Since COVID hit, our organizations have been struggling to keep performance and throughput up, while also managing the needs of health and safety of our employees. Before the pandemic, with most employees working in the office, managers thought they could tell when employees were busy doing their jobs and working hard (well, perhaps like that famous Seinfeld episode).
After COVID hit, employees in many organizations were largely working from home (WFH), and managers became VERY unsure about how to handle the situation. The longer the organization went without setting clear expectations and measurements related to performance, the more nervous managers became.
So here we are several months into the pandemic, and some managers’ patience is wearing thin. One location manager recently told me, “These remote employees need to get back into the office or else!”
My response was, “Hold on! Let’s see what’s really going on.” Managing employees during crisis does have its challenges, but when it comes to performance, the foundational principles for managing employees effectively really have not changed that much. Step one is to establish clear, meaningful performance expectations and then communicate them. What does that mean?
Do employees (both in-office and WFH) really know what the expectations are? Have you defined the expected outputs or results for each employee? It has surprised me how many organizations still measure an employee’s performance by activities performed. Let’s face it, employees do need to fulfill certain activities and their job descriptions, but I believe we go astray if we focus on activities more than focusing on results. Perhaps that employee is supposed to take a particular number of calls per day and respond to a particular number of incoming calls and emails per day. And somewhere along the line someone has done the math, created the workflows, and determined the “magic number” to achieve the needs of the process, the bottom line, and the customers. But what measurable results are you expecting? A certain number of deliveries scheduled? A particular number of customer complaints resolved? A particular number of sales appointments made? A certain number of closed sales? Defining expectations and desired results and communicating (and measuring) them will help employees perform better.
It is not uncommon for me to find that five top managers in a location may have five different ideas related to employee performance and behavior. In one client organization in 2019, not only did the employees not know what their expected results and measures were, but also the half dozen top managers in the site did not agree on what those results and measures should be.
Related to clear expectations, is it time to look at workflow? Since the pandemic has changed many customer behaviors, do you know that those “magic numbers” mentioned above still apply? Have you evaluated your workflows in the past couple of months? It might be time to update them. In fact, if you have some employees on a team working from the office and some working from home, it is almost a certainty that you should tweak your process flows. Not only may it reduce conflict among team members, but it may also improve the performance of an entire team or location.
One organization realigned the workflow among employees to accommodate the fact that some activities (and results) are better designed for working in the office, while others are better for the work from home employees. As a result of redesigning workflow, changing expected activities and results, and making roles and responsibilities transparent among the team, conflict within the team dropped and productivity increased, almost overnight.
Taking a second look at expectations and workflow may be one of the best things you can do this year to improve performance.
In Part Two of this series, we’ll look two more steps in creating the environment for managing employee performance in the current, challenging situation.
If you’d like to talk about how to clarify expectations or improve performance, please contact us at, [email protected] or https://www.linkedin.com/in/transformingorganizations/
Leave a Reply