85 percent of managers describe themselves as paranoid that their remote workers weren’t working. 85 percent! That’s a high level of mistrust in our society. It’s un-good. But it’s because that’s what they were paying attention to before Covid. If they had been more focused on *output* — what did you create and deliver — then they could have seen that work got submitted through teams yesterday, or I heard that client call happened, or whatever else. We could actually see things happening if managers were doing a better job of setting smart objectives and having tangible evidence of somebody’s contribution. We could be doing so much better.
Move from Busyness to Effectiveness
If we just reward and pay attention to activity, we get busyness. If we reward and pay attention to outputs, we get productivity—better. But it’s not good enough because productivity isn’t accountability. Outputs aren’t accountability. Remember, I said it’s outcomes.
If we pay attention to whether their activities and outputs create the changes in the world we’re looking for — did mortgages go up this month? Yeah. Did our new performance management system increase the frequency of managers giving feedback? Yeah. Did our cyber security campaign reduce the number of phishing links people clicked on? Yeah.
These are outcomes. And when we pay attention to and reward outcomes, we don’t get busyness. We don’t get productivity. We get effectiveness.
Define Outcomes
When we don’t pay attention to and define the outcomes we’re looking for, how would we even know that what we’re doing is working? One of my favorite things to do is to do a workshop with leaders in an organization and help them define, “What are the outcomes?” How would the world be different if your people were successful? Not just what are you doing, but what are you delivering. And certainly not how many hours did you spend at the office and how many emails did you send this week. 11 hours is the average number of hours a North American worker spends doing email a week. 11 hours.
–
Until we start being clear about outcomes, we aren’t going to be able to figure out which outputs we can just stop and which activities are useless, which activities we don’t need to do. The only way we get out of this absolute torrent of overwhelm and burnout is if we start figuring out if we’re being effective and what we can stop doing because it’s not helping.
How to Increase Accountability
10 Helpful Things To Do When You’re Overwhelmed