Managing Remote Work: The Problem with “Outcomes Not Hours” (Part 1 of 3)
Companies globally require new ways of managing as they grapple with new working conditions from the coronavirus pandemic. As companies adapt to greater work from home environments, new problems have arisen.
Amidst these efforts, an increasingly popular thesis has emerged: “outcomes not hours.”
This thesis advocates for managers to focus on performance objectives and deliverables. With workers increasingly managed in remote situations, managers cannot easily observe how direct reports are actually working.
Therefore, outcomes are easier to track than specific hours worked or time spent working on tasks.
For most companies, even a simple minded outcomes based approach likely leads to more effective management. Having said that, situational context matters.
Just to be clear, I’m not saying the move towards outcomes rather than hours is wrong. However, we need a more nuanced discussion on how to make a focus on outcomes actually work.
It bears considering:
- What are situations an outcomes-focused approach can lead to poor efficiency?
- What do managers need to think more carefully about?
WORK OUTCOMES FORMULA
Let’s take a step back and think about how people work on a broad conceptual level as per the diagram below.
Simple Work Outcomes Formula:
For simple work, the model above represents a basic relationship of work inputs and output.
In this model, focusing on outcomes works especially well when:
- Employees ability (for a given task) is relatively constant
- Work processes are roughly constant
- Hours are easily observable
In these situations, employee work outcomes should be relatively easy to predict.
Roughly speaking we can generalize this as follows:
Recently, the coronavirus pandemic forced a large scale shift in employee work environments. Specifically, it shifted employees working in stable, uniform, and observable work-environments to unstable, varied, and hard to observe home-environments.
Home office setups in particular, can vary quite dramatically from worker to worker. For example, one employee could have a dedicated home office with no distractions while another employee could be working in a shared space with lots of distractions.
Hence, in our current world, where hours are not easily observable, shifting observation from hours to outcomes makes sense.
Managers Observation Focus by Work Environment:
WHEN OUTCOMES GO WRONG
For companies that engage in simple work, an outcomes focus makes sense. However, a simple-minded outcomes approach adversely impacts organizations that don’t have hot-swappable employees or that engage in more complex work.
Consider:
- Ability: Organizations in which employee skill levels vary widely or change
- Process: Work processes in which outputs can vary in a non-linear or unpredictable way
- Outcomes: Work involving complex outputs that managers have difficulty properly evaluating
In these scenarios, the simple-minded approach focusing on outcomes could lead to inefficiency.
Coming Up Next
Part 2
Check out Part 2, where we consider in more depth the situations in which an outcomes focus can go wrong.
Part 3
In Part 3, we consider the role of trust vs. tracking, counter-examples of companies not requiring observation, and solutions.
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Global Tech Executive in AI, Gaming, Mobile
4yThanks for an interesting post! As long as people are motivated and believe in what they are doing they will go above and beyond - maybe that is something to be measured and cultivated more systematically? What would be ways to track strong motivation + alignment in goals/vision?
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4yQuite nice article ; i would however add in the equation the "efficiency" that can itself be composed of quality of environement of work, capacity of concentration, tools, ...
General Manager at Product Madness
4yI think it doesn’t work for companies with certain cultures. We at Starloop Studios have been working online since the beginning of the pandemic. We still have to tune and improve lots of things, but we will get there. In any case, it’s not easy to get a productive environment under the same roof sometimes, so again I think it’s more about culture than underlying technology or physical space that we use to work. And yes, building a remote culture is hard, but is it any easy to build a good onsite one? Great article as always btw, looking forward to the next parts😃
Vice President of Marketing & Leadership Team @ Rovio
4yIn our case we haven't seen productivity take a hit at all, its been from my view point quite succeasful. We surveyed the full workforce at the start of the Summer to see if they wanted to move back into the office and the overwhleming majority still wanted to WFH. We will likely go back to the office in mid Sept but we have a plan to go back to remote if needed (which seeing how Covid cases are rising in Spain, its quite likely). As for the more results based focus rather than hours, I think its key. I understand the need to have some hours in common to be able to have more improvised meetings, but generally giving people control over how they organize their life and treat them as mature adults is important. I hope we can eventually move towards that model.