How to Combat Productivity Paranoia with your Team
Episode 685: Show Notes
There’s a toxic culture rearing its head in the small business world– monitoring productivity. What’s the buzzword? Productivity Paranoia! That’s the fixation that leaders have with their employee’s work, which leaves them thinking way too much about how their staff is spending their time, and what the resulting output is.
Today, we’re here to share how we monitor our teams without micromanaging them. We’ll talk about the effective systems we use to keep our team connected and all moving toward the same direction without any creepy stalking.
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What Causes Productivity Paranoia?
The decline of the age-old practice of management by walking around. These are the hall monitors of the corporate world. Their job is to watch people doing their jobs, and that’s just not needed. Especially in a post-pandemic world. You should be checking in with your employees, but there’s no reason to look over their shoulders.
According to Microsoft’s survey, only 12% of business leaders feel fully confident that their hybrid employees are fully effective at work, while 87% of employees are saying that they are productive. That’s a huge problem! It tells us that only a handful of business leaders trust their employees.
Stop Simply Counting Hours of Work
Work as we know it has fundamentally changed. We shouldn’t be trying to turn back the clock to before the pandemic. CEOs are realizing that it’s not necessary to measure hours of work (it literally never was). Instead, we should be focusing on the outcomes that employees need to drive. There’s a shift towards giving clarity to employees who would otherwise be doing busy work, and providing them with the feedback they need to be successful. People want to feel connected to their work, to the company, and to their managers. They want to know that their work matters.
The Right Way to Look at Connectivity
We believe there’s a better way to help people to feel connected. According to the CEO of LinkedIn, the way to do that is to make sure that you have the right people with the right skills in the right roles. We agree with that! There’s another side to this, and that’s the dark side, where monitoring gets taken way too far. Where ‘presence’ intended to make employees feel connected is just straight-up creepy. Today, we’re talking about some of the systems and software that we’ve built our employee relationships on. More importantly, we are talking about the mental shifts that have guided our perspective on productivity, tasks, and trustworthiness at Boss Project.
What it Means to Work Together
It’s about addressing your value of work. What does it mean to you to reach an outcome and be productive? We’ve got to unlearn what it means to be busy, especially when there’s corporate trauma in the mix. The drive to feel like you always have to be working, that you always have to be ‘on’ is toxic and unhealthy. There’s no reason to bring that into your business. There are times when you will have remote employees who are not doing their jobs, and you might need to do extra things to make sure they are moving in the right direction. The goal is not monitoring, it's helping them get the support they need to be productive.
Optimize Productivity in Your Small Business
While every employee needs something different, we’ve got some amazingly effective channels that help us to maximize productivity in our business on a daily basis. One of them is Slack – we are chatting all the time! We have various channels open, and extra systems in place where we can check off tasks that have been finished. In the last year, we’ve also learned to use multiple calendars (one for each team member, one separate ones for events, etc). And we’ve gone beyond our public, outward-facing generic email addresses and starting using individual email addresses sparingly. We don’t tend to use a lot of email internally at all, but we do need it occasionally for outside communications.
The One Thing We Never Do
We never babysit our team members! We don’t tell them what they can and can’t do with their time. They know what they can and can’t do with their time based on what they need to get done. When we need to focus on what we’re doing, we’ll snooze our notifications on Slack, and that’s our equivalent of closing an office door. It’s so important not to hold people hostage for keeping their icon green on Slack.
Keeping Tasks & Projects Organized
We use Asana to organize our projects and tasks, and it’s one of the most effective platforms for making sure everything is looked after. That’s how we keep all the information and documentation we need in one place. Hunting things down is just so unnecessary when you can have clearly defined systems.
Never assume that anyone is going to read your mind. We keep full details of our processes within our task cards, even though our team has so much experience and completes the tasks so regularly that they rarely need to reference the information. But if a team member is out of the office and someone else needs to do a task that they aren’t familiar with, they can easily find what they need to get it done. If you set this up thoroughly, this will help you indoctrinate all new employees early in their onboarding process.
Creating the Best Environment for Our Team
People will develop their own styles and that’s fine, that’s something you can work towards accommodating. Some people will want way more level of detail in their step-by-step task management, and others would rather stare at one large project. All of our team members have different work styles.
We’ve had to learn what kind of environment works for us, and we’re really clear about that in the job description before a person even applies. There are some really specific things we do to outline this. We didn’t know what our preferences would be until we experienced this. You can start broad, and then if something’s not working for you, get a little more narrow.
One of the biggest ways you can set yourself up for success is to truly think about what work style fits best for you, before hiring a new employee. There are some things that are worth putting energy towards, and others that are a misuse of your time. The benefit of understanding and empowering your people is manifold.
Want Extra Support?
If you want even more help streamlining your business, we’d love to have you take just 10 minutes to apply for the Incubator. We have thorough conversations packed full of value with each applicant to make sure this is the right next move for your business. Even if you decide not to join, if you’re approved you’ll have instant access to a private training all about how to streamline your work week without increasing your client capacity or sacrificing income.
As soon as you apply, send us a DM on Instagram @bossproject so we can get the conversation started!
Quote This
At the end of the day, it’s about addressing your philosophy and value of work.
Highlights
A better way to track productivity than simply counting hours of work [0:18:03]
The right way to look at connectivity [0:21:05]
A better philosophy on what it means to work together [0:22:10]
What you should be doing to optimize productivity in your small business [0:24:58]
The one thing we never do with our teams and what works so much better instead [0:30:28]
Today’s Guest:
Abagail & Emylee
The Strategy Hour Podcast
We help overwhelmed and creative entrepreneurs break down their Oprah-sized dreams to create a functioning command center to tame the chaos of their business. Basically, we think you’re totally bomb diggity, we’re about to uplevel the shiz out of your business.
Key Topics:
Connectivity, Productivity, Employee management, Leadership, Systems
