It’s been years at Hilsoft that I try and experiment with the most effective and efficient way of making our team productive and deliver results to our customers.
As the founder and operator at the same time, I tried so many tools from Assembla, Jira, Asana, Trello, Basecamp, Notion, and more as the nature of my work are field sales/consulting, field product implementation and at the same time monitoring remotely the progress of our team in the office.
Two years ago when I contemplated converting our team to a work from home setup due to traffic in Manila but the old-school thinking was the reason I have not executed the idea.
Some form of adversity or challenge will indeed motivate you to innovate and take action. Mid last year, pre-COVID-19 pandemic when a major shareholder decided to pull the plug and so I had no choice but to be conservative.
I figured I had to change. First, I reverted to our company DNA which is being customer-centric instead of a product company. Our success in our first decade as a company was because of our service-oriented nature and doing everything for the customer. It changed uncontrollably due to my desire to grow but fortunately, I was able to bring it back.
My second action was to take inventory of our current resources, culture, expenses, and put some metrics on it to be able to objectively decide on what things to let go.
From those challenges when I was able to define an effective remote work policy. It was an amazing discovery, which now I call Hilsoft Commitment Workflow.
So in this post, I am going to breakdown our secret workflow, hoping that I can help small businesses to easily adopt and define their remote work policy and be productive. This is the second method I talked about in my previous post.
Secret #1 – Let go of time-based monitoring. We’ve been used to time-in and time-out monitoring process and this culture only promote unengaged employees. We do implement a time-in process via Slack, but it is just to notify the team that you are online and available.
This is a little tricky because we require our team to be available on day time due to customer support during work hours so we implement a one hour response time. It is like the team’s internal SLA.
These response times are monitored and serve as one variable in their performance KPI. At 5:30 pm, the team submits a status report of their tasks (we call them commitments), with their roadblocks and a request to work overtime if necessary.
Secret #2 – Define tasks clearly with acceptance criteria. Since we are mostly programmers, we digest tasks from user stories or customization requests from our customers. Each team lead defines the tasks’ acceptance criteria. Acceptance criteria can be a high-level design and a test script.
For other functions, sales, for example, can have a task such as book meetings and their acceptance criteria can be 3 meetings for the week.
An HR or admin function can have a manpower sourcing task and its acceptance criteria are 5 interviews for the week.
Secret #3 – Secure the team’s commitment. Once acceptance criteria are set, ask the members to assess them and ask for their commitment. This should be an open dialogue between the team. A team member should not commit to it if he or she has clarifications and team leaders should be empathetic on the commitment date. The final form of a commitment is the task summary, acceptance criteria, and commitment date.
Secret #4 – Be open to commitment adjustments. There’s no such thing as a perfect plan. I always say that if things always go as planned, then we don’t need managers. The role of a manager is to manage risks, roadblocks, and motivate people hence commitment adjustments are a good culture to practice if executed correctly.
Team members should initiate the adjustment request with their roadblock details and justifications and team leaders should assess and validate them. They may agree to work overtime instead of adjusting the commitment or the team lead may have a quick resolution to avoid the adjustment. This is also good practice so we can notify customers ahead if adjustments are made.
Secret #5 – Measure. In our case, a commitment is not limited to one task. It is a batch of tasks called Job Order. A commitment can be as short as one week or as long as three weeks. On every delivery of commitment, the team leader has to validate them based on acceptance criteria and in the end score the commitment based on quality and timeliness.
At the end of the month, we have a summary of performance based on their KPI and we can quickly figure out what to do. This is where the company’s rewards, incentives, and code of conduct comes in.
Commitment-based monitoring is definitely more effective instead of installing time-monitoring apps and screed recording apps. It is not only more productive but promotes employee engagement and trust.
There are so many online collaboration tools we can use to monitor this type of productivity workflow. I recommend Ticktick.
For now, the last secret I want to tell you is that we are currently developing an app for this remote productivity workflow, and hoping to help companies adopt the remote work culture to secure survival and growth as this has already been a new norm.