Forget monitoring software. Here’s how to foster remote employee productivity.

Employee monitoring software sales have risen in parallel with the increase in teams working remotely of late. I can easily understand that the goal of such purchases is to ensure employee productivity, but you’re unlikely to achieve it this way. It comes down to the data: Though software like Hubstaff, Teramind, and ActivTrak can tap a veritable river of it for you, it’s the wrong data. Nothing those Big Brother vendors can sell you will help you improve employee productivity. At best, you’ll chase your own tail. At worst, you’ll lose the people who contribute the most to your organization.

Supporting remote employee productivity is both easier and harder than these Orwellian-tactic pushers would have you believe, and it comes down to three things: (1) make all phases of the work visible to all stakeholders, (2) review the work and ignore the 'pseudo work' stand-ins we often wrongly use to measure productivity, e.g., hours clocked, breaks taken, meetings attended, etc., and (3) remove obstacles as needed.

Employee productivity can’t be measured in mouse clicks

That anyone would ever entertain the absurd notion that employee productivity can be measured in things like time spent typing and moving a mouse ought to be laughable. Sadly, no. Newsflash: You don't know who's actually contributing to your organization by looking across the office. Or the webcam, as the case may be. Breathing-in-seat, present-in-the-meeting, and average-time-to-email-response are bad metrics. They measure attendance and responsiveness, not productivity.

Realizing this but still somehow not seeing the whole picture, misguided managers are heading further down the wrong path by layering on even more surveillance. App and URL tracking, keystroke logging, remote desktop screenshots, even remote desktop control… none of these “features” measure employee productivity; they measure activity—and only a very particular type. Busyness. That’s what you’re measuring when you use monitoring software, not employee productivity.

I don’t want my remote teams busy. Busy means nothing. Busy is a trap. I want our teams to innovate, focus deeply, and deliver competitive value to our customers. How do managers engender all of that?

By focusing on work product, not work production.

Watch the work, not the workers

It starts with trust. Trust is important anywhere, but it's axiomatic to remote team management. Assume your employees want to be productive as much as or more than you want them to be*. With that assumption firmly in mind, you’ll choose systems, processes, and tools designed to support productive people rather than those designed to single out unproductive people. As a result, your highest contributors will thrive, your strugglers will have what they need to improve, and your occasional non-contributors will out themselves in their work product.

Here’s how you go about this:

One: Make work visible

I’m talking about output here, not input. The results of effort—both the results of each incremental step and the overall results—not the effort itself. That’s what you need to surface in order to foster employee productivity: output, results. The systems and tools you employ to do this may depend somewhat on your industry. For example, our software developers use Git, a distributed version control system; Agile methodology, an iterative approach to software development featuring processes for managing continual change; and Pivotal Tracker, a project management tool built specifically for agile dev teams. Our marketing team operates differently. Both teams use systems, processes, and tools that make transparent to all stakeholders the products of their work—the source code, for example, or the blog post draft—rather than the keystrokes and clicks used to create them.

I cannot overstate how critical this transparency is. A key reason why is something you may not have considered: People have a limited capacity for sucking up. They can suck up to the boss and maybe excuse poor work, but if their work is exposed to all? There just isn't enough suction. Bonus: Team review and kudos for well done work that advances the team's goals is significantly more motivating than suck-up-induced kudos from the boss.

Two: Review the work

Now that the source code, the blog post draft, etc. is visible, evaluate it. (And not just you. It bears repeating: Peer evaluation is powerful and probably more productive than management evaluation in many contexts.) What’s so good it sings? What needs improvement? Review the work and deliver timely, actionable feedback.

Three: Remove obstacles

When the work isn’t up to snuff, find out why. How? Ask! Open a dialogue with the struggling performer. Together, you should ferret out the obstacle or inefficiency that’s creating the problem and address it. Their success should be your primary motivator here.

This is part and parcel to managing people, and if you don’t know how to do it, you need to learn. Here’s a resource. Here’s one more. If you can, find a mentor—an experienced manager with a track record of proven success. You can’t effectively manage people if you can’t bring yourself to communicate candidly with them from the perspective of helping them succeed.

As I mentioned earlier, doing these things is both easier and harder than installing monitoring software and spending your days spying instead of working. Don’t tell me it’s work. It’s not. It’s an utter waste of resources. Surveillance isn’t leadership; it’s post-hoc monitoring. If you are to lead people, you need to focus on and cast a vision for what they are going to do next, not what they did (or didn’t do) last week based on meaningless metrics like keystrokes. Monitoring has its place—data center logs, vehicle emissions, heart health, etc. But people doing complex meaningful work don’t emit data that can be monitored like an oil temperature or a heart rate. So you need to manage, not monitor.

Managing is easier in that it doesn’t breed an us-versus-them dynamic that will have you fighting an uphill battle to get deliverables, destroy employee productivity (including your own), and ultimately put a dent in your profits. But managing is also harder—it requires time, consideration, candid conversations, and more. No software can do the work of people management for you.

Bonus tip: Hire self-managers

Work with the team you have. Use the above suggestions. It will take practice and experimentation to build the right systems, processes, and tools for your situation. Eventually, your highest contributors will reveal themselves through their output (if you used employee monitoring software to form your perceptions, you might be convinced these folks aren’t contributing much at all). Likewise, it will become obvious who your non-contributors are. You may need to make some staffing decisions. If so, I encourage you to rethink your approach to hiring.

The employee productivity—or, rather, the lack of it—problem generally starts further upstream. Because the requirement process is often geared toward finding people who will work for the least amount of money per hour, you end up hiring people who need (or at least are accustomed to) lots of management, which then means you’re spending money managing these many low-cost hours.

What if you had fewer people who could do more in an hour and didn't need the layers of management? What if you hired for self-management and then provided tools and guidance to help people maximize productivity?

This is what we do here at Open Door Teams. Combined with the above suggestions, this approach results in teams that regularly solve business problems and deliver competitive value.

Foster employee productivity with transparency and trust

I’ve been managing remote teams for over twenty years now, and I can confidently say, without qualification, you have to trust your people. It is the only viable way to get anything done at all, let alone anything of high value. Accept that and reap the benefits of establishing transparency across your organization. We can help there. We built Daycast in part to make our work more transparent. It helps us stay connected across miles and time zones and gives us all the visibility we need to deliver our best work. Learn more about Daycast here.

*If you can't make that assumption, you have problems that no amount of monitoring software will solve.

Photo by Luke Peters

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