Working Well Remotely: Outcome-Focused Work During Covid-19
It’s time to pivot from simply surviving to intentional ways of working that serves your employees and clients well.
As 2020, the year of the pandemic, draws to a close, organizations around the world are waking up to the fact that the way we work has changed–permanently.
Organizations of all kinds, from large corporations like Facebook to local governments and nonprofits, are shifting to remote work indefinitely. That’s freeing people up to move to more cost-effective places or closer to family for support. And even those organizations that are planning on returning to the office know they have to be cautious, often rotating in-person days to limit interaction between employees, at least until a vaccine is widely available.
It’s a new world out there, and it’s time to shift the way we work to meet it.
There is no one right path forward in terms of remote vs. in-person. But regardless of how an organization chooses to position its team geographically post-Covid, one thing is true: organizations that want to succeed in this new world need to shift to outcome-focused work.
Fortunately, we’ve been talking about outcome-focused work for years. In a nutshell, outcome-focused work rewards work produced instead of time spent working, whether those hours were actually productive or not. This incentivizes employees to focus, optimize productivity and achieve quality outcomes–even or especially if they can do it in less than 8 hours a day–giving them their own time back.
A shift away from managing to time toward managing to outcomes is critical for remote workers, who don’t have the built-in structure of an office setting to keep them on task. Working from home blurs the line between the professional and the personal as the office comes home. Many remote workers have fallen prey to pressure to be always available, from the moment their eyes open until their head hits the pillow at night. A setting that should be giving them more autonomy is actually just forcing them to work longer, later.
That’s where outcome-focused work comes in: it takes the pressure off of wondering when to be available, fighting to fit a set number of hours of work into a day filled with constant interruption and competing priorities during the pandemic. Instead, team members can manage their own time, knowing exactly what they need to accomplish in a given day, regardless of how long it takes them to do it.
Outcome-focused work also shifts the burden off of managers to make their team “look busy” all day long, which is near impossible when teams are scattered in their homes. Managers can trade late-night emails and pointless standing meetings for workday structures that reward effectiveness, giving team members the autonomy they crave.
If outcome-focused work is such a win-win, why hasn’t it already become the norm? What before was a heavy lift to shift cultural workplace norms away from hours worked to outcomes accomplished has now become necessary for managing a team remotely in the age of Covid.
So how do you successfully implement an outcome-focused workplace?
First, identify what you or your team need to achieve each week. Feel free to start from scratch: ditch the standing (virtual) meetings or check-ins, and outline what actually needs to be accomplished–both tasks and goals. These are your outcomes.
Work backward from your desired outcomes to determine how to structure your workday. What meetings can be dropped, or replaced with a check-in email? How much time does your team need for focused, deep work vs. collaboration? Can administrative tasks be batched on one day to free up time the rest of the week for achieving outcomes?
When you’ve achieved your objectives for the day (or week), stop working! Yes, really! Turn off your computer, silence your email and phone. Go spend time with your family, get some exercise, pursue a creative hobby, or sleep. You have permission to enjoy the time you’ve reclaimed by managing to outcomes instead of hours worked.
We used to ask the question, “How would your workweek look if your goal wasn’t to clock a certain number of hours, but to achieve specific outcomes and then go home and unplug?” Now, while working remotely, the incentive to manage to outcomes is more flexibility to juggle work and distance learning with children, or time to close the laptop and take a true mental break. Managing to outcomes is a key way to prevent burnout, never more so than while remote working during a pandemic.
Give outcome-focused work a try, and see how it transforms your workweek during Covid-19 and beyond!