Policies and Procedures…
Many who know me, know that I’m an eternal optimist. Silver linings, glass half full, all that good stuff. So during this pandemic, I’ve focused on what positives can be taken away. The value of spending time at home, with family and loved ones, is something I’ve always cherished, but now realize how much I missed that in exchange for pursuit of professional success. In that vein, one of the biggest positives I have encountered is for the first time in my professional career, I have been able to work remotely. Working remotely has taught me many things about myself, my working style, my colleagues, and my passions. It has also opened my eyes, with passion, on what real leadership should be and more so, what performance assessment should look like.
You can measure employee’s performance on things that truly matter. The quality of their work and their efficiency in completing it, the quality of your interactions, their help in the identification, pursuit and ultimately achievement of goals, both personal and broad. The paradigm where “dollars per hour” need not apply to many roles that should value thoughtful, quality output rather than time spent making the thing. Perversely, as I’ve seen in many places and heard in many others, inefficiency is regularly mistaken for work ethic. If Jack spent 5 hours putting together a high-quality memo, but Jill was able to produce a similar level of memo in 3, it’s quite clear to me who is a better worker, but it was quite commonplace to be lauded for ‘staying late’. In our new world of WFA (a friend and industry contact reminded me that working need not require a home at all, and can happen anywhere, so I’ve amended my oft-used shorthand), leaders have the opportunity to step out of their old ways where success meant ‘putting in the hours’ and can refocus on those things that matter to the core of the business.
That may sound cold and ‘industrial-revolution-y’, turning everything into a production mindset, and that’s not my point. Realistically, all workers have a requirement to produce something. It’s the common denominator across all professions. For some, it’s steering wheels in a Ford plant, for others, it’s those wordless instruction sheets you find in an Ikea dresser (bless and curse those people at the same time!), for others still, the product is less tactile, an idea or a vision. Nonetheless, it is core to the job you do and should be the primary reason why you succeed or fail. Being able to measure that core function is so important and, in my view, eliminating all the ‘other’ things around that allows a leader to better assess his or her team’s ability to produce.
You’ll notice the word culture doesn’t come up in that last stanza. That is purposeful, as culture need not be conflated with production at this surface. Of course, the culture that a company creates can either manifest fertile ground in which production can happen at its highest level, or conversely, a stifling force that chokes out all the nutrients from the earth, and therefore makes production nearly impossible. It’s not the production itself, it’s the environment in which production can happen. While I am a firm believer that culture is a living breathing form that needs to be cultivated first by leaders and expressed through actions, many companies lean on “company policy” — often a thick binder of words, expertly crafted by HR and legal types. These policies and procedures lay out the responsibilities of the employees and the employer. Most policies and procedures are meant to protect the rights of workers as well as the business interests of employers. Protecting the rights of workers remains and has become increasingly important, to give people a clear understanding of what can and cannot be done, notably around behaviors. But perhaps it’s time that every company revisits the latter piece; what policies protect the employer’s business interests?
I recently listened to a podcast interview of Netflix CEO Reed Hastings about his new book “No Rules Rules”. The title was appealing, but it discusses many things that I as both an employee and a leader think about on a daily basis. It’s the confluence of the two things I just touched on. How do you create optimal culture that promotes the highest level of production? For Hastings, in his first company Pure Storage, he felt as though he was creating procedures as a response to mistakes to prevent them from happening in the future. This is not unlike many other firms, particularly start-ups who are charting their own course (without legacy baggage). However, this quote resonated with me: “Policies and control processes became so foundational to our work that those who were great at coloring within the lines were promoted.” Just one line but illuminating in terms of the kind of culture that can be inadvertently created. The status quo and following the rules was the tone set by the company, and employees could coalesce around that idea, that doing such things would result in advancement and professional success.
It’s a sad story, but one that is quite telling. The idea that ‘following the rules’, however outdated or inane some may appear, and the status quo is the path to promotion. To be clear and fair, my intent is not to exist in corporate anarchy where there are no governing documents or policies, but I tie this idea back to WFA. Policies should not be written to stifle, they should be to protect, but more so to promote what will ultimately be the best culture in which the highest level of production can occur. In the current world we live in, remote work has been our only option to continue to be productive. In the not-so-distant future, it will no longer be the only option. But it is imperative for policies to reflect that it may indeed be the best option for many employees and that a policy that mandates co-location as a condition of productivity is downright offensive.
It goes beyond physical location though. What emerges from a revisit of many of these policies is a large number do not promote the best environment for production. The idea of “coloring within the lines” is not creating a growth mindset, it is not meeting employees where they are, it is ultimately a way to control rather than empower. I continue to come back to a core principle about leadership. Trust remains the most critical component of success.
In the podcast, Hastings talks about what has become a not uncommon policy in Silicon Valley and beyond, the no vacation policy (for clarity, that means unlimited, not zero). His words: “So, now that we’ve had it [a no vacation policy] for a decade, we’ve figured out a pretty good balance, where we have very few people who abuse it and sort of go away for a year. And then, we have very few people who don’t take any vacation because they don’t feel licensed to.” Trusting his workforce to have personal accountability allows a policy like this, which provides absolute freedom to the employee, to not be viewed as a ‘perk’ or a ‘benefit’, but simply part of their work. When you take the stigma away, that it’s not a Scarlet Letter to take a month off to recharge, call it a hunch, but you get a happier and more productive workforce that trusts and has positive feelings about their employer.
The same applies to my soap box issue, a long-term desire for the embrace of WFA. When a company trusts its people, they can write policies that provide flexibility that don’t mandate, stifle and force ‘coloring between the lines’. These new policies can promote the best environment for production for the employees and meets them where they are. But without trust, you can’t have this flexibility, but it may be said that without flexibility, it’s hard to have trust.
