You've probably seen the news articles in the last few months. Return-to-office because people can't connect & be productive & work efficiently remotely. 

Also, you've seen the trends of over-employment. A community of people maintains 2, even 3, or 4 full-time remote jobs. It is possible only because they don't work all their hours in either of their jobs. 

Yet, and I'm not alone in this feeling, all the leaders blame employees for this situation. 

I don't know about you, but this feeling makes me very f***ing angry. 

Ensuring that people have work to do and that what they do is meaningful, not just for the company but for them, is pretty much why we employ leaders and managers. 

So if this situation is management's fault, how can we improve that? What can we do to make people work

Today I will give you 5 tips on ensuring everyone in your team stays productive, regardless of their time or location.

Make operations transparent

The number one reason people "get away" without working is that we don't know what each other is doing.

Classic management's answer is to herd everyone back to the office. At least there, we could see each other. 

I don't want to start the debate on whether people were more productive in the office, but I know everyone had a "hot tab" on their desktop to open when a manager walked past them, showing that they were indeed working, not checking socials. Anyway.

By making operations transparent, we can see who is working on what and probably can have a good guess on timing as well. 

The team players

Managers don't know what people are working on because they are not part of the team. 

When operations & leadership experts say to leaders, "Be a team player, be part of the team," it is not just empty BS. It has practical side effects. 

If you are outside, you are guessing. If you are inside, you see. Yes, you can coach, mentor, and support your team in what they do. But you also see what they do.

Analytics is your friend

We trust what we see, so we must see how we work. Once we solve that, no one can get away with 1 hour of work full-time. 

People analytics is a trend for a reason. By adding analytics to your workplace, you can track how you work: get insights on the bottlenecks and see if you have resource issues.

The age-old output VS outcome debate

In some cases, we see people not working because they've already provided enough outcomes within a couple of hours. That brings us to the debate, which I am getting tired of highlighting, by the way, measuring the outcomes instead of the outputs.

High-performing individuals work FAST. And they deliver results FAST. If they do so, who cares if they won't sit around for 8hrs a day around you? 

The manager's job is to feed these people with problems they can solve. If there are no more problems to solve and people work only 2-4 hours to solve those, maybe you don't need those people for full-time.

Terms of employment

That leads us to the last point, the constant fetish of full-time people. I don't know where it comes from originally, but the "you can't build a team on a group of part-time people" is so dominant that it is hard to ignore.

It is simply not true.

If it somehow turns out that some of your team members deliver results but do not work full-time, then maybe you don't need full-time people. It is nothing wrong with people working part-time or fractional. 

But again, this is the job of the management to decide. Don't blame the employee for working part-time but scoring a full-time salary.

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It is funny that Adam Smith wrote his work hundreds of years ago, and we still need to remind people that everyone (including employees) naturally acts based on self-interest. 

If we are allowed to score full-time but work part-time, hell yeah, who wouldn't do that? You can do whatever you want with those free hours, work another job, spend more time with family, etc.

But it is a systematic error that we are allowed to do that. Much like booking a 1$ return cross-Atlantic flight because the booking software had a hiccup. 

Workplace systematic errors are operation dysfunctions. And it is the management who's running the operations. So ultimately, it is their fault if they have an error.

So stop blaming people and making them return to the office. Get your shit together and figure out how to work efficiently with a distributed, flexible workforce. It's on you, leaders.