How do you measure your employee's work? The old way we measured was by how many hours our employees were in the office. Punch-in, punch-out at the 9 to 5 job. Measuring remote workers by this metric doesn’t really make sense. With the fluid nature of remote work we don’t really punch in and punch out.
A few years ago an employee came to me and asked if maybe she could work from home a few days a week. She had young kids and a long commute into the office. She explained that some days it would be easier to work from home. My first reaction was ‘absolutely!’. But then my fear started creeping in. How do we know if she’s working? What if we need to get ahold of her?
Setting clear expectations is the key to building trust and accountability with your remote team. For example, you will want to discuss:
- How many hours a day do you expect them to work
- What time windows (if any) do they need to work within
- What daily work output is expected
- How will we discuss and evaluate work performance
Getting this stuff figured out up front, then having regular meetings about how it’s going is the key to managing remote teams.
