Too many managers don’t know how to manage remote people. Worse, those managers, or their organizations, don’t trust people to do a good job. The organization installs spyware to see if people are working. That’s classic Theory X behavior.

However, people are smarter than the spyware. Many of these spied-upon people have installed mouse (and keyboard) simulator products. Yes, these products randomly move the mouse to pretend the person is “working.” (I got a good chuckle out of that.)

Imagine that—that people are willing to exert themselves to avoid control, but supposedly not willing to exert themselves to do the work. What a paradox of thinking.

First, typing is not the only kind of work we do. (See Management Myth 22: If You’re Not Typing, You’re Not Working.) But second, this is an example of management micromanagement.

This kind of micromanagement occurs from these two primary sources: managers don’t know how to measure “productivity,” and the managers are afraid to trust people to do the work.

I’ll start with measuring productivity.

How to Measure “Productivity”

Most organizations are so obsessed with “productivity” that they schedule every minute of each person’s day. They also overload people with more work than they can possibly do. That’s a classic example of resource-efficiency thinking.

The more we overload people, the slower they finish anything. (Little’s Law at work.)

We might not like Little’s Law, but we can’t escape it. The more work we have in progress, the lower the throughput, and the longer any single thing takes.

When I see managers or organizations invest in spyware, I ask them what information they expect to receive and which decisions they will make based on that data. They often tell me:

• How to reward or recognize people
• Which people to move around
• When to offer feedback to people who are not delivering

All of these answers focus on the person, not the work.

But no one, on any project or product, works alone. No one. At minimum, even people who work alone have customers. And those customers have opinions.

If customers don’t like the work, they will tell the people who created the product. And that’s when the organization has choices: does the organization continue or stop work on the product?

If we will make product decisions based on feedback, why do managers want to measure people?

People have very little control over their system of work. Kurt Lewin explained this with his equation that a person’s behavior is a function of that person in their environment. That’s why some people don’t succeed in one team but do in another.

We can’t measure a person’s productivity. We can measure the productivity of the system, the throughput. But first, managers need to trust the people to do the work.

Trust the People to Do the Work

How much trust do your managers extend to you? If you’re a manager, how much trust do you extend to others? For a quick checklist for trust in your organization, see How Well Do Your Policies Create Desired Outcomes and Trust?

We extend trust on a continuum—not a binary all or nothing.

Whenever I had a chance to promote people to a new role, I had a couple of policies: regardless of how often we had one-on-ones before their promotion, we returned to weekly one-on-ones. And I asked if they had anything specific they wanted to learn in their first few weeks of their new role. I was happy to arrange training or coaching so they could succeed.

Remember, these are newly promoted people. I knew they could do the new job. I also knew there were portions of the new role that they did not yet know—and I didn’t know either. Why would I trust without some form of verification? That’s an example of Shorter Plans Results in More Management Ease and Better Results applied to people.

In fact, one of the problems with newly promoted people is that their new job challenges them so much, they stop doing management. Instead, they return to micromanaging or performing their previous work. (See Tips for Passing the Baton.)

Since I now know about flow efficiency, I might do this differently if I was still a manager inside an organization. But that assumes I already encourage management cohorts and teams.

But here’s the minimum trust a manager needs: to trust the person to tell the manager when the person/project/product/effort needs help.

Managers can check on that needing help business with flow metrics. Which is exactly how managers can tell if people are working hard.

Asking for Help and Flow Metrics

If you want to know if people are working hard, you can ask for qualitative data: how often people and teams ask for help and how often people can support others when they need help. That asking and supporting requires several actions:

• People have to know when to ask for help.
• Managers have to know it’s okay to ask for help, even as a leader.
• People have the knowledge and slack in their day to offer help (not too much WIP), or, everyone knows you support teaming, such as pairing, swarming, and mobbing.

If your environment does not offer these conditions, people will not ask for help.

But you can use flow metrics to know when people have too much WIP. Here’s how:

• Ask the teams to measure their cycle time. Even if they count things they finish per unit time, as a back-of-the-napkin first idea, that’s fine. Ask them to ask for help if they have delays that outweigh the actual work time.
• Actively manage the aging of the project portfolio and the roadmaps. Eliminate all the work people are not actively working on. Then, decide what people should work on so they stop multitasking.
• Look at the throughput of any given team and see when they finish what. (See the Little’s Law post.)

People are part of a system. Look at the system, not the people.

Spying Does Not Work

Sure, managers can try to spy on people, especially if those people are remote. But it doesn’t work. Not just because people don’t want managers to spy and will actively work against spying, but because spying does not get managers the information the managers need.

When people work, they think. Sometimes, they draw on a whiteboard. Other times, they discuss with other people. None of those activities involve typing. Never mind the times that people walk, shoot some hoops, or take a nap.

People are thinking—and working—even when they’re not at their computers. That’s why personal productivity is meaningless.

Stop the spying efforts. Instead, ask people to measure their flow metrics. Even better, ask managers to measure their flow metrics. Too many managers suffer from too much WIP, aging decisions, and decision delay time.

You can tell if people are working hard. But that has nothing to do with their mouse or keyboard.

(Learn how to do this with the Modern Management Made Easy books. If you want to learn how as a cohort, see my Modern Management workshops.)

This is part of the intermittent series of leadership tips.