“Going to work”

Is this what ‘going to work’ looks like for you?

This is a phrase that I personally uttered thousands of times and, until a few months, I thought it would be a phrase that I would continually utter until I decided I was ready to hang up the spurs of my professional life.

When I looked for a definition of this phrase, I broke it down. I found this: going — an act or instance of leaving a place; a departure. Then I found this: work — productive or operative activity. So, if I put these simple definitions together I get “leaving to [do] productive activity”.

If we have learned anything in the recent past and present, there are essential jobs that require people to ‘go’. In the face of a pandemic, these front-line workers have been the bravest among us, across all fields. In the truest sense, they ‘left’ the relative safety of their homes, their families, to ‘do productive activity’, namely to ensure that the rest of us are taken care. It goes without saying that we owe a debt of gratitude for those who continue to do that during this pandemic.

However, for me, the last several months have proven that the act of “going” anywhere is not required to do “work”. My job in the investment field would be classified as one of a ‘knowledge worker’, crudely defined as a person whose job involves handling and/or using information. We live in the ‘information age’, where data is plentiful and readily accessible. Connectivity to people, to information, to the answer to nearly any question can be achieved using any number of devices from nearly anywhere. These two components, which enable nearly all of my daily work, sum up to the fact that my role does not require a physical location to complete my productive work.

As a knowledge worker, I am seeing firsthand the benefits of wider distribution and increased collaboration. One of the key reasons why this works (for me, not for all) is TRUST. More than physical location, a distributed workforce needs to exist on a solid foundation of trust in both systems and your co-workers. It comes down to two extremely simple questions: can you and will you? Can you effectively complete the job you need to accomplish with the tools available to you, and will you have the self-motivation and discipline to do so? If the answer to both is yes, then you’ll have an extremely hard time convincing me that a distributed workforce couldn’t work for you.

It does go beyond that, though. Trust isn’t just about the job. It’s a step further, to accountability. We must still be able to measure productivity, even if we do all trust each other. With that, the biggest challenge becomes how managers will adapt the way they manage. Judgments of efficiency, acumen and even motivation can no longer be made by the arcane and detrimental ‘face time culture’. It will be hard to say the ‘best employee’ is the one who is the ‘first one in’ or ‘turns the lights out when they leave’. It’s fundamentally misguided to think that hours spent equates higher quality and better work. Rigidity has been replaced with flexibility, and I can’t imagine that any leader, other than the most outmoded, could think that is a bad thing. It does mean there needs to be a shift to a ‘goals and results’-oriented mindset, with quantifiable KPIs along the way. Some managers already manage this way, but not nearly enough have adopted this more sensible approach to measuring productivity.

Naturally, there will be barriers to our ability to have a parallel and linear productivity track, both as it pertains to the goals as well as relative to peers. However, in this new distributed workforce environment, it is paramount to be able to ‘meet people where they are’. Every worker will have their own ‘fact pattern’, which includes all the internal and external factors that aggregate to form their situation. Given this, as a manager, one of the most critical elements will be to develop a system where people feel not obligated but liberated to accomplish tasks and complete work in a way that conforms to their best abilities.

In this new world, ‘going to work’ and leading/managing have taken on new definitions. As knowledge workers and leaders, we need to adopt them as reality and adapt our ‘old ways’ to enable this more positive work environment to be sustainable long into the future.