Even when all your employees are in the office, can you really know how many of them are being productive? Most of today's jobs can't be measured simply by how many widgets each employee produced. Keeping track of employee performance must be hard for every manager (I don't know, I've never done it). But that rationale doesn't seem to apply at home. When I worked in an office, it was easy to give myself "credit" for working based on the number of hours I spent in my chair that day. People are usually their own worst critics, so meeting your own standard for a solid day's work is often harder than reaching someone else's. One rather counter-intuitive trait of remote workers is that we often get more done in a typical day precisely because "the boss" isn't watching. Many people I talk to (freelancers or former freelancers, mainly) are usually surprised to learn we don't require any kind of time tracking or screenshot software during working hours. This means that you need to trust your employees to keep themselves accountable, often before they've even proven that they can. The "Management by Walking Around" (MBWA) strategy does not apply. It's just not possible to check in on everyone throughout the day or track the state of their status dots in Slack and keep your sanity. Leading a team of remote employees, especially across multiple time zones, is not a job for micro-managers. I actually have two, seemingly-conflicting, answers to this question. This is the question I probably get the most. "How does your boss know that you're actually working?" I've also added some quotes from my colleague Angie, our Marketing Admin, about her experience as a relatively new employee. In this post I'll respond to some of the most common questions or comments I've received about working from home. After five years of it, I'm only reminded how unusual it seems when I talk about it with people who have never done it. It doesn't take very long before working from home full time starts to feel totally normal.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |