How can we monitor the productivity of our employees
2020 is a year of massive upheavals and massive uprooting of our beliefs, lifestyle, and the way we are going to work. 2020 is a year akin to a huge Sledgehammer hammered everything we love to do, our routines, our plans, and our way of life into smithereens.
The way Leaders and Managers manage their teams had changed too. Employees don’t want to work for inauthentic Managers and Leaders. Team members don’t feel empowered when working with people who don’t have a reasonable level of emotional intelligence. Partners, vendors, and clients don’t want to be associated with companies that aren’t transparent about the way they do business–and the masses don’t want to support companies whose actions don’t align with their mission statements.
Personally, I believe the Covid-19 crisis will change the way people think about leadership forever. What are my views on how can we lead in these trying and challengingly painful times? Businesses wiped out, Industries like tourism across the Globe wiped out and industries which are linked to Tourism like Aviation, Hotels, Motels, Restaurants, Bars and Clubs, Training & Seminars, and even Conferences are affected.
Even gathering and praying together at Churches, Mosques, Synagogues, and Temples are no longer like before. The education sector like Universities and Colleges are affected too. These are unprecedented times and you and we got no choice but to adapt quickly. It is what it is, The New Normal has impacted all levels of life, walks of life and we have to embrace it with an open mind or reluctantly.
Here are some of my views:
Being Proactive and Caring deeply about your employees and team members is crucial.
When you work in an office, you can generally assess when somebody is having a bad day or if they’re upset about something.
Digitally, this becomes much harder. Both at the leadership level as well as the managerial level, we have to be more thoughtful about how we check in on people. This means proactively asking questions like, “How are you doing these days?” and actually taking the time to listen.
Instead of hopping on a Zoom Call or Google Meet and immediately diving into work-related items, take a moment to show you care. Managers and Leaders are human too. It is okay to express how you are feeling.
Being Transparent is very important in these trying times. When a Leader is working together with her team in the office, one can see what is happening around the team. But when everyone is working remotely, it becomes quite impossible to know how they are feeling or going through a bad bad day. It is hard to read their body language like facial expressions and etc.
It means having the capacity for the whole range of emotions and still being able to make sound, logical decisions for the business.
Leaders must act on their Mission.
Now more than ever, the mission of a company matters. Customers care about it. Employees care about it.
Investors care about it. Everyone wants to know where they are putting their time, energy, money, and support behind an organization they believe is impacting the world in some sort of positive way. Second, as more and more social impact campaigns shift the world, how your company’s mission fits into these larger narratives of humanity can dramatically change the way people see your brand.
Adaptability, Flexibility, and Agility are key for Leaders.
In a world of uncertainty, adaptability is key. It has always been true that leaders must constantly be thinking 5 steps ahead. But during a global crisis like Covid-19, flexibility, and agility being able to make quick, informed decisions is crucial to keeping the business moving forward fast and furiously.
Clearly, it shows Leaders must stop and relook and ask the right questions about their business status. Tough and hard questions force us to walk on Terra Firma and call a Spade. It’s far better to have answers to these types of questions before, rather than during, a difficult time.
Confronting Reality Clinically is key for leaders now. Tell the Truth!
Once a company is off and running, though, the optimism can’t stop. Your team needs it. Your co-captains and fellow leaders need it. Everyone around you needs to feel as though they can see the light at the end of the tunnel, just like you can.
That said, you also have to guard optimism from delusion. Being optimistic can’t mean lying to or deceiving those around you–or especially yourself. Instead, it means being brutally honest, while at the same time acknowledging both the good and the bad, the lessons learned, and the growth to come.
Over-communicate, Over-communicate, never Under communicate!
Everybody Communicates, but only a few Connect. Whether you are running a small outfit or a big behemoth, Communication is key to success, Clear timely Communication is crucial at every level of your organization.
Many Unnecessary Conflicts like Wars started when Leaders did not communicate clearly and factually. Many successful relationships, mergers, and collaborations materialized when things that matter most are communicated timely and effectively. Right now, especially, every leader should be over-communicating with their teams.
On the one hand, this means making sure people are receiving the information they need when they need it. While working remotely, this might require you to do more frequent check-ins with employees or to set reminders to send status updates to key decision-makers every day. On the flip side, though, effective communication also means leaving room for others to speak up.
You can get each team, every day every employee sends a report to their immediate superior, who sends these reports to the pertinent manager by the end of each week. This way, managers can follow up with the employees regarding the goals for the department and the strategies that are being implemented weekly.
You can use a few different digital tools for communicating, collaborating, and of course, tracking the progress of all of your projects like Google Drive and Monday.com because everything is public to the entire staff.
Seeing the day-to-day progress of the work, as opposed to the time spent each day, allows us all to know the status of any project we are working on at any time; which is great if you are working on several projects like we are!
You can Google Docs spreadsheet accessible to the entire team 24/7 where people assigned to individual projects pick what they want to work on. Each project has an estimated time attached, e.g., five hours, and contractors who complete before the general time frame are judged as more productive.
A weekly update is required. This ensures accountability for results while giving your team the freedom and trust to figure out how to accomplish the goals themselves.
A remote culture requires investing a lot more time upfront to make sure you are only hiring incredibly bright, motivated, mission-aligned people. But once you have the team in place, you can worry a lot less about looking over their shoulder and a lot more about helping them get the results that we all want to see.
However, we don’t rely on this alone to assess the performance of our employees. Because it’s useless if your employees are just completing their assigned hours but not delivering results. You can assign tasks for team members to certain tasks to be completed in a day. At the end of the day, you may check if the tasks were completed and how much time was spent on each task. I believe that you need to take into account both the results and the time, to get the overall picture of productivity.
It is important to measure remote worker productivity is, either understanding the task or job that needs to be completed, or get some guidance on what the job entails. This way you can understand what the performance should look like, how many hours a job should take, and so on.
In conclusion, monitoring your employee’s productivity by giving them the right tasks and job is crucial to ensure work and business continuity is not affected.
Working from home in this Covid 19 situation does not mean that we are letting our guard down, especially in performance management.
