How can telecommuting managers make employees manage themselves and improve human efficiency?

37signals is located in Chicago, USA, and consists of less than 40 employees from different countries. Its office relies entirely on remote collaboration, but it serves millions of users around the world, with a market value of $654.38 billion, making it one of the most efficient companies in the world.

Telecommuting, which started nearly 50 years ago, is not a new term.

Hot knowledge: The earliest telecommuting can be traced back to the American oil crisis in 1970s. Nilles first put forward the concept of telecommuting (or "telecommuting") in 1975: telecommuting refers to working away from the traditional workplace or at home. If it weren't for the epidemic, people might not be so concerned about telecommuting. The epidemic situation has enabled a considerable number of domestic enterprises to break through the barriers of telecommuting, accelerate the construction of digital transformation, and create the possibility for the normalization of telecommuting. According to the survey data of Prospective Industry Research Institute, there were only 1.8 million telecommuting employees in China in 2005, and this number rose to 3.6 million in 20 14, with a compound annual growth rate of 8% in 9 years. According to this growth rate, the number of telecommuting employees should have reached 4.9 million in 2020.

According to the survey report released by ACS in 20 19, about 4.7 million employees in the United States spend more than 50% of their total office hours telecommuting. June 5438 +2020 10, Microsoft announced that employees can choose to work remotely from home for a long time. Prior to this, Facebook and Twitter, also located in Silicon Valley, took similar measures. In the same year, researchers at the Becker Friedman Institute of the University of Chicago surveyed nearly 1000 jobs and found that 37% of them could be done at home, and the salary of such jobs accounted for 46% of the total salary in the United States, which was higher than that of those jobs that could not be done at home.

It is not only the change of management workplace and mode, but also the change of management thinking. After studying and analyzing 800 jobs in nine countries around the world, McKinsey concluded that the potential of telecommuting is concentrated in knowledge-intensive fields such as finance, management, science and technology, and more than half of employees can finish their work efficiently when telecommuting. ?

There are advantages and challenges for knowledge workers to telecommute in the post-epidemic era, but it is undeniable that this must be the future trend. Telecommuting is not only the change of employees' working place and mode, but also the change of management mode. As Drucker said, in order for knowledge workers to work efficiently, they must have the will to do so. Therefore, in order to arouse the enthusiasm of employees, managers need to have higher management skills to eliminate employees' sense of organizational detachment in the process of telecommuting. In Fang Yunjun's management practice, it is found that the most important thing of telecommuting is to enable employees to achieve organizational goals efficiently and freely. To do this, managers need to constantly improve themselves. Fang Yunjun put forward four management abilities that telecommuting should possess, and discussed them with you.

Ability 1: Optimize performance management, and high efficiency is the premise of freedom. The most striking feature of telecommuting-the inconsistency between working environment and working hours-brings both advantages and challenges. The results of the global "Future of Work" survey by Weilai Taoyue show that 69% of enterprises think that performance management is the place that needs to be changed most in the future human resource management module. Telecommuting makes employees and managers no longer bound by attendance and interpersonal relationships, and the evaluation of efficiency and value can return to the essence. It is precisely because of the uncertainty of working environment and time that managers' performance appraisal needs to be optimized and upgraded. What they need to pay attention to is no longer how long employees have worked, but to measure the output value of employees. The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) also pointed out that various flexible working modes urge organizations to better measure their performance according to results and output, instead of evaluating employees' attendance, speaking level at meetings or showing off their achievements. Remote management employees need to change the traditional time thinking into output thinking and encourage employees to set some specific quantitative and practical goals for themselves.

Ability 2: full trust and decentralization, freedom makes efficiency easier to achieve, first of all, we must give freedom. Boundary theory holds that people need to create and maintain various boundaries, and through these boundaries, they can distinguish and arrange personal time, space and specific affairs, thus creating various fields that are meaningful to them. When people telecommute, they can better divide and maintain various boundaries. Giving employees more freedom, rather than homogeneous working hours and scenes, can stimulate their good working conditions and enthusiasm-4 hours of "chicken blood" is better than 8 hours of "fishing". The second is full trust. As the old saying goes, there is no doubt about employing people. Daily newspaper and weekly newspaper, which are commonly used in offline work, are a kind of supervision to employees in a sense. The essence of this kind of supervision lies in the black box of trust-leaders need to know the progress of employees through some means, and employees need some means to prove that their work is beneficial to the organization, although this means is not necessarily fair and objective (after all, they are all talking to themselves), and it is not necessarily the most reasonable and suitable for employees. When used in telecommuting, the above negative problems will be magnified more and more-the remote environment determines that employees have too many ways to deceive managers. Building a trust culture is a top-down responsibility, and managers need to fully decentralize and trust employees.

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Ability 3: Even if it is remote, employees need a sense of belonging. In Maslow's hierarchy of needs theory, the sense of belonging ranks in the third level and is regarded as a basic need of human beings. The research on employees' sense of belonging can be traced back to Mowday's classic definition, that is, employees' sense of belonging refers to having a strong belief and sense of identity in organizational goals and values, voluntarily contributing to the organization, and having a strong desire to maintain organizational membership. Telecommuting, far away from the physical office environment, everyone is "alone" or communicating online, and employees' perception of organizational cultural identity is reduced, which may further affect their sense of belonging to the organization, thus affecting the teamwork and even stability. Signal theory was first put forward by Michael Spencer in 1973. According to the signal theory, it is difficult to observe directly, because the information of employees' ability and motivation is usually vague and incomplete, and managers need to rely on some observable signals to identify and motivate employees. At the same time, a series of policies implemented by the organization are also a signal to employees? Based on these signals, employees make judgments on the values and ideas of the organization. Under the telecommuting mode, managers need to formulate a matching incentive and care system. After employees effectively receive such "signals", negative emotions such as anxiety, loss and neglect will naturally be dispelled, and then a "positive signal" will be sent to managers, thus forming a virtuous circle and completing the construction of employees' sense of belonging. As for how to apply "signal theory" in management practice and form a closed loop, leave a suspense and talk about it later.

Ability 4: Use AI management tools to comprehensively evaluate the working status of remote employees. Although there are many telecommuting tools in the market, most of them are oriented by "things" and lack attention to employees' working state, psychology, mood and behavior. In fact, as mentioned above, the core difference between telecommuting and offline office lies in the huge difference in the working status of employees, but there is not much difference in the cooperation, division of labor and schedule management of "things". Using AI management tools, paying attention to employees' individual behavior data, and finding employees' abnormal state with the goal of value output in time can help managers care for and empower employees more immediately and help them solve specific problems, which can greatly improve the efficiency and challenges brought by telecommuting.

imagine

Before starting work every morning, employees can receive emails or nail reminders from AI, and AI will plan and allocate the task list for that day. Employees only need to complete the tasks in the list to ensure the overall progress.

AI customizes performance templates according to managers' expectations and the strategic objectives of the organization, generates a list through AI's fair and accurate judgment, and evaluates the output value of employees.

Encourage employees to work more efficiently and with higher value, and avoid wasteful labor. If there is a problem, the data can also accurately lock the problem. After all, the low-value labor of a large number of employees is not rooted in employees.

In the process of AI follow-up, the working status of employees can be objectively recorded, and a data report can be formed and sent to managers in time.

Managers can receive good or improved "signals" from employees: employee A is full of distrust of the organization and lacks a sense of belonging; Employee B is in poor condition, and the project he is responsible for is at risk of overdue; Employee C's recent error rate is low and his work enthusiasm is good ... thus, managers are urged to send corresponding "signals" to employees, or encourage or care for employees and prescribe the right medicine.

Freer, more efficient, more efficient and freer Fang Yunjun believes that telecommuting will be popularized, and migrant workers can create higher value in a freer, more active state.

reference data

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Wen Shu Ritchie

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