With so many employees working from home (a trend that is not likely to reverse), many companies are concerned about efficiency and productivity. And in response some are implementing monitoring strategies that, while they might be legal, are crossing ethical lines and causing privacy concerns. Worst of all, these types of policies can do big damage to your company culture. In this episode we talk about why watching your employees too closely backfires and present alternative technology solutions that will better help your employees be successful—while working from home or office.
Speaker 1:
Welcome to the JMARK Business Innovation Technology experience.
Christina:
In today’s episode, we are talking about virtual babysitting, the dark side of the distributed workforce. With so many companies working remotely right now, a lot of business leaders are considering investing in tools that will monitor their employees’ productivity. Listen today as we discuss several things to consider when you’re going to make a decision like this. Several different main points that we’ll hit are clarity. Clarity reduces stress. You need to be really clear with your people on expectations of what success for their role looks like.
Christina:
Productivity. You pretty much can’t put a blanket productivity and measurement system over your entire company because productivity is going to look different for every role. Outcomes, at the end of the day it’s the outcome that matters and that process will look different for everyone. And then last but not least, using technology in the right way. When you use it as a scare tactic to get your employees to be more productive, you’re pretty much going to end up with the opposite result. It’s so important to use your resources on the right technology tools for your company. Enjoy.
Todd:
You’re welcome everybody to our weekly live podcast of the JMARK Business Innovation experience. And today we have … I think we’re going to be having a very engaging conversation about what we’re calling the dark side of the distributed workforce. And the idea for this concept actually came up in a couple episodes ago, but as companies are moving more towards permanent status of remote work of a distributed workforce or some type of a hybrid status where long-term will be part-time at home, part-time in the office. We’re seeing that many companies are implementing technology solutions that monitor their employees. And from a legal standpoint, there isn’t anything that I’ve been able to find that prevents an employer from doing this.
Todd:
But it does cross some areas of concern with ethical concerns or privacy concerns and just getting into the culture and the trust between manager and employee and between leaders and staffing and organization that we’re going to consider today and talk about. As we start this off, Pete, you are the director of learning at JMARK. You also are a big champion for our culture. You chair the … I want to say chair up but the culture crew. It’s called a committee that talks about culture in a company. And how do you see this idea of remote employee monitoring playing into the effects it could have on culture and trust?
Pete:
Sure. I think one of the … Well, it’s a deep conversation, isn’t it? But I think one of the challenges is when this all happened there wasn’t already for a lot of companies, a culture established where they took more of a servant leadership type mentality. We’re putting into piece it together as we go. I understand the need for a company to make sure that productivity is where it needs to be at, 100%. But what I think needs to happen, I think businesses need to do a couple things. One is, really establish what success looks like. I think if I can send this up to anything, like down to one thing. Is what does success look like? In other words, is it the amount of time I’m spending in front of my computer? What if I’m walking around? What if I’m solving a problem walking around the room? I pace all the time. What if I want to take an extra 10, 15 minute break? But the outcome I have to deliver every week is top-notch.
Pete:
I think once the business and the employee do clarity around that idea, I don’t know if as much monitoring is needed. I think it comes down to that but I can tell you from an employee’s perspective, I feel like if you have heavy monitoring, most folks, whether willing, committed, or not, will give as much as they need to do not to get fired. They might have that internal, I want to do great. They feel like they have that heavy thumb on them. They’re like, great, I will get done what I need to do. If a business can help build a culture where people see that there’s incentives, by as an employee, by me working harder, by me helping generate more business that helps me protect my position. It puts money back in the company for my future salary. I think when those incentives were aligned, I think you need less monitoring. I think you see things increase.
Dax:
Yeah, I’ve always believed in the idea very strongly of that trust builds responsibility. That people will live up to the trust you place in them and often beyond that. And of course, it’s not across the board. Of course, there are people that don’t but I think that we have to avoid assuming that everybody is the worst employee, when most of the time, the vast majority of people are trying to do, they want to do the best work and you build that trust in them. And on one hand that this is easy for me to say, Todd can speak to the same thing. And I think you quite a bit too, Pete, that I’ve worked either remote or in an offsite office nearly the entirety of the last 20 years.
Dax:
And so I’ve learned to build up this trust, but I know it also was something that was always placed in me that I never wanted to betray by not being reliable and not being available and not making sure that I was getting the goals and that I always had clear goals that were given to me so I knew what to hit, what was expected of me and what I need to do to achieve that productivity.
Pete:
That you’re talking about again, around the idea of clarity, right? The idea that clarity reduces stress, when I know exactly what I need to do to succeed, I can be measured against that goal.
Todd:
Yeah. And the hard part about clarity too, is everybody’s position is different. What is done in accounting, the use of a computer is not the same as what’s done in marketing. And you can know what you’re expected to do, you can have your outcomes defined and you can be working towards achieving those things. But if there’s this weight on your back, that you’re always thinking, is somebody’s watching me? Is somebody … Sorry, we just had somebody try to get into the meeting.
Pete:
Somebody’s watching you.
Todd:
If we’re always trying to, this is just weight on your back extentially. If I’m sitting here thinking about writing an email or writing an article and I’m working things over in my mind or maybe I’m looking on a site that is not normal. Maybe I’m on the New York Times looking about some research or some other side gardeners. And if I’m in the back of my mind going, oh man, if they see them on this side, are they going to think I’m not working? Or if I click this link in this email about this new story, that could apply to something, is that going to apply? Or if I go search online to get a meme, to throw into a chat, is my employer going to think I’m wasting time?
Todd:
You see that’s the part of the clarity that I think is difficult because employers need to understand that their reality of what is needed to perform a job doesn’t necessarily match, always match what is actually required. And I’ve done marketing related things for years and years and years but before I was heavily involved in the marketing team at JMARK, I never really understood what Dax likes to call the creative process. Where Dax and I are sitting on the phone, talking about messaging, trying to understand, is this going to work or is that going to work? We’re not on our computers. If you’re constantly thinking, oh, my computer just went to sleep, somebody’s going to think I’m not working. And that’s the part where I see the effect, is there’s this weight on people’s shoulders going, what if? What if they are looking at this, what if they are doing that? Not that you’re doing anything wrong, but that you’re just doing in a different way, you’re not needing the computer or whatnot.
Pete:
Todd, If I was an owner of a company, I would hate for my people to appear to be busy. What I’d want them to do is to be productive and to have those conversations with their supervisors. Letting them know, hey, here’s what I need to be successful. Supervisor says, “Hey, I got this report blah, blah, blah”. Not being like, “Oh, you did wrong”. I think the conversation needs to be okay, let’s talk about this. “Oh, why do you have to go to that site, if you don’t mind me asking”. I think those simple questions are fine. I think accusatory is where it becomes a problem.
Christina:
Yeah. And when you talk about basically pretending to be productive, it reminds me of an example that I read when I was researching. And this company did a little experiment for the purpose of writing an article about this kind of thing. And the guy ended up saying that he learned that the system showed that he was being “productive only when he was actively typing”. He straight up said, “I found myself trying to cheat the system”. And that’s not what you want.
Todd:
Yeah. And that’s going back to what some of this looks like, in some of the gray areas. With working from home, you have work computers, which legally can be monitored. But for example, I’m in my home office right now and my kids come in here, sometimes they watch cartoons on the TV. And I’m talking about after work, this is a work computer. Is it rightful for an employee to monitor audio and video and different things? Or for example, if you don’t have policies in place to on what is the area of personal versus professional, people need to have clarity on what they’re allowed to do on their computer. Can they go answer an email in the middle of the day from their personal tax advisor on the computer or do they need to go to another computer and then do that kind of thing? And so that’s I think where we’re driving about clarity too, again. It’s just that people just need to understand what’s expected and understand that, everybody is human and everybody is doing the best they can the most part.
Pete:
I think that’s a good point for companies to look at right away, an immediate action is if you have work computers, are your policies clearly defined? Has all the people in your company reviewed the policies? For example, with us we can tell when a policy has been read and checked and acknowledged. I think that’s critical because again, if you don’t know what you can do, it just opens up all kinds of errors. I think people do the best they can do with the information they have. I like to always assume that people are doing the absolute best they can with the information they currently have. I like to take that approach. But if you don’t know what I can and can’t do through policy, don’t be surprised when people do things wrong and then they get frustrated because like, why didn’t you just tell me?
Dax:
Yeah. And I think that leads into the other thing that Todd mentioned, which is regulations and Todd you started the conversation off a few minutes ago talking about the fact that you would looked up and try to discover what is out there as far as laws and where privacy laws stand and stuff. And you’ve talked about the fact that privacy laws haven’t necessarily caught up to this. There are some there, and they could be different from state to state and you need to take all of these things into consideration. If you have employees in different states, you need to make sure that you’re taking those things. And also this idea that again, privacy laws haven’t caught up, but don’t assume that they’re not going to catch up.
Dax:
Keep an eye on that as you’re making these plans because again, part of the reason we’re having this conversation goes back to something we’ve talked about so many other times through the length of this podcast, which are work from home, remote work is not going away. Plans that you’re making now to increase productivity, to increase efficiency, all of these things these aren’t just short-term plans, you’re making long-term plans so keep your eye on what is happening in the regulation and legal area aspects of this entire process.
Pete:
Yeah. And I don’t want to come off as if I think all monitoring software is bad. It’s not a, this is bad, but I think it can be used as a tool but not necessarily be the be-all, end-all. I’m only going to manage my folks based on these numbers. If you see patterns, obviously, that can be very beneficial. I think along those lines, I think you need to start talking to your folks and asking them. Okay, so you’re working from home. What are some things I can be doing as your manager to help you with your productivity? What can I be doing to serve you? And that goes back to some previous discussions.
Pete:
We had this podcast on the idea of servant leadership. The leader is asking, what can we do? What can I help you with to help you become more productive, right? Challenge your people like that. You’d be surprised what you hear. Yeah. The reason why I’m doing X, Y and Z is because I don’t know, my external monitor is broke. Oh, well, we probably should get you another monitor. What? Sometimes this simple things don’t come to light without probing your people on what they need to be better.
Todd:
Yeah. It’s very true. And as you started talking there about monitoring it occurred to me that we haven’t really defined what monitoring is. There are many, many different ways that employers can monitor their employees. There are software programs that can log keystrokes. There are software programs that can take screenshots at various times. There are software that can monitor the web browsing and what applications you’re using and the usage of different applications. And then there’s the more nefarious side where there’s cameras that can be turned on and recorded. And you also have some types of companies and again, this may not be bad where location is important, in understanding where the location of your assets are, or employees, a lot of people put those in vehicles.
Todd:
And again, like you said, not all monitoring is bad. You have an expensive vehicle that you do deliveries on, or you go visit clients on, that’s totally logical to make sure you want to know where that vehicle is for multiple reasons. But the part where we’re talking about is, a distributed workforce and using monitoring technology because you don’t necessarily have the right culture or the right skill set to manage remote employees and to get them the tools and the resources they need. And that’s the other thing that we haven’t talked about a lot too, is, there’s so many tools out there. There’s productivity, not productivity tools. There’s collaboration tools, there’s communication tools, there’s software. And at JMARK, we just recently in the last month we invested a bunch of money into a new software program.
Todd:
And the purpose was to better align sales and marketing and to help us be more productive and speed the communication and the collaboration and just the information flow. And that’s an example of JMARK investing in the right kind of solution, which was not inexpensive but it’s the right solution to help us be successful. And that’s a great example in my opinion of using technology in the right way to help your people be successful and be productive. But when you use technology as a heavy handed guilt trip to make employees be more productive, I think you get the opposite.
Pete:
Hey, Todd, I know some times when people talk about monitoring, they also talk about security. I’d like to bring that up is the topic of using monitoring software to maybe either establish or monitor security within their networks. Does anyone have any thoughts on that?
Todd:
Yeah, definitely. Security is one of the biggest problems right now. It’s one of the biggest risks in any business. And there has to be software on a computer that monitors the security, that monitors some aspects of employee behavior. The aspects of employee behavior in terms of clicking on links and clicking on emails and what happens with the files. And so for our JMARK, we have many different monitoring tools that monitor things like, are all of a sudden, do you have bunch of files moving from one place to another that could indicate a ransomware attack? Or is the employee trying to execute an executable file that they shouldn’t be, or they don’t normally do as part of their job? And that system will stop that before it becomes a problem.
Todd:
And so monitoring for the sake of security is absolutely necessary in my opinion. But where you use that to invade on the privacy and again, you affect the morale and the culture, that’s where you’re cross a line. But employees need to know from a security standpoint that, they’re going to be monitored and to make sure that the system stays safe and that the company stays safe and secure.
Dax:
And I think this is another place where we talk about this all the time, where we circle back around to employ a security training so that they understand we’re monitoring these actions because these are the consequences that could occur if something goes wrong and you’re teaching them. And you’re also, again, like your employees are your first line of defense and also your weakest link when it comes to security. You’re training them in conjunction with all of the software that you’re using for security and you’re making entire company more secure. In the end, it comes back to what you talk about again, which is the outcome. You’ve got a better outcome in that situation.
Pete:
It actually said the magic word to me, the three letter word, why? Explaining to folks why certain monitoring is in place. Why do I have to authenticate this way and that way, right? Why do I have to do all these different things? Because we have that at JMARK. It’ll be beautiful, I can click one thing, have a secure and get what I need but you have to balance those things between usability and security. But again, I think you nailed it is advice for business owners. Explain why we have things in place. What the benefit is to the company, how it benefits the employee?
Pete:
Talk about the links. What’s the benefit to me? I don’t want to be the guy that brings the company down. I want these measures in place so it’s another level of protection. If I accidentally do something wrong, at least there’s a system there to help me. That’s a good thing. Now, if you don’t tell me that, if you don’t tell me why I have these things on my machine, I’m like, oh, I see the comp is just monitoring, because you don’t trust me. It’s a very different thought process, in my opinion.
Christina:
Yeah. [crosstalk 00:21:55] trusted by your company, that’s a complete culture killer like we talked about earlier. And I mean, culture is always important but right now people are so stressed out. Now is not the time to add extra stress on top of your employees. That’s not going to make their productivity any better.
Todd:
That is perfect. It’s so true. And Dax and I have had this conversations so many times every week when we’re getting ready to think about a prospect email or something else we’re doing, this comes into play. And we’ve had COVID and elections and the holidays now. And the funny thing that Dax and I were talking about is nothing has ended. It just keeps like continuing and piling on top, you know? And so people are feeling overwhelmed with everything. And I think that’s a great point on trust, is employees need to understand and give people the benefit of the doubt that they want to do what is best for the organization. Now, a popular term is trust, but verify, which is totally fine. You verify through outcomes, you verify through what is completed and what is accomplished. And you understand what the employee is going through, whether it’s on a personal side or on the business side.
Todd:
Are they getting pulled in a bunch of different directions by different people in other departments? Are they getting … Are there other projects that they’re involved in that I don’t realize they’re in? And that’s where this moves from a conversation of trust to just leadership, good leadership. And I think that’s another thing that people need to consider right now is we’re moving into a new world. A new world where the majority of people are working remotely, or at least working remotely at some of the time. Do we have the leaders and managers in place? Do they have the training involved to understand and work with remote users and understand how to lead remotely? Because that is a very different strategy and very different tactics than gathering everybody together in a room and talking through something and this conversation of privacy and all those other things really come back to outcomes and trust and leadership.
Pete:
What is the first step then for companies? They know that they want to for their folks in networking, whether it’s completely remote or some hybrid and managers are a little bit worried that they’re not going to get the same level of productivity. They’re investigating different tools and rightfully so, they want the best for the company. But what would you recommend first and foremost companies start doing to answer these difficult questions about privacy, about what tools are right about company culture, about leadership, where do they start?
Todd:
Well, we’d happen to have this handy dandy little guide.
Pete:
I promise I did not know that, this was not a set up question. Please tell me about that. I didn’t –
Todd:
No, I just started laughing when you started saying that because we have this guide called the remote … I don’t remember what it’s called now. Remote workforce guide.
Dax:
Mobilization is the word.
Pete:
Okay.
Todd:
That talks through a lot of these things. But I think the real answer in this is the answer with a lot of technology problems. Is it just depends. That’s why we talk about important partners and we talk about making sure you have people that can help you navigate these things, because what is right for a bank in terms of monitoring, in terms of security, in terms of privacy is nothing near what is right for a manufacturer. And what is right for a healthcare company is not the same as what’s right for a law firm. And so it’s a very different conversation with all of these.
Todd:
It may be that security is actually pretty good in your organization. You may not realize it. Is security and maybe there’s just these other things, like some training that your employees need on security or some training your leaders need on working with remote people. But I hate to give a non-answer, but the truth is that the answer could be so different to so many different people. That’s why it’s important to have partners like JMARK that can come in, ask the right questions, implement the right technology and the right solutions to help you be successful.
Pete:
Yeah, that makes sense.
Dax:
Yes. Yeah. I think that also you have to define the outcomes that you want. We talk about outcomes and I think so often that even the best companies can sometimes fall into this trap where your outcomes become sort of nebulous. We want to improve efficiency but what does that mean? What are the specifics of that? And sometimes that takes some time. Sometimes you have to take a look and take a bit of time to take a look and track things and figure out what efficiency even means for your particular company. Not just like Todd pointed out from industry to industry, those things are going to vary, apart from company to company and the way your people work. But you need to define those things that you have something specific that you know you’re trying to achieve or else you’re never going to reach a goal that is so vague as be more efficient.
Pete:
Yeah Dax, I think about it, I’m a football guy. I was watching the Steelers and Ravens last night. I was thinking, imagine if you didn’t know how far away the goal was, you literally did not have it defined and you’re at the 40 yard line. How far is the field? Well, I don’t know, somewhere between 40 and 70 yards, it would be insane. I think that goes to what you’re saying is really getting down to the nitty gritty of what success looks like. And I want to just touch on that, not just outcomes in terms of productivity but what about your people? What are the outcomes look like for your organization culturally, right? How do you want your folks to feel? Are they waking up in the morning, Monday morning excited to come to work? Not to pat myself on the back, I am. I’m looking forward to it.
Pete:
Let’s go, challenge. Get to hang out with my friends, talk about technology and they pay me to do this. This didn’t happen by accident. It’s been a very deliberate cultural thing we’ve done. It’s not perfect but our outcome is we want folks to consider JMARK the best place to work. And I think a lot of companies want that. I think when you’re making these goals and these outcomes, it’s not just about production, it is how your people are feeling. Do they feel so in tune with their company that they would never go anywhere else? Concern I have is with the use of remote work, it’s a lot easier for companies to possibly poach, right? Because now you’re not limited to one geographic location. Exactly, what is your company doing to retain the talent? I think that’s an important piece of that.
Christina:
Yeah. And I would say constantly reevaluating these things too, checking in because things are constantly changing right now so you have to keep up with it.
Dax:
Yeah. I want to add just like you talked about, the culture and again, this is something that I personally feel like, can I ever be stressed enough that a great culture and employees who are excited to come to work are always going to outperform those employees that are not, regardless of the measures that you try to put in to kind of force people to work, happy people are productive people.
Christina:
And I would add to that, if you feel like you’re being watched in your own home, you’re not going to be in that group of people who’s excited to come to work in the morning. That’s scary.
Pete:
Yeah. And I think if a company wants to implement some of these different monitoring tools, I would recommend having a very open discussion about why and what the outcomes look like and why they’re doing that. And just talk to the people about it. Because again, it’s about that trust. It’s about bringing your people in to have these difficult, these important conversations. Again, all these things tied to culture and build trust. I might not like every decision being made but I certainly appreciate the fact that a company is trying to explain to me why they’re doing it. It’s a very different approach and how you got this modern software, deal with it. I’ll deal with it for my job, but man, I’m not going to be too happy about it. I’m not going to be doing backflips.
Todd:
Yeah. The one thing that came to mind too is one of the negative outcomes that comes from monitoring when you don’t know what you’re doing is the resource requirements internally on the network. For example, there were years ago, I just remembered this where it was a different company and it was a law firm that asked us to install a special monitoring software on all of the computers and this software logged keystrokes. It took snapshots of the screen at intervals. And what that really meant on the background was a whole, whole, whole, whole lot of storage space. They had maybe 50 employees in this law firm and so massive amounts of data. What are you going to do with this data? Where’s it going to store it? Is it cost-effective to store it all?
Todd:
How are we going to process the data? Is it just there for compliance reasons or is it there for checking on and make sure people are working because there are different tools for compliance and different tools for productivity. And so if somebody wants to install something, a solution like that, just for the sake of making sure their employees are working. There could be massive amounts of costs that they’re not even considering and time, which is money, that they’re not even considering. But if they come to the solution provider and say, hey, we have this problem. We need … There are certain employees in our organization that we have to have really good records for legal reasons because of there interacting with clients. Then you can tailor a solution that will fit that desired outcome along with the desired outcome of, I don’t want to pay a zillion bazillion dollars to have this solution that just monitors my employees to see if they’re working.
Todd:
And so that’s an important to remember too, as going back to the original outcomes, the point and part of the outcomes, I think is, are they really the outcomes you want? Because there’s many times I’ve gone through goal planning processes and we have a goal stated and then we realized that the way that it’s written is not really what we want. We don’t want productivity. We want profitability, we don’t want to … that’s the kind of discussion I think we have to have.
Pete:
Yeah, Todd what’s even more dangerous is not even looking back at a goal goal. That’s not exactly what we wanted, but achieving the goal and it being the wrong goal that was actually achieved, spend all the time and resources on it. Yeah, I think that’s a really great point of is talking to someone that knows the difference between, is it something for legal reasons? Is it that something to monitor, right? It can be taxing on the system. And like you said, the processing of that data, who’s going to do it? How often are you going to do it? What are their hours then we doing? What are all the exceptions to it? Do you need to bring more people in? It’s a big discussion. I think it’s a lot bigger than just grabbing some software and say, I’m monitoring my folks at this point.
Dax:
I think Todd and Pete, you guys can speak to this much better than I could. But it also occurred to me as Todd was talking about the strain that it puts on your network and on your entire system but there are certainly security considerations every time you add a new piece of software, something new to your technology stack as well, right?
Todd:
Yeah, absolutely.
Pete:
Yeah, 100%.
Todd:
Nothing just goes on and doesn’t cost anything. And that’s what a lot of people don’t realize is that, and that’s why solutions like JMARK or companies like JMARK are needed because you want this solution to do such and such, but you don’t realize that there are underlying problems with it, like security, for example. Does it open up holes in the network? Does it require a lot of traffic between people interacting in the software? Well, now that people are distributed, will it even work in a distributed environment? Will people be able to click on the software and get all the data they need in different places without lag time from people working from home with possibly worse internet connections? And so there’s all of these things to consider with everything and that’s one of the reasons why we’ve talked about like at JMARK, when we have a software that comes into the organization, it goes through a vetting process.
Todd:
We look at the company, we look at their security, we look at their policies. We try to understand, are they secure and will they help our organization? We had one company we were looking at and I don’t remember their name, but we were looking at an integration piece between a couple of our softwares that would help a lot with improving the data and the security. And we asked them what they do for security and they gave us answers like, “Well, and security is really important to us”. And that’s a true story. We’ve had this over and over, where people are … we find out companies are in their mom’s basement and there security is important. There’s lots of strain on different things in a network that can happen from just a simple software. Okay.
Pete:
Absolutely, Todd. JMARK we use one of the major tools we use to really increase engagement is Facebook workplace. I was wondering to get your thoughts on how workplace can be used in terms of a type of monitoring. That’s maybe not as intrusive as some of the solutions possibly.
Todd:
Well, I don’t consider workplace or any tool like that monitoring in any shape or form. To me, it’s a tool for collaboration. It’s a tool for communication and I can … Not saying I should do this, but I can go downstairs and get some food and answer a message from Dax or Christina or whoever in workplace. And I can review posts and different things like that. But the point of it is it’s a solution that we’ve talked about before. It’s increased our velocity. It’s increased our decision-making, it’s increased our collaboration, it’s increased our communication. And that has so many amazing benefits in and of itself. I don’t think we have people thinking, I wonder if our employees are productive.
Pete:
Right. Maybe when I said monitoring, some things you look at is engagement. For example, engagement levels. That might be one tool a supervisor might take a look at, why is this employee not communicating with their team, for example rather than watching what they’re clicking. I think that’s maybe a way that a supervisor could see and it just kind of monitor the types of conversations going back and forth and how they can assist them to be even more productive based on those conversations you’re talking about.
Dax:
Yeah. I can actually speak to this from personal experience from when I first began at JMARK, Todd mentioned clear back at the 20 minutes ago that I come from a background of creative work and I’m used to doing work used to sort of like wandering away from my computer to think. You talked about people pacing the house and that kind of thing. And walking down to get my mail in the middle of the day, just cause I need time to think. And I remember right as when I came to JMARK, this was the first time I had an experience with something like workplace by Facebook, where we have chats that is always open and available and ongoing conversations that are happening. And so it wasn’t on my radar to make sure that I was paying attention to that and being in sync and being available when people had questions and stuff.
Dax:
And I remember like right after I started, there was a time when somebody had sent me a message and I hadn’t responded and they contacted Todd and they were like, “Hey, I haven’t … Dax hasn’t responded to me for a while, have you heard from him, is everything okay?” And it wasn’t even a concern of whether or not I was working. It was more from a like, is everything okay? He hasn’t responded type of thing. And so Todd called me up and said, “Hey.” And that was the eye-opener to me, that I needed to be available and to be, and it got me more instinct and I think that’s been something that there was no moment when we sat down and anybody said, “Hey, let’s all be in sync and be working at the same time and paying attention to what everybody’s doing.” But it just happened organically because of the way that workplaces allowed us to do that.
Todd:
I think though, too. That if you’re not careful, that is the point where it all starts. This going down this negative road of, I got to be available all the time. It doesn’t matter if I’m in a meeting, I need to answer chat. If I’m talking on the phone with somebody, I need to be available. And that’s where people need to change their mindset of just because they’re not answering me right now in whatever form of communication, whether that’s phone, email, chat, doesn’t mean they’re not productive and doing something. Maybe look at their calendar, at the end of every meeting, maybe just give them a benefit for the doubt. But I think that that kind of goes into the whole conversation we’ve had. So –
Dax:
Todd, I just think that the final point of that is it’s worth noting that you and I actually had a conversation right there, Todd, at that time about meeting that middle ground that Pete has talked about a few times today. I was like, okay, Dax, how do you work? And here’s how other people work, let’s find out and make sure that everybody’s, the methods and manner in which everybody work is achieving those goals and working for all the parties involved.
Todd:
I think this actually brings up a little bit of a different topic, but kind of on the same vein is this idea of expectations and productivity in communication because that can lead somebody down this path of, are my employees being productive? When there’s a message that your boss is trying to find out from you but you’re in another meeting or you’re dealing with something really important and you don’t respond to him or her right away, we have to be careful that that doesn’t lead us down a path of, are they productive? Because there are times I’ve gotten in chats with triple question marks, which in my mind is like, holy cow, it’s an emergency. I need to answer this but I haven’t been able to and so there’s, I think it’s an interesting topic that we can be our own worst enemy and we can lead our company down this path that will ultimately not get us to where we want to go if we’re not careful. Great conversation, Christina, can you give us the scoop?
Christina:
Yes. Okay. First word that I decided on for our discussion today is clarity. Clarity, like Pete said, reduces stress. You need to be clear with your people on expectations of what success looks like for their role specifically. That brings me to productivity, which we talked a lot about. You basically can’t really put a blanket productivity measurement system over your entire company when it’s going to look different for each role. Like Dax mentioned, for a creative role, productivity can literally be pacing the room brainstorming. And then that ties directly into outcomes. It’s the outcome at the end of the day that matters so that process looks different for every role.
Christina:
And then last but certainly not least kind of the whole entire point is using technology in the right way. When you use it as like a scare tactic for your employees to try to get them to be more productive, you’re basically doing the opposite. And at the end of the day, it’s still important to put your resources into the right technology tools.
Todd:
Awesome. Well, thanks everybody for a great conversation. Please contact JMARK, go to our website, jmark.com or give us a call, shoot us a message and let us know how we can help your organization be successful and be ready for the coming changes in whatever changes are coming. Take care.
Speaker 1:
Thank you for attending this podcast. We hope it has been informative and help convey that at JMARK, we are people first and technology, second. To learn more and discover additional content relevant to your business, please visit us online at jmark.com or at LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. You may also call us at 84444 JMR. Thank you for your time. And we look forward to seeing you again.
