Cherri Holland Blog

Is this your question: Now that people are working from home, how do we make sure they are productive?  The Covid-19 lockdown is revealing what managers truly believe about people.

If Participative Management has been a ‘thing’ for decades, where everyone in an enterprise explores optimum productivity as a mutual goal, why is it that in today’s digital era (when employees are far more educated, on average), there are STILL layers of draconian supervision. It is still more common than you may realise.

The challenge
Even in the digital era, some still see the management role as a prize, not an obligation to facilitate a collective pursuit of peak performance – a state in which everyone wins or no one wins.

The opportunity
Could this pandemic ‘shut down’ be the chance to hit the re-set button – to recalibrate how you work using those leadership skills that keep people connected and effective because they willingly choose to empty their tank for the collective good?

This is a checklist of drivers of productivity that I have found to be common to high performance anywhere, whether people are together in a physical workplace or working remotely:

1. Use a Performance ‘stock take’ ritual:  Plan,  Monitor,  Review, Improve – repeat
   The remote work version applies as well whether you are using Skype for Business, Zoom, Microsoft Teams or any other tools. Not: Have you done XYZ? But rather: What’s up with XYZ? Or better: What’s working well with your plan? What isn’t working well? What are your thoughts about that? What do you need help with? Who is best to help? What are your next focus areas?

   Anyone can run these performance catch ups in a small group e.g. by rotation. The ritualistic, repetitive element is crucial as is making them short and relevant. As people self-manage and report back to their work group (not ‘up’ to ‘the boss’), they calibrate within the social pressure of equitable contribution, this being the real manager of productivity. (See next point.) The team can challenge and guide each other so that everyone performs to their potential for everyone’s benefit.

2. Negotiate social contracts
   Everyone carrying an even load is important or some will disengage. A team agreement (the collective obligations for the team to fulfil its purpose) is an example of a ‘social contract’ that effectively manages collective effort. Where people report to the team on their contribution, they are quickly exposed if they are not pulling their weight
3. Reveal purpose
   Keep people connected with why the organisation/team exists; this ignites internal drive which in turn fuels focused performance.
4. Highlight impact
   Remind people of their impact. There is a story about a group of engineers who designed early-cancer detection equipment, who were taken to meet those whose lives had been saved by early detection. You don’t have to have people physically in front of you to make these links. In fact, through your questions, you can ask people how what they are doing is helping others, and in what way. They can create and share their own stories. The feelings of positive contribution are a great antidote to stress which is so prevalent right now.
5. Value Autonomy (within a performance partnership) Fundamental to productivity is that people can express themselves in their daily work – put their own individual mark on it. When people are working remotely, this is more important than ever as there are so many distractions.
6. Encourage problem solving
   People are problem solving machines – brains thrive on problems. Managers need to ensure people know what problems need solving – some are hidden – and how the problems impact the wider context. Now more than ever, a collective effort is needed to solve existential business problems. Involve people.
   
   This pandemic is an opportunity to make the most of the human capability at your disposal.  Seize the moment to permanently reset the team for ‘performance to true potential’. Their health and sanity may depend on it at the current time (and yours may too.)

There’s a reason the self-fulfilling prophecy concept is so well known – it is so prevalent in a crisis. People panic. Business owners are people. Business owners panic and make rash decisions. Everyone gets scared and productivity suffers. The business can’t perform so people have been architects of their own demise.

I saw first-hand during the GFC that those who stepped forward and did more of what leads to success, not less, made very large gains. I was never busier which proved the point (to me at least.)

Those who succeeded during the GFC focused on what the GFC didn’t change:

1. Remember that business purpose guides direction – True North
   Your purpose doesn’t change. You may have to focus on new markets and new products but your core purpose – the reason you exist and the people you positively impact in the ways you impact them – usually doesn’t change.
2. Stay close to customers
   Who needs you, in what way, to achieve what? They are still out there. Get closer to them than ever. Or someone else will.
3. Stay close to employees
   A virus pandemic changes a lot of things in a unique way yet in a digital world, you are even more equipped for the unique impact of this event. How can your business run productively where your team is virtual and geographically separated? This challenge is not new to many teams – many are already experts at this.
4. Create new sales to new markets
   If your sales team aren’t used to finding new business, they will be even less likely to do it in crisis. During the GFC, when the tide went out, business owners realised their business hadn’t been selling to new customers for some time. The good news is, this can be learnt.
5. Market
   Be more visible not less to both customers and employees but remember: optics count. Be sensitive to what people need to hear at this time. Keep people connected, informed, positive and supported.
6. Adapt your business model
   The GFC challenged people to re-think their business model and today, you have so many more digital options. Flatten outmoded structures and involve people more.
7. Harness creativity
   Human beings in a state of confidence, optimism and enthusiasm are creative geniuses. (When scared, uncertain and fearing the worst, not so much.) Develop your collective creativity as a business – involve everyone in new and creative solutions.
8. Connect with others in a similar situation
   Form groups, network and connect digitally. Share ideas and you will be amazed at how resourceful people are. Ideas are always better in multiples.

Leadership during a crisis is the leadership that counts.  Predictable and steady times don’t call for character, strength and skill. When the tide goes out, leaders are revealed.

These quotes got me thinking:
“The bad news is, time flies. The good news is, you’re the pilot.” Michael Altshuler
“Priority management is the answer to maximising the time you have.” John Maxwell

All very well, but are we talking short or long term? I remember reading a book over 30 years ago that changed my thinking about organization priorities – permanently. I can remember neither the title nor the author, simply the message: If you solely prioritize profit (tangible), you can very quickly strip (intangible) wealth that you’ve spent years creating, and rapidly compromise profit.

“Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything  that can be counted counts.”
Albert Einstein (early 1900s)

Factors interfering with profit are pretty pervasive in the average organization, but if all you focus on is the tangible result, those insidious issues will go unaddressed and you will never know how much profit was intrinsically possible.   No matter how technology has changed things, people are essentially the same and business is about people.

This is the classic thought divide between Milton Friedman (your priority is profit – circa 1970s) and Adam Smith (and others of his generation, 1700s – 1900s: your priority is consumers.)

Being somewhat risk-averse, I sit firmly on the fence:

1. You have to satisfy both investors and customers or you won’t have a business. If you swing too far in one direction, you risk losing funding and/or future revenues
2. You have to take a longer term view as there is a lag between investing in resource and having that resource produce value (‘realised benefits’)
3. Not everything of value shows up in your reporting – you may be fooled to think it is not there (while it is materially affecting your numbers)

Simon Sinek’s ‘The Infinite Game’ (2019) puts forth the view that there is more to the game of business than tangible – ‘finite’– bottom lines. Buckminster Fuller back in the last century challenged finite concepts of value and predicted a time when information would be delivered in a non-physical, connected world. He saw as inevitable a shift from the tangible (finite) to the intangible (infinite). “You have to decide whether you want to make money or make sense, because the two are mutually exclusive.”

In a reputation economy, other metrics challenge Friedman’s assertion. E.g.“Your reputation (is part of) your intangible value, which, by the way, makes up 81% of market value.”¹ The counter argument to Friedman’s is: focus on profit and other things, that materially impact profit, suffer.

I recall being surprised (shortly after I read that book 30 years ago) when a sports coach said: “We focus on performance, not results.” I did a double take. But it is essentially the same argument. The score board is history – make your adjustments while the ball is still alive and you get to control what ends up on the scoreboard. (He also made the point that you can get a great result against a sub-standard team that is misleading, setting you up for catastrophic failure later in the season.)

In my experience, leaders are separated along these lines:

• those who focus on short term, tangible, easy-to-measure results
• those who focus on longer term, intangible value – those factors that are not as easy to measure, but that count more when it comes to achieving potential profit and profit that is more resilient

“Organizations that have made a strategic investment in employee development, Gallup finds, report 11% greater profitability and are twice as likely to retain their employees.”²

While research is now prolific into non-profit drivers of profit, the alternative view still seems to be main stream. Was it because Friedman simplified matters? Just one thing to focus on does seem alluring. If only it were that simple.

“A singular focus on profit at the expense of customer and/or staff engagement will not optimize performance. There is enough evidence now to show that companies with high customer advocacy and staff engagement outperform those with a singular focus on profit.” ³ Owen McCall (who specializes in the delivery of value from technology.)

 The question is: what will you prioritise in 2020 – profit or people? They don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

1. “What is the reputation economy?” Sven Klingemann, PhD, Director of Research Reputation Institute https://insights.reputationinstitute.com/blog-ri/what-is-the-reputation-economy
2. “What High Performance workplaces do differently” by Rob Desimone. Gallup Workplace. December 12, 2019  https://www.gallup.com/workplace/269405/high-performance-workplaces-differently.aspx
3. “Clarity amidst chaos” by Cherri Holland. May 22, 2018
   https://www.institutefordigitaltransformation.org/clarity-amidst-chaos/

I’m not an advocate for Engagement surveys – they have always struck me as somewhere demeaning: sit over there and communicate with leaders via a digital dashboard. Why not simply ask people what they think, how they feel and what we can collectively do to make the organisation succeed. I have never found people to hold back when I ask them those questions. If you think they won’t be honest, address that problem. Don’t create another.

I ‘get’ the value of benchmarking, trends and comparisons – with customers, markets, products, not work partners.

Are surveys inherently flawed? No, it is just that they may well take organisations away from their goal in this area, not towards it. Forcing human insight and goodwill into the narrow bandwidth of clicks and ticks seems odd. (As for those lacking goodwill, they shouldn’t be there in the first place so the results become meaningless.)

The way you can tell if people are really communicating freely is if you as leader are ‘comfortable’ with criticism from anyone.(I put comfortable in quotation marks as past programming may make feedback of any kind inherently uncomfortable.)

People are fully engaged when six factors are high. These have been consistent in organisations I have observed in 10 countries across a wide range of culture and enterprise. If any one area is low, performance is compromised.

1. Valued
2. Work environment
3. Productivity
4. Fit
5. Aspiration
6. Organisation (as both noun and verb)
   

1. Valued – not ‘values’. This is the extent to which people feel valued – do they see the link between what they do and the positive effect on others both inside and outside the organisation? If not, they will find it hard to keep toiling away without the satisfaction of knowing they are making a difference. Valued includes what is noticed and acted upon. It includes mechanisms to respond to concerns and routine individual/team and organisation timeouts (to decompress if needed), review how things have gone and joint planning of next steps.
2. Work environment includes atmosphere, how people treat each other and are welcomed when they first join. It has to do with how people feel working together and their mutual respect. It also includes tolerance of diversity and how a group celebrates difference and makes the most of it for high performance. It also includes capability to handle conflict and pressures including the ‘politics’ associated with strong personalities and the influence they are seen to have.
3. Productivity includes how work is organised and allocated, the workflows and being able to get things done efficiently. (It includes induction and onboarding.)
4. Fit includes who is put into what role and which tasks they are allocated; it includes regular review to account for scope creep.
5. Aspiration includes systematic on-job learning (whereby managers process with employees their learning and how it relates to their role), delegation, group learning opportunities and a focus on continuous improvement/organisational learning. This factor encourages creative thinking and innovation whereby people can turn their minds to making things work better and have a sense of pride and fulfillment from directly and/or indirectly contributing to achievement.
6. Organisation includes recruitment, induction/onboarding (this is also under 3. Productivity), structure/roles, management (who and how), communication channels, internal marketing (i.e. reminding staff systematically about their impact, the positives, reinforcing the value of working here), quality controls, feedback loops, H&S/wellbeing, risk management, planning and tracking against plans, reporting, celebrating, leadership, ethics and values alignment.

When these 6 elements are collectively managed by everyone, equally, the organisation (and the individual) performs to potential. Engagement is not about people with something added but when nothing has been taken away.

Do you have staff who:

• hold you/your operation hostage?
• suck the life out of everyone, including you?
• drain your energy and leave you feeling exhausted?
• complain about everything (and nothing)?
• are simply ‘high maintenance’?

Who knows………it is possible that due to some early childhood experience they never learned to self soothe! Or delay gratification. Or stand on their own two feet. Or all of these. But that is not your concern. You are not their parent nor their minder. In my view, you are there to ensure they are the most sought after in their field and hereby secure continued employment. Yet they choose to stay where they are because they get a kick from adding so much value and this is what keeps them pushing through the daily (inevitable) challenges that would overwhelm those with less commitment.

It is a truism that the human condition is to see ourselves differently from the inside to what is seen from the outside. Without a constant reality check, delusion is only a thought away. Look at yourself in a video or listen to a phone call recording and you will see what I mean. (“Who is that person?!”)

Everyone is guilty of this ‘split’ in realities due to a strong mental defense mechanism to stabilise self-perception so that it is not disturbing and unsettling. (Also, sensing rejection by the social group is very threatening and so the brain has an endless number of ways to delude the person that they are the ‘MVP’.)

For everyone to be the best version of themselves, they need continuous ‘grounding’ – access to how they are seen by others. I encourage people to canvass their ‘constituents’( i.e. host group) to ensure they are seen as adding value.

Unfortunately, most workplaces are what may be called sensory deprivation tanks. People simply do not know how and in what way they are having an impact – either positive or negative. Individuals are simply unaware when they are negative and depressing in their demeanour, facial expression, posture, word choice, chatter and casual remark. Like a virus, negativity can spread throughout a group and before you know it, everyone has lost their will to live.

These individuals displayed none of this during the recruitment interview (except possibly incessant chatter, which you thought was charming and bubbly but which then became a constant source of annoyance to people around them.)

But let’s not kid ourselves: the costs to you and your business can be huge when they:

• mislead others with their own version of reality
• complain incessantly
• blame everyone and everything for non-performance
• frown, sigh, tut-tut and roll their eyes
• waste time while acting ‘busy’
• get sick at the most inconvenient time
• expect everyone else to do the heavy lifting

What message does it send when everyone is told it is critical that we achieve results and be at our best at all times and then they witness the exact opposite day in day out, and no trap door opens through which this person rapidly and permanently disappears? On the contrary, these individuals seem to outlive endless restructures, staff turnover, people coming and going, new managers, old managers, new policies and constant change. They seem to be immune (in their own little bubble) to the world moving on.

When I question this strange anomaly, people either mumble that you can’t get rid of anyone these days or the person is related to someone in high places (or said person appointed them and won’t face facts.)  Suddenly costs don’t seem to matter and that’s because no one puts a dollar value on the intangible costs of distractions, stress, wasted time and the sheer frustration of those working with this person.

High performing teams have a high degree of group honesty and personal integrity. The team always comes first and the individual with their heart and head in the right place will step aside if they are a threat to the team playing its best game. Without such a ‘team first’ commitment, no team can perform to its potential.

These teams are so committed to achieving success and fulfilling their obligations to fans, sponsors and team mates, that they will simply not have it if someone compromises their performance.

360° reviews do not bring the insights that a simple conversation will. Ongoing ‘nudges’ are what we all need to jiggle us into position so that we best serve the collective needs of the group.

Better still, make it a requirement that every member of the team canvass their ‘constituents’ – those they work with throughout an organisation – to find out what is of value to others and what may be costing others (their sanity, if nothing else.)

Without this continuous feedback, self-insight and self-correction, people can become self-referencing and feed off a constant stream of fake news, none the wiser that there is another reality out there. That serves no one well, least of all them.