Remote working and effectiveness: moving from onsite control to performance management

François Toulotte Senior Manager

How to follow up and ensure employees are efficient and perform effectively their work remotely? If on site work was a guarantee for managers, and could give them the impression of managing personal and collective activities, the rise of remote working shows the importance of developing and anchoring a management performance culture and practices

Managing performance is having the right tools to organize and measure the company’s objectives’ achievements

Performance management is an approach aiming at:

Conceiving a vision and defined shared objectives (for all the levels of the company). Those objectives can be based on different components, on which the company’s, teams’, or employee’s performance will be assessed (partners and client satisfaction, operational excellence, CSR…)

2. Guide employees and managers by giving them the ability to achieve those objectives in the most efficient way, on an self and collective level.

The challenges of the French companies: establish a performance culture

Since the 2017 Macron’s orders simplifying its use, remote working is gaining ground. However, before first French quarantine, only 25% of remote workers were counted, according to a Malakoff Médéric study in 2019. The onsite culture, still very anchored in companies, believes that the onsite presence is a pre-requisite for good performance . The transition between an onsite culture to a performance culture is key to put in place an effective distant management.

The performance culture is not about the performance itself. It is rather a mean to establish shared values between a company, creating a fertile ground in favor of the implementation of performance management. This latter offers legitimacy to managers and employees and the needed support for their initiatives.

It is clear that, for example, including shared values for a company that aims to implementing a performance management is fundamental:

Goodwill

Measuring performance against objectives shouldn’t be the alarm of a future sanction but as a signal resulting on actions. This way, performance management is not experienced as a source of stress but as a means of dialogue

Performance as a tool not as a purpose

It must be possible to talk about it and consider possible development areas in a discussion between a manager and an employee

Being outspoken

Interactions must be constructive and should be a taboo on ‘what isn’t’

Key Succes Key Factors to be ncluded in a performance culture

Manager is key for self and collective engagements around performance

The manager is key for performance management as he/she is in charge of reading into the companies’ strategic objectives to adapt them in operational objectives. This way of thinking must be led at a collective and self-level for each member of his/her team.

Being a driving force in the daily performance management, the manager will also ensure that his/her team are on track in this strategy by allowing them to understand the role they need to play as a team and as an individual.

This step has a very important role in remote working as it will give sense, motivation and guidance to the most scattered team activities and to employees away from their managers.

Manager is key for self and collective engagements around performance

For example, if the company sets its strategic ambition to be recognized for client satisfaction, the adaptation into a team’s operational objectives could be:

On a collective scale: achieve a 90% satisfaction rate on clients’ surveys
On an individual scale: give a reliable answer to queries in the given period by ensuring the client feels recognized and listened to.

One of the manager’s mail challenge in implementing remote working is to establish motivating engagements with each team member and ensuring a coherent system. This way, he/she will make sure of the collective/ self-performance, independently from the work mode of each team member (onsite or remote)

The manager will then be asked to manage activities and ensure on a regular basis that actions will lead to expected results, linked to the given operational objectives. It has to be noted that the expansion of remote working requires to regularly put in perspective the team’s progress. (management indicators are shared and updated for example)

To sum up, there are 3 bases for actions leading to a ‘collective performance’: the teams’ organization, its management and daily facilitation.

Collective performance management pillars

Because collective performance relies on, amongst others, performance and self-engagement, it must also be a way to make employees grow with tailored objectives and guidance.

It must be emphasized that operational effectiveness is a fundamental component in a companies’ performance management and it relies on the manager’s capabilities, notably by inspiring a positive culture and putting in place engaging and concreate means. However, those conditions will be materialized only if the manager, beyond the challenges of activities’ operational follow up, unites the employees around the companies’ vision.

As a ‘HR’ manager, his/her role is to create and bring to life the right conditions for this engagement via a shared meaning. Furthermore, it is key, when talking about companies’ performance to address the culture of innovation, which determines a secured long term performance. In regard to this, the management must act as a catalyst and facilitator of innovation and transversal ways of working for internal and external optimization.