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As a manager, how can I ensure my employees
are productive as they work from home?
This is Paul Hill with Utah State University Extension.
I'm an extension associate professor,
and I develop remote work curriculum and courses.
While I think remote work is the future of work,
I believe really that asynchronous communication
is an even more important factor when
you're dealing with productivity, especially team
productivity, whether your team is
remote and everyone's working from home,
or you're all in the same office.
Asynchronous communication is when
you send a message without expecting
an immediate response.
For example, I text you, or I email you,
or I call and leave a voicemail.
And I'm not expecting a response immediately.
Whereas synchronous communication
is when you send a message and the recipient
processes that information and responds immediately.
This could be in-person communication,
or this could be like a live chat.
For instance, like using Slack.
And one thing that we learn about this
in this entire concept of asynchronous
versus synchronous communication is that in a Harvard Business
Review article, it was entitled "Collaborative Overload,"
the time employees spend on collaboration
has actually increased 50% over the past two decades.
And as we've seen with communication and all
the different communication technologies that we have,
of course that's the case.
And the researchers in this study
found it was not uncommon for workers to actually spend
upwards of around 80% of their workdays
communicating with colleagues in the form of email, meetings,
as well as using Slack, and sending 200 messages a day,
a thousand messages per week.
So this trend towards near constant communication
means that the average knowledge worker,
which is someone that, as a manager
you're allowing to work from home.
They have to organize their workday
around multiple meetings, with time
in between spent distracted with one eye on email,
and then another eye on like Slack, or the other messaging
services.
So this highly synchronous way of working
would be understandable if it produced results, right?
But there is more and more evidence
that all this real-time communication overhead
makes it hard to focus and it drains your employees'
mental resources.
And generally makes it more difficult to make
meaningful progress at work.
And so one of the biggest issues is interruptions.
So interruptions, they split your employees' attention,
and they make it more difficult to make
meaningful progress on work.
So high value, cognitively demanding
activities like coding, or writing, or video editing,
designing, and strategizing, and creating solutions to problems,
this requires long periods of deep, focused work,
uninterrupted.
And synchronous communication makes
creating large uninterrupted chunks of time
during the workday literally impossible.
And so examples of deep work and shallow work.
So deep work is drafting a plan for a new feature in an app,
or writing a technical science paper, or content
for your blog or your website, or reviewing products.
And preparing for an upcoming presentation.
Or even just researching problems in a workflow
that need solutions.
So those are examples of deep work.
Whereas shallow work could be things
like processing your email in your inbox,
responding in chat if someone has a question that they don't
know an answer to, and you just respond or provide
a link, or something like that.
Making phone calls to arrange things
like logistics of what time should the meeting be,
and just providing status updates on where you're at.
That's more the shallow work.
And that can end up taking 80% of our day
and not allowing us to do the things that create real value.
And so what I will say is as you're
going through looking for ways for you
to manage your employees to look at the 70-30 rule.
You might have heard of the 80-20 rule.
This is the 70-30 rule.
So 70% asynchronous time, and 30% of synchronous time
a week for your employees.
And that can be overall in the week or certain days.
In general, you want to think of synchronous communication
when you need to build rapport with your employees,
when you need to provide critical feedback
or discuss sensitive topics.
Or even when you're brainstorming and coming up
with solutions, or figuring out what
are the variables to bring everyone
on the same page at the same time.
Of course, when a crisis happens, when a server crashes,
or when there's a global pandemic
going on, synching up and coming together
synchronously in meetings face to face or virtually,
those are good times.
But you want to be considerate and understand
that synchronous communication should be the exception, not
the rule.
And I'll say that again.
Synchronous communication should be the exception, not the rule.
And a lot of times, we've got that flipped.
We think that every--
we should be meeting face to face constantly.
But this, again, it blocks the time
for asynchronous work, which allows
us to do the deep work that creates
value for your business.
And so if you look at the 70-30, follow that rule,
and adjust schedules, and make sure to limit
those interruptions with employees and not requiring
them to be on Slack all the time,
or in face-to-face virtual Zoom meetings,
you're going to be able to ensure that your employees are
productive, just as productive at home as they are at work.
Thank you.
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