A Look into Productivity and Transparency in Remote Work

A recruiter shared on LinkedIn recently how he had difficulty recruiting good hands in a full-time on-site position. Most of the best hands in the advertised position were only interested in a remote work offer, or at least partly a remote offer where they only have to report to the office location on predetermined days.

“Throughout last year, my experience has been that people just want to stay home and fritter away time. A person is working remotely and you try calling to get him on a task, and he says his mother-in-law stopped by to say Hi. Some are actually brazen enough to tell you they are picking up a couple of groceries at the mall. During work hours??? I’d rather have staff on-site and know that it is now up to me to ensure they are working maximally than have them in remote locations where I hardly even know what they are up to” he posted.

Now to the facts. Remote working is not just ‘a thing’. It has become ‘the thing’. It has moved from being a secondary option an employer may extend to staff, to become primary offer employees want on the table. Another fact is that not every job role can be done remotely. Irrespective of skill or competence, there are job roles that will require you to be on-site every day of the week. One more fact that some employers are having to deal with is that productivity may be drastically affected if you don’t have a structure for remote work.

Given the way the coronavirus pandemic came upon us last year, it is understandable that a lot of employers did not have time to set up and finetune a structure for remote working before they were forced into it. Even when the lockdown was lifted in some places, some companies were not willing to expose their staff to all the risks of commuting to work daily, and still allowed people to work from home for as long as it was possible.

For many companies, remote working first came as a government order. Some however anticipated it and had started putting some structures in place ahead of the lockdown.

Back to the issue of transparency and productivity. How do you determine if your staff is still in bed by 11 am? How do you know that your employee is not seeing a movie on his Tv set at the time he is supposed to be working on your mission-critical project? How can you be sure your sales manager is not making that follow-up call to the client, in the bathroom and still in his bathrobe? How can you tell that your manager is not busy with some extra-work affairs at the expense of his defined roles?

As far as remote working is concerned, there will be a lot you don’t know and cannot confirm – probably much more than you know at any point in time. This explains why some employers are still uncomfortable with the idea.

One technology some employers used in checking their staff was a clocking innovation. I would not want to mention specific names here, but there is some technology that staffs use to clock in when they are about to resume work, clock out for a break, and at the close of work. With such technology, they could have a rough idea of how many hours staff was devoted to work. However, such technology has its shortcomings. While it tells you staff has clocked in for work, there is still no way to determine if the person clocked in and went back to sleep or actually resumed work.

Now, what you could do is combine this with any of the task manager technologies. While clocking in, staffs also have to enter projects they are working on, what stage they are on, how many hours it would take to get past that stage, etc. At the end of the day, they also use the task manager to check the items that have been completed, and the tasks which will spill over to the next day.

With this combination, the HR manager should be able to summarise a staff’s productivity for the week, the tasks that have dragged on for too long, the tasks that have been completed, etc. If a staff keeps entering the same task the entire week, even though the task should have been completed in 8 hours, the HR personnel can then call him for a chat and decipher what should be the next steps. This works excellently even for on-site working and helps avoid situations where staffs simply sit around all day doing the barest minimum needed to keep their job. Obviously, if a person has spent the entire day on a 2-hour task, he would have questions to answer.

The fact is that if you run a business, you will have to consider the remote working option sooner or later, especially for the high-skilled staff.