Every business leader has a little voice inside their head that says, “What are my people doing?” With remote work, that voice in our head screams even louder. “Are my people working on the right things? Are they working at all? Are they doing it well?”
40% of leaders express low self-confidence in managing remote teams, while 54% of knowledge workers feel pressured to show that they are online, present, and working.
Data is the only way to answer that voice and say, “Have some confidence.”
However, for many teams, there is no data available to help understand how work is getting done. All we know is the output. Did we have a good quarter? Yes, we did. Everyone is working. But what if we had a bad quarter? Was everyone slacking off? Or were there other factors? We just don’t know.
This lack of visibility has spurred many leaders to install monitoring tools, collecting information about what their people are doing on their computers without their knowledge or consent. Beyond damaging trust, employee monitoring tools don’t even answer the questions the voices in our heads are asking: “Why did we have a bad quarter? Why did the team miss their target? What is holding them back?”
It’s time we change our attitude toward the way we collect and make use of data about how we spend the workday.
So often we blame people for not working the way we work—or the way we want them to work—believing that our method is the most effective. To move forward and establish a healthier, more productive culture, we can’t make assumptions.
We need to share and study data together. We need to include the whole team at every point so we can understand the input, not just the output. Only then can we get the full picture.
The challenges are in collaboration
We need a new unopinionated, transparent, and team-focused approach when analyzing how we collaborate. People have been collaborating since the dawn of time, but what’s new are the tools. The in-office shoulder tap has been replaced with the Slack ping. And these pings are constant.
While there are benefits to hyper-collaboration, we are also seeing employees overwhelmed by these always-on work environments.
Time spent on the collaborative aspects of work—such as messaging, email, and meetings—has increased by roughly 50% over the last two decades.
Knowledge workers spend over half their workweek in meetings and, according to Slack, people spend over 90 minutes a day in their app, and knowledge workers at large organizations get 200 Slack notifications daily.
Unfettered messages all day may not be a problem for some, but it may be a problem for others. Short-noticed meetings might be welcomed in some organizations, but they could be completely disruptive for others. Let’s look at the data and have a conversation with the team to determine whether it’s disrupting workflow. Before you implement a new process, step one should be to agree on the problem.
We’ve created an engagement paradox
Business leaders are optimized to avoid distractions. They can opt out of meetings, silence notifications, and have their EAs clear their schedule. This is not something their employees can do. When individual contributors are focusing on their work, they must also be available on Slack or Teams to show that they are engaged.
The reality is that if employees are online, they get hammered with messages, notifications, and updates, but if they’re offline, we worry that they are not working at all.
Without shared data, business leaders are left with assumptions and are pressured to make blunt decisions that lead to unintended consequences.
We need to accept that we all have unique perspectives on work. How we spend our time is different, so the first step is to align on the workday.
Get past opinions
We are at the start of a movement. Leaders are bringing awareness to digital well-being and putting employees first. We are challenging old work models built for a different time. To make effective change, we need to understand what’s working and what isn’t.
We don’t believe the people are the problem. But there is a problem—and it’s team-based, not individuals—and to fix it, we need to give everybody the ability to identify the issue and offer the metrics to show whether the changes are making a positive impact. If we want to quell our concerns, we need digital work analytics and we need to work together as a team.
Joel Abramson is the CEO of Produce8—a modern workforce analytics application that helps remote and digital-first teams work better together.
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