Answer three questions to make remote work productive for your company

Why focusing on performance, culture and satisfaction underpin all successful remote work strategies.

Greetings from Vancouver! 👋

Remote work has become an uneasy situation for many companies. Some people like it, others hate it with a passion. I recently participated in a lunch with eight executives on how they were approaching remote work and I was surprised to see so much confusion around the topic.

In this week’s edition, I share the three questions all management teams—performance, culture and satisfaction—must answer before deciding on their remote work strategy.

Let's jump into it!

The Performance Question

All leaders must start by asking how they will measure performance. The question may seem obvious, after all, you likely already have performance reviews, success metrics, job descriptions and expectations with every employee. And yet, many companies are designing back to office plans in the name of performance. 

Performance happens in three levels: individual, team and organization. Employees are held accountable for their contributions at all three levels and go through frequent reviews to discuss performance. Either an employee hits their performance targets or they don’t. It is black or white and in theory, easy to measure.

The issue is that many companies have actually measured performance through their eyes. Part of their frequent reviews included “visual” metrics like seeing employees at their desk at 5 pm, at the boardroom in meetings, and at the coffee station talking to other employees. I’m not sure what this has to do with performance but it has clearly been a factor for many employers.

As employees went virtual, these visual metrics disappeared. In the new hybrid world, some employers are grasping for new ones. Take for example the usage of entry card swipes. I doubt any employer has specifically listed “you will swipe your entry card in our lobby six times per week” as a performance metric but companies like Amazon and Google are telling employees that entry swipes might play a role in their reviews.

A sales executive recently told me that he wants his sales reps in the office five days a week, otherwise he will assume they are slacking. A successful sales rep doesn’t need an office to hit his or her quota. However, his boss wasn’t talking about the performance of closing deals but the performance of being present, a visual metric he personally uses.

Designing office schedules means being able to answer the performance question. How do you actually measure it and what does it mean to be successful? Every role is different but the way to measure performance should be crystal clear. Don’t confuse performance metrics with culture ones, which we will cover in the next section. 

Question: Does your organization have clear ways of measuring performance or are you relying on visual metrics that you believe are tied to performance?

The Culture Question

The second question leaders must answer is how to build a successful culture. 

I define culture as a work environment open to new ideas, welcoming to others, supportive of each other, enjoyable from a work perspective and conducive to performance. Your definition might be different but you need something equally as clear.

Maintaining a good culture might be the best argument against any kind of remote work. In fact, I think most people who are against remote work are primarily worried about the potential demise of their culture but they often mix up their concerns with performance. The problem is that they can’t define culture, which is how you ended up with organizations who tried to bribe employees by offering free food, free laundry and free amenities. Once again, I don’t know what this has to do with culture but there you have it.

Once you define what culture means to your organization, you can then start to explore how remote work may or may not help you achieve it. A sales rep doesn’t need an office to hit their quota but they may need the appropriate culture—mostly support from others—to do it. Talking to other sales reps can help them adopt new ideas and perhaps motivate them to push themselves.

All of this is highly dependent on your personality. An HR leader recently shared that the people most likely to visit their office in-person were individuals who are single, live in small apartments and tend to be more on the extroverted side. Individuals who are married, who have children or who are more introverted prefer to work remotely.

How you accommodate varying needs is the great balancing act. This is why hybrid schedules of two or three days have become the norm for many companies. They are the compromise, meant to appease the most amount of individuals.

I’m not sure of the long-term impact of remote work on culture. No one is sure as the long-term hasn’t happened yet. The best companies can do today is ensure that culture is clearly defined and have metrics for measuring their progress on those attributes. In essence, to treat culture like performance, instead of some fluffy, squishy term that no one can define it. 

Question: Have you defined what culture means for your organization and how to measure it?

The Career Planning Question

The third question all leaders must answer is how to measure the long term success of the employer-employee relationship, primarily through multi-year career planning.

Many companies work with employees to create multi-year career plans that detail the skills the employee can acquire in their role. It also takes into account personal factors such as children, school attendance and other personal duties.

The plan is meant to help employees think strategically about their future while helping their organization succeed. In the best cases, it aligns the desires of the organization and employee. In the worst cases, it sets up both parties for disappointment.

Individuals can use these plans to reaffirm their professional satisfaction while employers can ensure that employees are contributing appropriately to the organization. Performance and culture tend to be seen in short-term timelines—days, weeks and months—while career plans are inherently about the long-term—three to five years in the future.

Your plans for remote work have to take into account career planning. If an employee would like to be promoted in two years, they will need to ensure that they can still acquire the necessary skills to make that leap. Being fully remote might make it harder to learn certain soft skills such as dealing with conflict, reading body language and providing feedback. 

The work of updating career plans is time consuming but it is better than operating under the wrong assumptions. Individuals who want to have a child, get an MBA, be promoted into a VP role, all while never coming into the office are delusional and setting themselves up for failure. 

Your choices around hybrid work will determine what individuals can reasonably do with their careers. This is not performance or culture, it is the long term choices that are affected by present-day decisions. Make sure career plans reflect a realistic future and not one based on rosy predictions.

Question: Has your team updated career plans to reflect remote work choices?

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Remote work doesn’t have to be an are of contention and paranoia. It has be deconstructed into language everyone understands and then measured like other metrics. Every leader may have personal preferences but they should not be confused with performance, culture or long-term career planning.

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Cheers,

Ruben

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