Company-wide cohesion is not created with a forced work environment, but rather with good management. In today’s global workforce, the majority of US companies now have some portion of their workforce that works remotely from their main office. Companies now need to do more with less, and having employees based near clients cuts down travel costs and provides quicker service. As well, employees have been proven to be more productive when they can work from a home office, cutting down on commute time and disruptions. This has created a shift in the old assumptions, that all work must be completed in the same office location.
However, some have a hard time releasing those assumptions, limiting their corporation’s ability to stay competitive. It’s like the refusal to use an automobile, at the turn of the century, because of a belief that a horse drawn carriage was more effective. Yes, a horse drawn carriage has some charm to it, and was effective for a long time, but eventually they were run over by the automobile, and they are no longer a competitive transportation method.
Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer, announced this week, plans to change the previous telecommuting policies, and ordered all employees to begin working out of one of the company offices. Reasons cited have been to increase communication and collaboration. Other comments noted that their telecommuters were “slacking off like crazy.” (The Week 2/25/13 http://theweek.com/article/index/240566/yahoos-telecommuting-ban-does-working-from-home-make-you-less-productive )
You can’t care for an automobile the same way you do for a horse team, and the same is true with a telecommuting team. For a remote workforce model to work, it has to be managed correctly. If it is not, it can impact communication and collaboration, as well as encourage non-focused employees. But if it is managed correctly, you will have a much more effective and competitive business model.
There are 7 strategies to successfully managing remote/teleworking teams, that differs from regular employee management.
1. Increased Communication – Communication with teleworking employees must be increased. The perception, as expressed by Yahoo, is that you will communicate less with virtual working employees – which will cause the decrease in collaboration and idea sharing that they experienced. Managers need to make a conscious effort to communicate more with teleworking employees, as well as facilitate increased communication between team members, to foster the same level of idea sharing and collaboration. Communication should never be delayed because you can’t walk down the hall to chat with someone. Pick up the phone, send an email or use IM to foster that same chat. It does take some initial assistance to get employees into this routine, but once that is created, it will happen naturally.
2. Create a Team Community – Managers need to make a more concerted effort to create a team community when their teams work remotely. They need to find opportunities for team members to work together, celebrate together, and spend time talking about non-work related things. This helps them get to know each other as individuals, so they can work more effectively together, and feel like a part of an important group.
3. Manage to Goals and Outcomes, Not Tasks – Give employees the responsibility to manage themselves by providing the vision and guidance when needed, rather than explicit instructions that are task focused. Think of a team’s goals as a bowling alley. You want to clearly outline what the goal is - knock down all 10 pins in 2 or less shots, by rolling the ball. And you also want to define the boundaries for them to work within - like setting up the bumper guards in the lane. However, after that, you want to leave it to them to decide how to get the ball down the lane to accomplish the goal. Do they roll it fast or slow, do they use curve balls or straight shots, do they bank it off of the bumper guards several times – these decisions should be left in their hands.
4. Enable Team Micro-Monitoring for Accountability – One of the biggest fears when managing a team of remote employees is that they won’t be working and getting the job done when you can’t see them. Unfortunately, this fear can lead to micro-managing of employees, which can lead to the direct results you are trying to avoid. Instead of micro-managing employees, have them micro-monitor themselves. Have them hold themselves accountable to their goals and have them report their success, or lack of, to you each week. By clearly setting goals and providing a weekly status report to you, they will hold themselves accountable for their goal attainment. No one wants to come to their manager and tell them they did a bad job. Everyone wants to be able to take pride in their achievements. Having them keep and report their weekly goal attainment status, keeps them self-motivated to reach those goals.
5. Ongoing Socratic Coaching – Teleworking employees need to learn how to make the correct decisions in the absence of their manager. The best way to prepare them for this is through Socratic coaching. This coaching method is designed to coach through self-discovery, by asking the employee open ended questions, to teach a thinking process that enables them to make better decisions in future.
6. Motivate Rather than Move Employees – What many call motivation is often really movement. It is the carrot and stick approach. If an employee does something, they receive a reward, or if they don’t, it’s a punishment. This method must be continuously re-charged, which can quickly fail when employees are not always in the same office. Instead, it’s important to motivate remote working employees by developing their pride and self-esteem in what they do. This is self-charged and will deliver longer lasting motivation. Develop employees pride through giving them giving them ownership in their job through decision making and idea sharing. Also find ways to give them appraisal and a sense of accomplishment.
7. Create Trust – Trust is critical for teleworking employees to work well as a team and as individuals. Without daily face-to-face contact, trust is more vulnerable to break-down. It takes forever to build trust, but can be destroyed in a minute. Remote employees in particular need to know that their manager respects and trusts them to carry out every day work functions, with little or no supervision. They also need to trust that their team members are there to help them when needed and have their and the team’s best interests at heart. Trust needs to be created through extending trust to employees, creating non-work related relationship building, communication, holding people accountable, and consistency in actions and expectations.
If managers are trained to manage along the 7 strategies, a telecommuting program can increase a company’s competitive advantage. They can hire and retain better candidates. They can reduce office costs, increase productivity, and have much more motivated employees. A remote workforce model will only breakdown if it is not managed correctly. Don’t get left behind in the race, with the horse and buggy, when today’s companies are testing out the fast new sports cars.
Jenny Douras © All rights reserved 3/4/13
Monday, March 4, 2013
Tuesday, December 4, 2012
The ROI of an Off-Site Employee Structure - Arguments for the Change
When considering a change to an off-site vs. on site employee structure, how do you know if it is right for the company? Or how to you make the argument to executive management that it will be. Some of the argument involves a shift in how we define work. Also to consider, is how it can benefit the overall quality of service and costs to the organization. Following are some new ways to define “work” as well as arguments for the change.
First, companies that are not used to an off-site or virtual employee structure, may need to consider a through process change, in how they view and define work. In the book “Managing the Mobile Workforce”, by David Clemons and Michale Kroth, they discuss some of the old assumptions and new ways to look at how we define work. Some of those old assumptions are included on the left in the below diagram, with a new perspective on the right:
If you challenge these old assumptions, and are able to view them differently, you will find that many work roles could be moved to an off-site/teleworker structure.
We also should consider the benefits of going to a remote worker format when deciding if it is right for the company. Companies with a virtual (off-site) workforce realize a decrease in many costs such as office space, healthcare, travel, and employee retention. Also, employees are happier with an improved work life balance, and are more motivated and productive. It can also improve customer relationships by allowing employees to be closer to client locations, and can help with internal change management such as a change in company office location or work environment, since it will not impact remote employees as much.
The federal government has implemented an aggressive Teleworker plan over the past few years. They submit an annual report that you can find on telework.gov, which includes measured results. Some of the benefits they highlighted in their 2012 report include:
• 70% of managers and 80% of employees found that their productivity increased
• They saved over 2 million dollars in electricity costs
• They decreased their resignation rate by over 6%
Unless an employee has a position that requires physical location work, such as construction, or hospital patient care, etc., it is hard to not make the argument for a remote workforce structure. It allows companies to stay competitive, reduce costs, and hire and retain top talent.
First, companies that are not used to an off-site or virtual employee structure, may need to consider a through process change, in how they view and define work. In the book “Managing the Mobile Workforce”, by David Clemons and Michale Kroth, they discuss some of the old assumptions and new ways to look at how we define work. Some of those old assumptions are included on the left in the below diagram, with a new perspective on the right:
If you challenge these old assumptions, and are able to view them differently, you will find that many work roles could be moved to an off-site/teleworker structure.
We also should consider the benefits of going to a remote worker format when deciding if it is right for the company. Companies with a virtual (off-site) workforce realize a decrease in many costs such as office space, healthcare, travel, and employee retention. Also, employees are happier with an improved work life balance, and are more motivated and productive. It can also improve customer relationships by allowing employees to be closer to client locations, and can help with internal change management such as a change in company office location or work environment, since it will not impact remote employees as much.
The federal government has implemented an aggressive Teleworker plan over the past few years. They submit an annual report that you can find on telework.gov, which includes measured results. Some of the benefits they highlighted in their 2012 report include:
• 70% of managers and 80% of employees found that their productivity increased
• They saved over 2 million dollars in electricity costs
• They decreased their resignation rate by over 6%
Unless an employee has a position that requires physical location work, such as construction, or hospital patient care, etc., it is hard to not make the argument for a remote workforce structure. It allows companies to stay competitive, reduce costs, and hire and retain top talent.
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Managing Performance - Keeping a Remote Team on the Right Track
How do you keep a remote team on the right track and in-line with the company and team needs? How do you ensure they understand how to perform and know how they are performing?
You can keep your team focused toward reaching the same goals and achieving them, by following a 5 tiered hierarchal structure that moves from vision setting to performance ranking.
1. Vision – Would you rather be inspired to reach toward a clear purpose, or would you rather have someone pushing you from behind telling you to move faster and work harder? Your vision is that bright purpose that you want to be the inspiration for your employees to strive toward. You might use your company vision as a catalyst for your own team, but rather than trying to make it a fancy marketing type statement, just make it a sentence or two on what you are really trying to accomplish as a team.
When asked, most employees could not recite their company’s vision or mission statement. Most companies spend countless dollars and hours coming up with a company vision or mission statement, but do a poor job ensuring that it is a driving force in the company or that the employees even know it. Once you create your team vision it needs to be reinforced whenever possible. Emphasize it in conversations and meetings with employees, to ensure they know the team’s purpose and the meaning is not lost.
2. Expectations – The second step is to let your employees know how they can help reach that vision. A vision can be esoteric and it is easy for employees to self-interpret how to reach it. If you tell your team to “think strategically,” that can mean very different things to different people. Expectations are the ways your team can reach that vision such as: “identify company competitive advantages and create plans to market them.” Make sure you clearly define what the team is expected to do to reach that vision.
3. Goal Setting – Once expectations are set, create specific goals for each employee that can be tracked on a weekly basis, that helps reach these expectations. If the expectation is to “increase company sales,” how does that breakdown for the employee? Do they need to make X number of sales calls a week? Do they need to find a new way to position a product each week? These goals should be SMART goals (specific, measurable, attainable, results oriented, timeframe) that they report their progress toward, each week to you. Numeric goals such as sales KPIs are always easy to set, but setting goals for more intangibles such as “strategic thinking” or “team player,” can be tougher. To do this, think about what the behavior of a strategic thinker or team player would look like, and find a way to set goals around this. If a team player is someone who helps others on the team, then set a goal for you employee to list 2 things each week that they helped teammates on. This will get them in the pattern of this behavior.
4. Performance Reviews – almost all managers dread performance reviews. That’s because they are done incorrectly. The best performance reviews are: 1) done quarterly, 2) initiated by the employee, 3) don’t include numeric rating systems, 4) are really a goal setting conversation between the manager and employee. Too often performance reviews are an annual event where the manager tries to think up clever phrases to support the number they gave the employee under each category: communication, motivation, etc. . . Instead have the employee list what they would like to focus on and accomplish over the next 90 days, as well as a review of how they did with their past quarter goals. Then discuss these with the employee giving them feedback and guidance in the discussion. By making these a working planning session, you will get better content and a more collaborative relationship, and the employee will have a much stronger understanding of where they should be going, and how they are doing. No one has ever gotten a good understanding of how they could “communicate better” (or how they were successfully communicating) because they got a “3” on a review.
5. Performance Grid Plotting – So if we don’t rate employees with a numeric system on their reviews, how do we understand how they rate in the overall scheme of the company? The most accurate way to understand how employees are doing as part of the whole, is to plot them on a grid (that measures both performance and potential), on where you think they would fall. From top performance/potential, to lowest. Then get together with other managers (ideally 1-2 times per year), and discuss why you would rate each person as such. This gets all managers on the same page as to what they think constitutes a top player vs a bottom achiever, and often times, managers may shift where they think their employees fall, during these meetings. This rating grid should never be shown to employees. Instead it is a management tool to help each manager know where they need to focus, with each of their employees.
Using this progressive tiered plan will keep the messaging and goals clear, as well has ensure a consistent way to track and measure performance.
Jenny Douras © All rights reserved
You can keep your team focused toward reaching the same goals and achieving them, by following a 5 tiered hierarchal structure that moves from vision setting to performance ranking.
1. Vision – Would you rather be inspired to reach toward a clear purpose, or would you rather have someone pushing you from behind telling you to move faster and work harder? Your vision is that bright purpose that you want to be the inspiration for your employees to strive toward. You might use your company vision as a catalyst for your own team, but rather than trying to make it a fancy marketing type statement, just make it a sentence or two on what you are really trying to accomplish as a team.
When asked, most employees could not recite their company’s vision or mission statement. Most companies spend countless dollars and hours coming up with a company vision or mission statement, but do a poor job ensuring that it is a driving force in the company or that the employees even know it. Once you create your team vision it needs to be reinforced whenever possible. Emphasize it in conversations and meetings with employees, to ensure they know the team’s purpose and the meaning is not lost.
2. Expectations – The second step is to let your employees know how they can help reach that vision. A vision can be esoteric and it is easy for employees to self-interpret how to reach it. If you tell your team to “think strategically,” that can mean very different things to different people. Expectations are the ways your team can reach that vision such as: “identify company competitive advantages and create plans to market them.” Make sure you clearly define what the team is expected to do to reach that vision.
3. Goal Setting – Once expectations are set, create specific goals for each employee that can be tracked on a weekly basis, that helps reach these expectations. If the expectation is to “increase company sales,” how does that breakdown for the employee? Do they need to make X number of sales calls a week? Do they need to find a new way to position a product each week? These goals should be SMART goals (specific, measurable, attainable, results oriented, timeframe) that they report their progress toward, each week to you. Numeric goals such as sales KPIs are always easy to set, but setting goals for more intangibles such as “strategic thinking” or “team player,” can be tougher. To do this, think about what the behavior of a strategic thinker or team player would look like, and find a way to set goals around this. If a team player is someone who helps others on the team, then set a goal for you employee to list 2 things each week that they helped teammates on. This will get them in the pattern of this behavior.
4. Performance Reviews – almost all managers dread performance reviews. That’s because they are done incorrectly. The best performance reviews are: 1) done quarterly, 2) initiated by the employee, 3) don’t include numeric rating systems, 4) are really a goal setting conversation between the manager and employee. Too often performance reviews are an annual event where the manager tries to think up clever phrases to support the number they gave the employee under each category: communication, motivation, etc. . . Instead have the employee list what they would like to focus on and accomplish over the next 90 days, as well as a review of how they did with their past quarter goals. Then discuss these with the employee giving them feedback and guidance in the discussion. By making these a working planning session, you will get better content and a more collaborative relationship, and the employee will have a much stronger understanding of where they should be going, and how they are doing. No one has ever gotten a good understanding of how they could “communicate better” (or how they were successfully communicating) because they got a “3” on a review.
5. Performance Grid Plotting – So if we don’t rate employees with a numeric system on their reviews, how do we understand how they rate in the overall scheme of the company? The most accurate way to understand how employees are doing as part of the whole, is to plot them on a grid (that measures both performance and potential), on where you think they would fall. From top performance/potential, to lowest. Then get together with other managers (ideally 1-2 times per year), and discuss why you would rate each person as such. This gets all managers on the same page as to what they think constitutes a top player vs a bottom achiever, and often times, managers may shift where they think their employees fall, during these meetings. This rating grid should never be shown to employees. Instead it is a management tool to help each manager know where they need to focus, with each of their employees.
Using this progressive tiered plan will keep the messaging and goals clear, as well has ensure a consistent way to track and measure performance.
Jenny Douras © All rights reserved
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