What’s Taking So Long?

A lot of teams have noticed that when they first went into lockdown or worked remotely, their performance and productivity went up. But now over time, the momentum's reduced- it's becoming hard to maintain.

Recently, I worked with an engineering firm - and that was their situation. When they first started, it was all great. People were working really well. In fact, productivity went up because there were fewer interruptions. But over time, it started to get worse. And what they noticed was that the tasks that normally would have taken six hours,  started to take six and a half or seven or seven and a half or eight hours.

The amount of time they were taking was filling out. Now, why does that happen? It happens when you're working remotely because there's no one around you. There are no cues in the environment such as seeing your team every day around you, which helps to keep you up-to-speed with what everyone is doing, establish expectations, stay on track and meet your objectives. These queues establish team norms, let everyone know what is acceptable (and what is not), create expectations, and boost productivity.

I like to call them “rumble strips”. Rumble strips are those strips on the side of the freeway that you hit when you're starting to go off track and they help you get back on track. Unfortunately, teams that are working in isolation lose access to the "rumble strips" - the social cues that tell you whether you're on track, whether you're doing the work in the right amount of time, to the right standard.

So, what you need to do with your remote team is help them set up rumble strips. And one great way to do that is through something that I call "time budgeting".

Time budgeting means that when you set up a task at the start of the day, or the day before, in your weekly planning, you give that task an amount of time. So you say it's going to take three hours to write that report or two and a half hours to do that other piece of work. And you put that in your diary. And what you want to do is get yourself to stick to the time that you've allocated. It's a way of setting up your own internal rumble strips. That's one thing.

The real thing around managing, around building up the performance of your remote staff is to create self-managing staff. And I talk about that elsewhere in another blog – you can get in touch about that.

I hope this has been useful. If you want more tips like this, please subscribe or get in touch. And in the meantime, good luck with that tip, and I hope you can get the performance of your team as good as it ever was.

Watch the video on YouTube