I am frankly getting tired of hearing it:  “How can I manage them if I can’t see them?”

That’s clearly the most common expression of resistance from managers who oppose letting their employees work from home (or from anywhere other than the corporate office).

In fact, I am convinced the fundamental reason that many organizations have not embraced flexible work programs is that middle managers fundamentally mistrust their employees. I continue to see evidence of a pervasive and deep-seated belief that if an employee is “out of sight” his or her work will be out of mind.

For me, there is only one way to overcome that kind of basic mistrust: measure what employees produce, not how much time they spend on the job.

Working remotely and “on the go” is a fact of life in corporate America today, yet most managers simply do not know how to measure and manage the performance of remote workers.

I believe it’s time for managers to catch up with the workforce, and to begin managing remote employees outputs, not their activities. My experience, backed up by hard data, shows over and over again that remote employees are much more productive, and more engaged, than their peers who have to be in the office every day.

There really isn’t any deep, dark secret to managing remote workers. Reward employees for what they accomplish, not for putting in time or just showing up. In the end, what does a manager care about how much time an employee spends getting something done if he or she produces the necessary results on time and on budget?

Let me say it one more time: there is no real need to know what employees are doing on a minute-by-minute basis; what matters is what they produce.

Just think about your own experience as a college student. How often did your professors ever dictate where you should read the homework assignment, or when you should write that term paper? The only times we had to be at a particular place at a specific time was to take an exam.

That’s what I mean by measuring (and rewarding) outcomes, not activities. And whether your professor trusted you or not, your grades were (usually) determined by the quality of your term paper, or your performance on the exams, not by how many hours you spent on the paper or how polite you were, or how nicely you were dressed, when you came to class (if you came at all!).

Developing Outcomes-Based Measures

Developing a results-oriented performance management system is the single most important thing you can do to keep remote employees aligned with company goals and with each other.

Formal performance and productivity measures serve several important functions:

• They establish clear guidelines and common expectations about how each remote employee will be measured and rewarded.
• They help team members stay narrowly focused on their assigned tasks.
• They help create an atmosphere of accountability in both directions and across the organization.
• They provide senior management with clear evidence of how cost-effective (or not) the remote work arrangements are.
• They help shift the dominant management culture from managing time spent on tasks to managing the results produced.

“Managing by walking around,” which was a common rule of thumb in the ‘80s and ‘90s, has some common-sense appeal in that it encourages managers to be visible and to interact regularly with their subordinates. In that context, however, “interact” always meant face-to-face communication (though in practice it also often included peering uninvited over an employee’s shoulder to scrutinize his or her work—and communicating all too clearly that lack of trust that is such a barrier to allowing employees to work remotely).

Clearly, that kind of interaction just can’t happen in a distributed environment. That’s why it is absolutely essential to replace such close monitoring of employees’ actions with a focus on their performance—the results they produce.

The best source of how to do that is the book Why Work Sucks, and How to Fix It, by Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, the leaders of the Results-Only-Work-Environment (ROWE) movement (link is to description on Amazon.com).

You may have heard about their work at Best Buy' corporate headquarters several years ago. There, employees at all levels are totally free to come and go as they please, and to work wherever and whenever it makes sense for them—as long as they meet their performance goals.

Measuring Knowledge-Based Work

At one level, outcomes-based performance is easy to understand. But it’s far more difficult to design and implement a workable system.

Certainly some knowledge-based jobs can be measured on the basis of quantitative outcomes, or least appear to lend themselves to relatively simple output indicators. Software development managers have long used “lines of finished code per day” as a surrogate for staff productivity; call center and tech support staff have typically been measured on “calls completed per hour” and “average time to respond to a call.”

Higher-level, more complex knowledge work is much more difficult to measure. How does a manager evaluate the work of an automotive engineer whose car design won’t show up in the marketplace for three or more years, if ever? How do you assess the value of a research chemist in a pharmaceutical lab whose work might (or might not) someday lead to a billion-dollar miracle drug—but not for 15 years? How can you evaluate the performance of a project manager on a 10-year building construction project?

But that doesn’t mean we’re jousting with windmills. To be successful, be willing to develop customized outcome targets for each individual employee.

There are two basic questions to ask about every job:

1. Why does this job exist? What value should it produce for the company, or for external stakeholders? Can we identify a specific quantity, or an important indicator of quality for the job?

2. How will we know the job is being done well? No matter what quantitative or qualitative dimensions have been identified, an employee is only performing well if his or her customer (whether an internal or an external stakeholder) is satisfied that the job has solved the problem or met a need.

Ask yourself, “How will we know that Sheila has done a good job? If she is a claims adjuster, the right measure would probably be something like “complete a minimum of 40 claims applications per day”—or whatever number is reasonable in that company’s experience. For an in-house attorney addressing more complex issues, an appropriate measure might be “respond to 85% of customer legal claims within two weeks of receipt.”

Note that one reason individual measures are so important is that different jobs (and different organizations) have differing levels of complexity, interactivity, and time frames. Those differences, and the expectations that both individuals and their managers have about what constitutes success, are critical.

What do you think? Please send your comments directly to me or post a comment here. I look forward to learning from you.

© Copyright 2012 by The Future of Work...unlimited. All rights reserved. Cross posted with author permission.