Performance Management: A Remote Take

In various sectors, the U.S. economy is experiencing a transformation, one that has seen a great deal of traditionally centralized productivity migrate to thousands upon thousands of home offices throughout the country. Put simply, remote work has become increasingly viable for many employees and financially/logistically attractive for certain employers in recent years. And while on-site work is hardly at risk of disappearing entirely (construction, surgery, policing, and catering tend to be incompatible with the remote work phenomenon, as you might imagine), scores of job categories are ideally suited for a measure of professional autonomy. In this context, such autonomy invites a detailed reexamination of employment expectations, which sets the stage for reliable, practical, and truly comprehensive performance management.

While remote work might carry with it several attractive benefits (both measurable and anecdotal) for the employee, its implementation must also be undertaken in the interest of company health, profitability, competitive strength, etc. Should the latter falter due to inadequate performance management, the former may be rightly deemed unsustainable.

A sensible strategy in the realm of remote work is one attended by an intelligently designed performance management program, one that fosters purposeful and sustained engagement between managers and their personnel. When such programs adhere to the objective and key results (OKR) template, their subsequent findings are likely to prove highly accurate and, of equal importance, useful to the manager. Better still are data-driven programs which utilize advanced technology to convey insightful reporting.

Employment and management models must be frequently reformulated to accommodate all manner of challenges, developments, and expectations. This is the case for both consumer-facing and internal business considerations and certainly extends to personnel management and training. All that being so, there are plenty of good reasons to incorporate an advanced OKR platform into your employee growth and accountability system. Evaluated in this moment, all indications suggest a continued shift towards remote work throughout the coming years. With the growing concern surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, the case for it becomes seemingly more defensible, though even a severe exigency is not necessarily adequate to produce lasting cultural change (welcome or otherwise).

If your company is likely to follow suit with respect to employing a partially or entirely remote workforce at some point, implementing a comprehensive performance management model will inevitably proceed beyond advisable to become plainly essential, assuming the model is predicated on an OKR blueprint utilizing a nexus of data, software tools, and engagement resources.