How do you know your people are being productive (or even working)?
How do you know your people are being productive (or even working) when you can't see them?
Before hybrid work, leaders could easily look around the office and see people sitting at their screens. That became a proxy measure for working.
Truth be told, it was never a very good measure because:
a) just because someone's sitting at their desk doesn't mean they're doing what they're supposed to be doing
b) you don't just need people to be shuffling paper from place to place - you need your people's ideas, thinking, and imagination - and that can come at any time or place (and probably least likely while sitting at a desk !)
Coming back to the leadership challenge of knowing what’s going on, here are three ways to assess performance:
Outcomes - measures the task
Group cohesion - measures the team’s effectiveness
Professional development - measures the individual
To put it another way – are your team:
delivering results?
operating as a cohesive unit?
growing, developing, and functioning as a team?
Here’s an easy way to check– what opportunities have you given recently for your team members to develop themselves and prove their capability?