Value outcome, not hours

In social media, I am always amazed to see that simple and unreflective appeals achieve high click rates. Some of them are already ancient, but they are re-posted every few weeks and get thousands of clicks. These platitudes are annoying and boring for me, but the attention economy of the social media loves exactly such calendar slogans.

One of the phrases is: “Employers, value performance, not attendance”. A great appeal, a wonderful topic to discuss. Furthermore, it is also very value-creating when companies take a serious look at it. For most companies, this means a profound change, which is not that easy.

When I see this prompt on my timeline every 14 days, I always have to think of many corporations and chuckle. I remember a conversation with a slightly younger unit manager. At the time, my team was known for its high efficiency partly thanks to Lean, Agile and Diversity, and I was often asked what was behind it all.

After such a talk, this colleague took me aside and explained to me how to achieve something in a corporation. It was a very great conversation, she has a very different perspective on the world than I do, but I really appreciate that she openly explained her approach to me. Here are the main methods of her “presence” strategy.

Always stay late, find a place in an open-plan office that is well visible to everyone. When the lights are shut off in the evening, don’t switch them on again, only light up your own workstation. Two LED desk lamps are ideal.

Always seek to get attention. Visit the executive floor, ask about appointments and attendance, take the lift exactly when the last executive meeting took place in the evening, mention in the lift that you are taking a short break and just get a drink from the vending machine on the ground floor.

When going somewhere, always have things under your arm, a booklet on which you can write something down with a pen is ideal. Against being bored, spread out a lot of documents on the desk, in between which you can hide some private reads. Even the private tablet doesn’t catch the eye in the midst of all the stuff.

She had a dozen more tips of this kind. Such methods were very successful in her company and I think this also applies to many other companies. As I said, not my world at all, but a very sympathetic conversation, I had to smile a lot and I have seen a different world view.

Now let’s evaluate the strategy “presence” and the alternative “performance”:

Imagine that in the next reorganisation, her name is tossed into the ring. The reorganisation is discussed by a small group of people who have access to hundreds of candidates. Her name comes up and most of the board doesn’t know her very well, but have a positive impression: “Oh, that’s the one who always stays so late”. In this fashion, the “presence” strategy conveniently finds many supporters across the board.

This is much easier than a matching assessment on the performance of hundreds of candidates. These performances must be transparent to the same decision-making body. Think about how many conditions have to be fulfilled for such a body to say by a vast majority: “Oh, that’s the one who always performs so well”.

One requirement is the mutual recognition and reference to each other’s achievements. “I could never have done it without the co-worker” or “The team was on fire towards success, I barely had to assist” and many more statements like this.

So, now we have something tangible for the people in team “performance”. Not just the hard-to-implement generic phrase “Employers, value performance, not attendance”. How about the appeal: “Give praise to a colleague in front of the whole team today!”

This can be practised in any company, regardless of whether it is a member of the “presence” team or the “performance” team. Even if the subject of “performance” is very well managed in your company, a little praise never hurts.

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About transparency

Some years ago, I attended an inaugural lecture by a division head in which she analysed current figures from her reports, identified discrepancies and resumed. She concluded that these discrepancies indicated deliberate cover-ups. A circumstance that she will change. Because only a transparent system is able to provide people with the opportunity to act in a purposeful way.

I endorse the last sentence with all the knowledge and experience I have. Cheating, estimated figures or sloppiness combined with an 80s “management by objective” apparatus are the best possible nursery ground for mismanagement. At the very best, they cause frustration in individual areas, when everything fits according to the specifications, but the overall result is poor.

My own example above, by the way, did not end well; a new system was created that was consistent above all. This could be observed closely in the defects that were subsequently closed. I cannot say whether the original intransparent system was created intentionally. But I am very sure that the new system which was created aimed at concealment.

Now, there are certain areas where transparency is not permitted. Reasons for designated restrictions on transparency are, in my experience, Almost always fabricated. “We can’t give you the current figures, as you know one of our parts of the company is listed on the stock exchange.” When systems strive for transparency, it usually has a very different ring to it: “We want to better understand how our services are viewed by customers, so we compare x-and-y. The listed part of the group can only be included in the analysis in such-and-such way. But we are continuing to work on possibilities here as well.”

It’s about what you want to measure and what you can measure. People who understand Lean or Agile know that it’s a journey. Establish metrics which really move you forward, and in the best case these are lead-measures. Not forgetting to use the existing possibilities of “what you can measure” creatively and to create better chances.

In my experience, real good transparency is always a journey, not something you can finally achieve or even set by decree.

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