both management and leadership feel as if their work force is “out of control”--and decide it’s better to reign everyone in and keep them in eyesight.

It comes down to both unclear leadership (what’s the end goal everyone should march towards?) as well as unclear management (what is the precise list of actions to be taken, risks involved, decisions to be made, and the dependencies across all those?). When both leadership and management truly understand the strategy and the specific work that needs to be done to achieve that strategy, the fear of “rogue” employees would likely dissipate. They would know if the tasks required were being completed adequately, regardless of the workers’ specific locations.

We are still, however, pretty bad at estimating how long tasks really take. Even as time-tracking technologies become more advanced, it still seems easier to have the employee complete those tasks under supervision so that you can at least see work getting done (and so goes Eliyahu Goldratt’s illustrative fallacy from The Goal that if people are always working, surely you’re being efficient too!). You may find momentary comfort in the ability to shift priorities as needed by walking over to someone’s desk and interrupting whatever task they may have been engaged in and task them with, instead, that item some Big Wig from has been clamoring for. The immediacy of face-to-face conversation at least gives the impression that you can intervene--and control--at a moment’s notice. If the strategy had been well-defined, such ad hoc intervention wouldn’t be so necessary nor desirable.

It also comes down to effective communication: top-down, across departments, and within teams. Finding the best technologies and platforms to facilitate effective communication is, of course, a critical piece in moving closer to a truly Flexible Workforce. But you first need to have a concise and clear message that’s worth communicating to begin with.

Trust is undeniably critical to the success of an organization--but it’s not what is preventing you from working from home. Clarify your strategy, and you’ll enable flexibility in how you and your team gets there--and where.