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Building A Skills-Based Organization: The Exciting But Sober Reality

 

Building A Skills-Based Organization: The Exciting But Sober Reality

 

Fueled by new AI tools and skills technology, nearly every company wants to become a “skills-based organization.” Now that we’ve had a few years to study this trend, I’d like to share some of the realities and calm some of the hype.

The Premise

Let’s start with the premise: the idea promoted by whitepapers is that we’re going to create this unbiased, politics-free company where decisions are based on skills, meritocracy, and performance. Vendors promise that we’ll have a global skills database and through the marvels of Talent Intelligence (primer here) we’ll be able to see trending skills, gaps in skills, and become more scientific about hiring, promotion, pay, and leadership.

Under the covers of this concept is the idea that we can “tag” or “assess” everyone’s skills with laser precision. And many of the AI tools, including the ones we use for our GWI research, promise to do this today. How do they assess our skills? They use the magic of AI to look at our job history, performance, work product, and other sources to infer, model, and predict what we’re good at, what we’re exceptionally good at, and what we need to learn next.

What a glorious vision. And the benefits are many: unbiased competency-based hiring, directed mobility of people to new roles, and strategic planning tools to help us plan pay, locations to hire, and more.

The Reality

This is not a new idea: skills have always been important in business.

I graduated from college in 1978 with a degree in Mechanical Engineering. Upon graduation I interviewed with Procter and Gamble, Boeing, the US Navy, and other organizations. Back then, 45 years ago, every company was interested in my skills. I took tests, answered technical questions, told interviewers about my courses, and demonstrated my proficiency in interviews. (Admiral Rickover, the head of the nuclear navy, asked me specific questions about heat transfer.)

But these companies were not naive. The reason they asked these questions was not to understand what I learned in college, but to understand how I think. I later learned that my behavioral interviews at P&G were designed to decode my personal goals, my mindset, my ability to think, and my ability to communicate. While these may be classified as skills, they are much more complex than figuring out if I knew how to code in Java.

Today, half a century later, it feels like we’re moving backwards. We’re heavily focused on tools and systems to identify technical skills and generic business capabilities. And while these tools and systems are amazing, we have to remember that the most important skills of all (the PowerSkills, as I call them), are yet left out. As my IBM manager used to say, “hard skills are soft,” it’s the “soft skills that are hard.”

In other words, companies succeed based on culture, ambition, learning agility, and alignment. And while we want to assess skills to define jobs, roles, and development, we also have to assume that every person can learn new skills (and must) on an ongoing basis. And this means we want a more holistic (“systemic” in our language) view of skills, moving beyond technical proficiencies alone.

Boris Groysburg, a Harvard professor, studied the performance of world’s top investment bankers. These individuals are highly skilled in financial products, deals, and large transactions. And what did he find? If you take a “highly skilled” investment banker in one company and move him to another, most likely he will not be a high performer any more. His “hyper-performing” skills were actually not his technical skills, they where his unique ability to leverage the organization and know how to get things done.

So building a skills taxonomy can be complex. As our research has found, business skills fall into many categories, each valued in different ways by different companies. And while generic skills certainly matter, it’s the way you use them in your company that drives value.

§  Technical proficiencies (coding, software, IT systems, medical procedures, etc.)

§  Operational proficiencies (running equipment, fixing a pump, safety procedures, etc.)

§  Functional proficiencies (marketing operations, CRM, product management, engineering, design)

§  Industry proficiencies (understanding oil and gas industry, chemicals, software business, etc)

§  Management and leadership proficiencies (managing teams, leading businesses, etc.)

Each of these is filled with “skills,” so much that companies like Lightcast, who aggregate skills for tens of thousands of job titles, build dynamic libraries with tens to hundreds of thousands of skills. And on top of this we have the big new world of AI-inferred skills, like “handling objections” or “analyzing financial statements” which it figures out on its own.

 

 

 

So What Is New Here? A Lot.

Given these complexities, what’s really new? Well the big change is the interest in building a corporate skills taxonomy, a single “dynamic database” for skills.

This taxonomy is not like the competency models of the past. This is an enormous set of data (tens of thousand of hierarchical skills) and every word in the taxonomy is subject to debate. Should we use “collaboration” or “teamwork?” Should we us “java” or “java programming” or “java language?”

There are hundreds of off-the-shelf taxonomies, and every industry is different. Energy companies have refining, production, and distribution skills. Consumer product companies have brand marketing, product marketing, and channel analysis skills. And Pharma and Chemical companies have scientific, genetic, and regulated manufacturing skills.

Some skills must be verified: entire platforms like Kahuna let you decide who can validate skills and when they have to be revalidated. And other skills need assessments: built on leadership, management, and other soft-skill models.

You can see how complex this is, and remember each company is different. Your company may value innovation and product design skills; your competitor may focus on manufacturing and distribution.

How can we put this all together? Isn’t this a “boil the ocean” type of problem?

Companies tend to take two paths. Path 1 is to build a skills taxonomy team, and then create a long process of working with business units to agree on the language and taxonomy architecture. This may work, but ultimately it has many points of failure. Without really testing these skills in action they’re likely to need tuning, so this often takes a long time.

Path 2, which we recommend, is to start by focusing on a problem. From that problem you build a part of the taxonomy, create a process for design and governance, and learn what tools work best.

Falling In Love With A Problem

Let me give you a real-world example. Suppose you have high turnover and low morale in customer service.

As you dig into the problem (what we call “falling in love with the problem”), you realize the customer service challenges are broad. The team is broken into small groups focused on different product areas, making their jobs boring and repetitive. So you sit down with team leadership and develop a “skills model” for customer service.

As you build the model you discover that very few of the staff are cross-trained. And some are not trained at all! So now, thanks to your skills model, you can decide how to reorganize the group (finding also that some of these “skills” can be automated by ChatGPT), start cross-training, and identify the high performers.

You also now discover that some of your folks are a poor fit. So you use the skills model to find other internal candidates and better source externally. And as you look to hire, you build assessments or interview questions to “hire for these skills.”

American Express actually did this years ago. They realized that the “skills” needed in the Amex sales and service teams were not customer service skills at all, but hospitality skills. Amex treats clients like guests, so they started recruiting from Ritz-Carlton and other hospitality companies. It took a skills-based analysis to figure this out.

As you can see, when you focus on a problem the work can quickly converge and you can solve a real problem. We just interviewed a company that used this approach to more clearly define its cybersecurity roles and found they could save a$20,000 per employee by hiring more junior candidates.

And this kind of analysis helps you decide whether to “buy or build” these skills. In 2020 we did a study of three companies and found that “building technical skills” can be as much as six-times less expensive than buying (hiring).

Such Skills Projects Are Everywhere

There are many use-cases for this approach.

In recruitment, a skills-centric approach lets you expand your network of candidates, often locating internal staff that may be a perfect fit for a job. Through the technology of “skills adjacencies,” we can find people with similar skills who will fit right into a role.

And skills-based hiring reduces bias. A large semiconductor company told us they now use an AI-based skills platform for hiring (Eightfold) and their entire candidate pipeline has more than tripled. They are finding people with excellent skills by blinding name, gender, and academic degree from the resume.

In career development and growth, talent marketplace and internal mobility tools deliver fantastic results. Rolls Royce uses a skills-based model to find manufacturing and production specialists, enabling people to rotate to new jobs in engineering and operations. MetLife, Schneider Electric, J&J, and other companies use a talent marketplace (skills-based employee to job matching system) to promote gig work, career growth, and talent mobility.

In pay and rewards, companies are experimenting with skills-based pay. A large pipeline company told us they now certify repair technicians in various functional areas (pumps, instrumentation, electrical engineering) and when a technician achieves an adjacent skill credential their hourly rate goes up by $5-10 per hour. Imagine all the pay equity data we can analyze against a skills model: this is likely to help us further reduce inequalities regardless of job level or title.

In technology, IT, and science, many organizations feel they can’t keep up. How well prepared is your company for AI, for example? One company we work with is in the middle of building a new skills model for their IT function, and they found that many of their staff are working on technologies that are 15 years old. The new model is helping them recruit, reskill, and energize the entire IT/product function so they can improve hiring, retention, and productivity.

So How Do We Scale This Up?

From a data perspective, companies need to build a business-centric way to manage, govern, and update these models.

Ericsson, for example, built a well-defined skills model for their massive 5G transition. This model was designed by engineers, sales and marketing teams, and the chief learning officer working together. They sat down and decided what areas, roles, and technologies to address, and from there settled on a model from which to grow. Their new journey is to refresh all their IT skills.

BNY Mellon has taken the same approach across IT operations. They’re developed “capability teams” which collaborate on critical job roles (ie. product manager, project manager, analytics) so the teams can keep their skills models up to date.

When you work this way – project by project – the effort gains momentum. You get real results and the business buy-in can scale. We recently helped a large software company build a federated model (business units coordinating effort) to develop a skills model for all their customer education. By doing this in a federated way they can merge and manage their internal skills needs with those of their customers, leveraging content and education in both places.

The Skills-Tech Challenge

But what about the systems? Where should all these skills be stored, and how will we keep them up to date?

While the market is still immature, let me share what we’ve learned.

Many smart AI-powered vendors now offer solutions. Workday, Eightfold, Gloat, Cornerstone, Seekout, Kahuna, Techwolf, Skyhive, Beamery, Phenom, Oracle, SAP, and ServiceNow all have offerings to help you store and define skills, leverage them across different applications, and assess skills through a variety of AI and assessment techniques.

Unfortunately they are each optimized for different purposes. Eightfold, for example, can automatically identify skills within a job description, find candidates, and then identify trending and adjacent skills through its sophisticated models. Cornerstone can show you all the skills covered in your massive learning catalog. Techwolf can infer skills from Jira and Asana projects. And Gloat and Fuel50 can infer skills and match them to career opportunities, jobs, and gigs.

And of course each vendor wants to be “a system of record.” And while many of these vendors have large clients, we have yet to find a company that uses one platform for everything. So while we may, at some point, find a single “skills cloud” capable of storing every skill for every job in the company, that goal has yet to be achieved.

The problem vendors face is the sheer magnitude of the problem. These skills systems are not simply databases: they are AI tools that ideally use second-generation AI to constantly find skills, infer skills, and update skills for every job, person, and career path. They must have open interfaces to the hundreds of skills libraries in the market (every industry and every job family has many taxonomies), and they must have tools to help you manage, analyze, de-duplicate, and curate this data.

And despite the claims, these “skills inference” tools are each different. The recruiting platforms typically are trained with the most data. These platforms (Eightfold, Beamery, Seekout, Phenom, iCims) search and index billions of worker histories and use time series, neural nets, and performance models to infer skills. This means they cover many industries and can identify and analyze skills across many job families across industries.

The talent marketplace platforms (Gloat, Fuel50, Hitch) tend to have less depth only because their goal is just to “make a match within the company.” (Gloat is moving into the overall “talent intelligence” category and now crossing the boundaries.) Gloat has introduced a recruiting product so their platform is clearly becoming an end-to-end talent intelligence system as well (they call it “workforce agility”).

The learning skills tools are least sophisticated (Cornerstone, Degreed, EdCast) because their goal is to match someone to a course or learning path. (Cornerstone is going well beyond this now as well, and has built an entirely new AI fabric to infer skills across its 7,000 customers.)

The ERP vendors (Oracle, SAP, Workday, others) are the least sophisticated, so they are more likely to become “skills aggregators” with APIs to coordinate skills data between these more specialized systems and their internal machine learning models.

In our new AI whitepaper (coming out soon) we talk about how these systems work, and you’ll see that a skills engine has to do many things. It has to infer/access billions of employee profiles, it needs to do time series analysis, and it needs advanced AI (neural nets) to infer, identify and build models that identify skills.

Over time, each skills-tech vendor will go down its own path. Newer vendors like Techwolf, Retrain, and others are looking at corporate data as a source of skills inference, now indexing information in Asana or Jira. This data, while limited, opens a new door: think about the skills information in the Microsoft Graph. Vendors who tap into this information (Viva Topics does this for document management) can learn far more about internal skills. And ultimately this is the type of data you need.

Regardless of the evolving tech market, successful projects focus on a problem. P&G built a skills taxonomy that helped them staff up their supply chain efforts during the pandemic. Reuters built a skills taxonomy to help them build up and scale their data science team. Ericsson’s skills journey started with their 5G re-engineering. And the list goes on and on.

My belief, as we see these projects progress, is that the upside of this work is massive. Companies that embark on this process learn tremendous amounts about their workforce at a rapid rate. They start to understand the governance process. And they build experience with vendors that helps them sort out who can scale to meet their particular needs.

Where This Is Going: From “Jobs” to “Work”

One final point. This work is even more important than you think. As I discuss in Irresistible, this work is part of a bigger shift, away from “rigidly defined jobs” to “roles” focused on work. We call it dawn of the “post-industrial model” of business.

This transition, which I describe in in my book, means that it’s ok to take the time to do this carefully. It’s ok to set up governance, experiment with different tools, and “fall in love with the problem” one step at a time. Over the coming years, we’re going to build more adaptable, scalable, productive companies as a result.

The Skills-Based Organization is coming, one step at a time. If you take the transformation seriously and consider how important it will become, you can build a plan that works.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cognizant appoints six female Senior Vice Presidents to cultivate diversity in leadership

 

Cognizant appoints six female Senior Vice Presidents to cultivate diversity in leadership

Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar S has highlighted the significance of the move. "Advancing diversity must be systemic, woven into everything we do starting with how we recruit and hire, develop, promote, engage and retain talent,” he said.

Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar S shares the importance of cultivating a diverse organization.

IT giant Cognizant said on July 19 that it had appointed six women to Senior Vice President positions in order to diversify its executive team.

Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar S said, “These announcements are something we should collectively celebrate. Advancing diversity must be systemic, woven into everything we do starting with how we recruit and hire, develop, promote, engage and retain talent.

 

Elisa de Rocca-Serra, who joined the company in 2021, has been promoted to SVP, EMEA General Counsel and Contract Lifecycle Risk Management (CLRM). In her newly expanded role, she is responsible for driving improved operational and financial outcomes by managing commercial risk throughout the entire client contract lifecycle.

Thea Hayden is now the SVP, Global Marketing. Hayden is the team leader of an integrated marketing and digital experience team that produces interesting content aimed at capturing the attention of global audiences from brand to demand. For the Cognizant brand, design and creative services, social media, thought leadership, and research, this team is in charge. Cognizant hired Hayden in 2020.

The position of SVP, Healthcare Provider/Payor Business Unit, was given to Patricia (Trish) Hunter-Dennehy. Revenue cycle management, clearinghouse businesses, hospitals, health systems, and health IT firms are all included in her purview. Her group supports the delivery of healthcare as well as the general management of healthcare in the US. Hunter-Dennehy joined Cognizant in 2015 as a result of the acquisition of TriZetto.

As a result of her promotion, Sailaja Josyula is now the SVP, Intuitive Operations & Automation (IOA) for the Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance (BFSI) sector for the commercial markets in North America as well as global delivery. She also serves as Hyderabad's Centre Head. With more than 56,000 employees, Hyderabad ranks as Cognizant's second-largest delivery centre.

As SVP, Industry Solutions Group (ISG), Archana Ramanakumar returned to Cognizant on July 5. In 2020, Ramanakumar departed Cognizant after gaining significant work experience at LTI and LTI Mindtree. In addition to bringing to her current position considerable outside experience, Ramanakumar continues the legacy she started when she first joined Cognizant in 1996.

Sandra Natardonato started working for Cognizant as SVP, Partnerships and Alliances on July 17. Prior to joining Cognizant, Natardonato worked as a senior equities analyst for 15 years at Gartner and 11 years at other professional services companies.

 

How to Re-Engage the Disengaged Employees | SightsIn Plus

 

Subject: How to Re-Engage the Disengaged Employees | SightsIn Plus

 

Category: HRM

 

Employee disengagement is catastrophic for business, and its severity is often underestimated. A Gallup study, conducted prior to the pandemic revealed that 69% of employees were ‘actively disengaged’, while 51% were ‘not engaged’. In a subsequent study, these numbers worsened, with 74% being ‘actively disengaged’ and 55% not engaged. These statistics are alarming, especially when considering the costly implications of employee disengagement, both financially and non-financially.

According to another survey, disengaged employees cost businesses between 20 and 25 percent of their revenue each year.  That startling figure should serve as a powerful wake-up call for organizations.

Therefore, it is vital for organizations to acknowledge the problem of disengaged employees, it’s high time to do so. In this write-up, we’ll scan the tell-tale indicators of a disengaged employee and talk about potential solutions to ensure that engaged employees outweigh disengaged ones within the organization.

But the Big Question remains ‘How do we Effectively Identify Disengaged Employees’

Before tackling the issue of disengagement, it is critical to understand the warning signs. We all have probably met & worked with such colleagues. They’re the people who continually moan, lack initiative and passion, have no desire to learn & grow, have poor work ethics, remain silent in the workplace, and are not punctual to work or meetings, are frequently absenteeism, rarely participate in social & engagement activities and display an overall negative attitude. In a nutshell, a disengaged employee has mentally & emotionally checked out. The problem with such negativity is that it spreads. Disengagement has a ripple effect, lowering team morale and resulting in bad performance and productivity.

So, Is Disengagement really that serious?

The short answer is, Yes. The financial consequences of disengagement should not be underestimated. Moreover, in today’s highly competitive economy, disengagement is an area where organizations have the potential to reap huge benefits if it is addressed effectively.

Now, let’s delve into the statistical evidence regarding the economic costs associated with workplace disengagement.

·         Companies with engaged employees enjoy a 10% rise in Customer Satisfaction

·         Companies with engaged employees have a 25% higher profitability compared to those with low engagement rates.

·         Engaged employees have 86% lower risk of leaving an organisation than their disengaged colleagues.

Even though you have identified the disengaged employees but next big question arises ‘How Do We Effectively Re-engage the Disengaged’

The first and foremost point is that we can’t have ‘One Size fits All’ model. The reasons behind employee disengagement are complex and diverse requiring a range of management approaches. Moreover, there are unlikely to be any quick-win solutions. Re-engagement will necessitate a substantial investment of time from the organization and an ongoing process of refinement.

So, what concrete steps organisations can take to effectively re-engage the disengaged?

Engage in Conversation, but Avoid Small Talk, yet Show Concern

“One disengaged worker can affect the morale of the entire team. As they say, “Nip it in the bud. Don’t let it fester.” Speak with the person you suspect of being disengaged in private, assuring privacy. Avoid small talk as it can be a means of avoiding a direct confrontation of the problem.

Show your concern, but avoid making assumptions. It’s possible that they may be experiencing a temporary setback. Still, ask them if everything is well and give them the opportunity to openly express their views and feelings.

Personalize your Actions to Reinvigorate

Take tailored actions to meet individual needs (whether it’s Compensation, Career, Work Life Balance, Recognition, or Feedback) as soon as you discover any signs of disengagement. Recognize that each employee is unique, and their needs may change over time.

Avoid using a cookie-cutter, ‘not everyone fits the mold’ method. By doing so, you can create a more meaningful impact and foster a sense of individualized support for each employee.

Boosting Positive Work Culture

Numerous studies show that work culture has the power to impact business outcomes and is key to improving organizational metrics. Employees expected more authenticity and transparency, a stronger sense of purpose and meaning, better schedule flexibility, more professional development opportunities, and a genuine commitment to diversity, inclusion, and well-being.

A positive culture fosters an environment where employees feel valued, motivated, and connected, ultimately reigniting their passion and commitment toward their work and the organization.

Let Employees Learn and Grow

Around 33% of job searchers see professional growth and development as the most important motivation to change jobs. If they don’t get it, they are likely to leave.

When employees see chances for personal and professional growth, it enhances their confidence, job satisfaction, and commitment, resulting in higher engagement and productivity.

 

Frequent Pulse Survey

Make sure your employees feel heard and give them the attention and support they deserve. Sending out anonymous surveys is an excellent initial step.

However, to solve the problem, first identify the exact problem. For that, you must decide what specific questions to include in the pulse survey to get the right responses and craft interventions to re-engage employees.

Conclusion

With 87% of the workforce comprised of disengaged employees, encountering them is inevitable in one’s career. Organizations have generally ignored the impact disengaged employees have on team morale and finances. However, it is becoming clear that organizations can no longer ignore this issue.

 Motivating disengaged employees can be challenging as ‘One-Size-Fits-All’ won’t work. To address this issue, understand the core issues, support employees in finding purpose in their work, build personal connections, align their work with the organization’s mission, and provide continual feedback.

Employee engagement is a continuous process, whether employees work remotely or in an office. If you cultivate the skills to channel their lack of motivation into a productive force the organizations are more likely to succeed.

 

 

 

 

Category: HRM

Pre-Covid, employers didn’t think too much about the productivity question. Employees had their butts in chairs in the office for at least eight hours a day, which had to mean they were doing their jobs, right? 

Not exactly. 

But the return-to-office pendulum has swung back and forth so many times over the last year, that now the ability to actually see people physically in an office “working” has become the RTO war cry for business leaders who believe that WFH is to blame for productivity drop-offs.

But location is no proxy for real productivity. In reality, seeing people at their desks was, at best, a blunt metric for assessing what was getting done efficiently, and what was merely time spent at a screen. 

“Many managers and executives have used being able to see someone as a management crutch,” said Rob Sadow, CEO and co-founder of hybrid work app Scoop Technologies. “The belief that just because I see you means that you’re working, I think we all know is not necessarily true. I’ve had days in the office where I was there and extremely unproductive, and days where I was remote and no one could see me but I was extremely productive.”

 

The issue of poor productivity measurement is universal. In the U.K., 37% of 2,000 desk workers surveyed said that their productivity is still measured on visibility, including hours spent in the office or online, according to new research from Slack. As a result, almost one third of the average day is lost to performative work that doesn’t contribute to company goals, but is simply done to appear productive. 

Cost-of-living hikes, shaky economies, mass layoffs, and the workplace flux that has occurred over the last year are putting pressure on organizations to ensure that workforces are performing at their top capabilities. But, to reach that goal without dropping the ball on employee well-being and reversing the strides made in allowing more flexibility, will take time and a willingness to measure productivity more thoroughly, say workplace experts.

 

‘No final answer to RTO debate’

Choice is at the core of modern work culture. And that extends to people being given the freedom to change their minds, depending on what fits their needs at different stages. “Every organization has a combination of lots of really different types of people,” said Sadow. “The answer of wanting to be remote, hybrid, or in the office is very different depending on if it’s my first year on a job or if I’ve been doing it for 25 years.”

Sadow said when his wife came back from parental leave, the ability to work remotely was extremely important. But then as that passed, she wanted to be able to come into the office. ”Even for the same person, this can evolve based on life circumstances in terms of where they can be most productive. There’s no one-size-fits-all for what’s more productive,” he said.

And employers will have the same autonomy too. 

“Different companies will choose different options customized to their needs: there won’t be a final answer to the RTO debate,” said Dr. Gleb Tsipursky, CEO of hybrid work consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts. “Different industries, organizations, and even individual roles within organizations have unique needs and constraints. What might work well in one context may not work in another.”

 

How do we define productivity?

 

“When people thought about productivity in the workplace originally, what they had in mind was a world of manufacturing, where you could figure out how many hours of labor, how many machines, and how much stuff is getting out per amount of capital and per hour of labor,” said Jose Maria Barrero, an assistant professor of finance at Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México, where he studies labor economics. “Now, this idea of ‘what is productivity’ perhaps needs to change. We still haven’t quite done that shift in how we conceptualize productivity.”

There have been numerous studies over the years attempting to answer the question of whether remote or in-person work is better when it comes to productivity. For example, a July whitepaper published by the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy and Research conducted by Maria Barrero, Steven J. Davis and Nicholas Bloom, found that fully remote work is associated with about 10% lower productivity than fully in-person work due to challenges with communicating remotely, barriers to mentoring, and issues with self-motivation. However, hybrid working appeared to have no impact on productivity, but is the popular choice because of employee recruitment and retention. 

 

Another study, conducted by Scoop Technologies looking at 3,600 U.S. firms, found that firms that allow more WFH grow faster. Those requiring 0 days in the office see a 5.6% growth, while those requiring all five days see only 2.6% growth. Bloom wrote in a LinkedIn post: “My takeaway is WFH increases recruitment and retention, which fuels company growth.” And if employees are happier and want to stay, doesn’t that also mean that they’re likely to be more productive?

There’s a lot to consider. With all of this, employers are scrambling to answer solve the productivity question, so core to assessing the true pulse on how the business is doing. 

“The question about productivity is the big question, and part of why that is, is because measuring productivity is not at all straightforward,” said Maria Barrero.

 

 

How do you measure productivity?

Some companies have decided to go the route of surveillance, where a remote workforce is measured through how much the green active light is on or how frequently they move their mouse. 

“Surveillance is something that a lot of companies might jump to,” said Ashley Cooksley, CEO, North America at agency The Social Element. “It’s intrusive and not very trusting of your team members. We have to trust that the people we hire will live up to our own values of being accountable and transparent.”

However, others argue that an outcome-oriented approach is best. Are KPIs, targets and goals being met? If they are, then the company doesn’t care how much time is spent at the desk, because clearly they are being productive enough to hit their targets. That’s what Tsipursky argues.

“Outcomes-based metrics are more reliable than traditional measures like hours worked,” said Tsipursky.

No one has a clear answer, but there are companies who are trying to push the conversation forward and figure out what is the best way to measure productivity. 

Tsipursky suggests looking at milestones achieved, projects completed and KPIs related to the job role. Qualitative factors are also important, like employee satisfaction and well-being. 

Managers must step up to the plate

At Scoop, that looks like setting important goals for each quarter for the entire company that will then ripple down to each job function. Sadow said it’s about asking questions like are we clear on the goals and how to get there. Along the way, it’s checking in on progress and navigating how they can accelerate if needed or get back on track. It’s an iterative process that largely focuses on goals. But managers need to step up to the plate to tackle this.

“Most managers traditionally have not managed outcomes,” said Sadow. “That’s just not the way they thought about it. They assumed if people were in the office, they were being productive. This requires a bit of stepping up our game to get a better sense of productivity.”

Crunchbase, a provider of private-company prospecting and research solutions, has tried to emulate this. The company’s chief people officer Kelly Scheib said that each team has objective goals and deliverables to meet. This helps stay away from only anecdotal evidence that a team member is being productive and instead provides a solid checklist. Managers have weekly one-to-ones with their team, which is where they spend the time to track adherence to those outlined goals. 

“It’s about trusting your employees,” said Scheib. “It’s like Mr. Rogers. You want to be the person that they never want to let down because you’re a good human and care deeply. It’s better to spend time caring deeply than worrying about whether or not they are on their computer

 

Most managers traditionally have not managed outcomes. That’s just not the way they thought about it. They assumed if people were in the office, they were being productive. This requires a bit of stepping up our game to get a better sense of productivity.

Rob Sadow, CEO and co-founder, Scoop Technologies.

 

 

 

Cooksley has also encouraged managers to track real productivity outcomes with quarterly check-ins. Aside from looking at goals, Cooksley said that timesheets are a core part of tracking productivity. While it’s not necessarily anything new for any agency, it is a solid way to see how much time they’re spending on projects. She says she has to keep a closer eye on people working too much compared to not enough. She looks at questions like: Are they working way over their hours? Do we have any burnout issues? Do we have areas within the business that need relief? 

 

“It’s hard to see that someone is at their desk until 7:30 p.m. when you’re not in an office,” said Cooksley. “We want to make sure people have balance and the support they need.”

Sarah Newland is an operations director who works on a contract basis for small businesses and has an array of different ways to scrutinize productivity to maintain a strong bottom line for the company. “Productivity is crucial as margins are tight and inefficiencies really can make the difference between success and failure of a business in growth mode,” she said. In the teams she supports, she measures productivity with timesheets as well, but also by looking at costs and profit margins, client satisfaction, team cohesion and the appraisal and review structure.

 

“Qualitative measures are just as important as quantitative measures,” she said. 

But for people who are still looking for quantitative measures, productivity and management software products can help. Michael Ritter, founder and CEO of media company Maple Media, said tech tools like Jira [project tracking software] and Slack can also help, in conjunction with check-ins.

In short, it’s up to organizations to figure out what works best for them. However, whether a company is remote or hybrid, basing productivity assessment on a person’s physical visibility in front of their manager, no longer cuts it.

“As we continue to navigate the remote versus in-office work debate, one thing is clear: the future of work is not about choosing one over the other, but about flexibility and adaptability,” said Tsipursky.