March 9, 2022
You’ve enjoyed the perks for a couple of years now. You can wear sweatpants, switch a load of laundry while on a meeting, and make yourself a delicious lunch in your kitchen. You can say “Hi” to the kids when they get home from school. You are happier, but are you more productive at work?
There have been many estimates that have been publicized showing people who started working remotely were more productive.
But here is an important question YOU need to be certain of, “Does my manager believe that I am more productive working remotely?”
The change from working in an office with many other people to working remotely shifts perceptions of productivity by managers. When working in our office full of other colleagues, occasionally, you would have a task that you wanted an associate to work on. You would walk out of your office, see the associate feverishly working on something, and think to yourself, “They look very busy. I guess I will just do this myself.” Working remotely, occasionally, we send a colleague an email, do not get an instant reply, and wonder, “What are they doing?” One of the problems with working remotely is that your manager cannot see how hard you are working or understand the problems you encounter.
To better understand managers’ perceptions on the productivity of their direct reports, my colleague Jack Zenger and I looked at ratings of 11,103 individual contributors on a skills assessment completed before the beginning of the pandemic. We compared that data to ratings from 1,094 individual contributors in the pandemic where the majority of employees were working remotely.
Each manager rated team members on 59 behaviors that most effectively differentiated the highest from the lowest-performing individual contributors.
We have seen a number of reports that productivity has increased in the pandemic but found that, in this case, the productivity ratings of managers were significantly lower. The pre-pandemic average rating was 50.54, and the pandemic rating was 47.51 (t-value 3.98, Sig. 0.000).
At first, these results surprised us because of the number of reports we had read indicating productivity had increased for employees working remotely. But this rating is not productivity. It is the PERCEPTION of productivity by managers.
Not every individual contributor was rated lower in the pandemic on productivity.
The productivity rating had a range from 1 to 5. Looking at only data collected in the pandemic, we compared those given low ratings on productivity (e.g., 1, 2, or 3) to those with high ratings (e.g., 5) on the 59 behaviors in the assessment. The results demonstrated the behaviors that most effectively differentiated a team member that was perceived by their manager as being productive from those who were rated as unproductive.
We surveyed a group in the middle of the pandemic and asked how many people wanted to return to the office. Only 7% of the employees wanted to go back to the office full-time. If you are one of those people that tried remote work, loved it, and want to continue, then you need to demonstrate to your manager that you are productive. Engaging in a few of the above list of behaviors will have a positive impact, and hopefully, you may be able to continue to work remotely.
—Joe Folkman Connect with Joe Folkman on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook.
(This article first appeared on Forbes)
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