Comment by michaelt
5 years ago
Imagine I'm a manager with a light-touch approach to performance management, a team that spends 99% of their time in the office, and a team member who is perfectly productive while in the office but unproductive when working from home.
Should I switch to high-touch performance management all the time for all employees, just because of the 1% of one person's time spent working from home?
You should deal with the problem of the single person, in the same way you'd deal with someone who consistently delivers bad code, or someone who turns up to the office and smokes crack in the bathrooms.
I'm a strong proponent of allowing people to work from home, but I have also had conversations with people in the past about whether its appropriate for them. Ultimately it needs to come down to the question of whether people are getting the work they need to be doing done, and if not whether that's for reasons outside of their control. If people are delivering what they need to be delivering (whether that's in the way you'd typically expect or not), there isn't a problem. If they aren't delivering, that's the problem to solve, not the nuances of a work from home policy.
> You should deal with the problem of the single person, in the same way you'd deal with someone who consistently delivers bad code, or someone who turns up to the office and smokes crack in the bathrooms.
You think if someone is a good employee 99% of the time I should fire them on the spot?
If it truly is a case of them being a good employee 99% of the time I'd honestly take the 1% hit in exchange for a happy employee. I'm definitely not suggesting just firing them, I'm suggesting acting in proportion to the problem, but focusing on the problem being them not delivering as well as they could be, rather than the problem being specifically that they're working from home.
Are you being obtuse on purpose? I'm glad you're not my manager. Of course that isn't what he is saying, he is saying why bother to change your management style of everyone for just one person. You should be managing each person differently. Duh.
This sounds contrived to me.
If you know whether people actually delivers or not, this is an easy discipline issue: point out that you know, and that working from home is a privilege that will be withdrawn if performance slips.
What I tend to find is that managers often believe productivity is higher in the office because they see people engrossed in their computers, without seeing what people are actually doing, and believe they're in control.
If you think you need a high touch system to handle this, then it suggest you doubt your current systems ability to pick up actual performance vs. whether they look busy.
Maybe in that case the 1% spent at home shouldn’t bother you? I’m personally not really in the business of wringing 1% more performance out of my team.