It’s good afternoon! In today’s edition, we asked the experts to think about how productivity has changed and reflect on the pieces of advice that are floating around out there that might not be completely on the mark. Are there questions or comments? Please send a note to braintrust@protocol.com.
VP of people experience at Meta
Async work has huge value, but we should be careful about rotating too far. Synchronous time is important to maintain velocity, unblock decisions quickly and ensure everyone is on the same page At Meta, we build teams in collaboration zones to ensure a minimum half-daytime zone overlap so teams can easily run standups and grab live time together as needed.
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The CEO is at Remote.
Monitoring employees to make sure they are working on their assigned projects at certain times is a growing trend in remote work. This can be similar to tracking activity on their computers or how many hours they work in a day. This is done for the company to be productive.
It is an invasion of privacy to have a clear view into how active your employees are when they are working from home. It doesn’t matter how much time someone spends in front of their computer or what time of day they finish their work. It is important that an employee’s output is what you expect from them.
Tracking your employees activity and keeping a record of how many hours they work is a short-sighted way of dealing with productivity. If you can’t see a person’s work output or understand their work output because you can’t see them sitting at their computer from 9 to 5, then there’s a bigger problem.
Managers and companies should support their remote teams with flexible policies that allow them to work when they feel most productive and get comfortable with their workers taking breaks to live their lives during the day. The final work product must be assessed. Productivity is achieved by the freedom to do great work.
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The Future Forum is at Slack.
For too long, productivity has been measured by hours worked in the office rather than impact.
Face time and presenteeism are too often used to calculate employee performance and work ethic, rather than whether their work was creating value. When work is judged by its value in delivering results around shared goals, alignment becomes easier and it creates trust in the metrics used to evaluate performance. The Pandemic gave leaders the chance to rethink their organization’s productivity mindset.
Flexibility is not going to go away. The expectations of employees are changing and they want more flexibility. According to Future Forum, nearly all of the knowledge workers want schedule flexibility. In response, leaders need to reset expectations, transition from the industrial age norm of fixed 9-to-5 schedules and allow employees to work when it’s best for them.
In the flexible work era, traditional productivity measures are not suited to manage teams. It is necessary to redesign how we lead, promote and celebrate success in order to build trust and success. A culture of trust is a must for leaders to retain top performers.
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Asana has a head of Global Engagement Marketing.
It is important for organizations to connect their teams around clarity of purpose and a shared sense of accomplishment to ensure employees feel appreciated. Being seen as a positive can also be a productivity blocker at work. It isn’t true that you cannot communicate too much. In an effort to better coordinate and manage work, teams get caught in work about work with misuse of communication tools, overwhelmed by notifications, and lost in project tracker.
Work worries have led to a decline in mental health among workers in the US. Work-related anxieties can distract us from family dinners, disrupt sleep, and create a culture where employees feel obligated to check email on vacation and respond to every ping. Almost two-thirds of U.S. workers check their emails outside of working hours, the most among workers globally, according to a recent study.
Clear guidelines for communication, including which channels to use, expectations around response times, and where actionable information should live, are the way out of communication overwhelm. The amount of time employees are able to spend impacting the company’s purpose is a major factor in employee engagement. At a company, clear communication processes, goals and tools will improve focus.
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Credit Karma has a chief people, places and publicity officer.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to only give feedback to employees once or twice a year, and I don’t think performance reviews are a good idea. A person’s ability to meet or exceed expectations isn’t defined by a “score”. Performance reviews overlook achievements made earlier in a cycle, and in many cases, employees feel stigmatized and demoralized, instead of being motivated to find opportunities for success.
I recommend using a weekly or bi-weekly tool to account for regular feedback. Managers tend to be more honest with their feedback when using a micro feedback model, instead of having to deliver potentially bad news at one moment in time, which can feel very permanent. When you tie compensation to reviews, people are less likely to focus on potential growth and development areas and instead focus on how they are being scored or the monetary outcome.
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The CEO of Formstack.
New software is a common strategy to improve workflows. Implementing solutions before taking time to understand the issues at hand can be more harmful than good. We have a bad habit of assuming that just investing in more software will solve our process problems. It is easy to find a quick fix when looking to boost productivity, but implementing software without a thorough understanding of the root problem leads to even more time- consuming and inefficient tasks.
It’s better for leaders to spend time getting to the root of our productivity problem instead of rushing to add to the tech stack. Start from scratch and map out a better way to accomplish the task. Look at software that can resolve specific problems and increase productivity.
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There is a CEO at a corporation.
Businesses were forced into remote work when the world was turned upside down by the swine flu. Many of us realized that remote work works. Our businesses grew and flourished, but our people got more than just the flexibility they needed, it gave them freedom.
People are being pushed back to the office with the lifting of restrictions. This approach may be in line with industrial revolution thinking, but it seems out of touch with how we work today. For those of us who are in the “bits” business, rather than the “atoms” business of making physical goods, this is especially important. We don’t need to be together.
The genie has left the bottle. It is a disservice to your people to try and put it back. It pays off in terms of results and loyalty if employees are respected to determine their own schedule and productivity. Enhancing remote work keeps people happy while leveling the field. Giving people the right tools to work how and where they want makes your businesses more accessible to many teammates, including women, employees with disabilities and people who are nervous.
It is time to measure outcomes, not location or hours. The returns speak for themselves when you care about results instead of counting the clock or filling a cube.
Today’s workforce requires flexibility and freedom.
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Vice president of sales at monday.com
The things that are supposed to help us become more productive often end up holding us back, because there is a lot of opportunity for wasted time. A lot of teams take a siloed approach to projects, where everyone does their own work, and comes together at the end to pull it all together. The approach intensified in the past two years as teams became more dispersed. It may seem like an effective way to work, but creating unnecessary silos can affect a team’s ability to collaborate effectively, think creatively, and prioritize the activities that are the most important in order to meet their goals.
Teams should take a more dynamic approach to collaboration so they can support each other’s strengths and work creatively regardless of whether they are operating from the same office or from different time zones. Teams can collaborate more efficiently if processes are created to build more visibility into each aspect of the project. By doing this, teams will have more chance to align on goals and do more meaningful work that focuses on what is truly important for the team as a whole, as well as to individual team members. It gives more time to recognize and celebrate the achievements of each contributing team member and ensure that each person is reaching their full potential.
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See who’s who in the Protocol Braintrust and browse every previous edition by category here (Updated June 30, 2022).
