The real opportunity behind work from home

Many things have been said about work-from-home policies. It’s been almost a year now, employees have been forced to grab their laptops and work from home, with no clear sight of when this will be over.

As soon as we open our browser we are overwhelmed by thousands of articles from all the corners of the internet with self-proclaimed experts sharing tips about how we should work from home.

Cutting through the noise and overlooking advice like “tell your manager if you go to the bathroom”, we can say that the most meaningful work from home policy is: “We Trust You”.

It includes collective responsibility, ownership, and makes all employees feel treated like actual adults.

And that’s a good thing.

But, honestly speaking, employers have little to choice other than make sure employees are responsible people and will work like a normal day at the office, even if none is watching.

What most discussions are missing is that work from home will accelerate the shift from a time-based work relationship to a delivery-based employment model.

Yes, most of us already have objectives, performance frameworks and goals we must achieve. But in most companies and in many non-commercial departments, the actual quantification of these objectives is far from perfect. And still, time, our 8 hours a day, the “how long” we work every day, is a cornerstone of our employment model.

What if this could be an opportunity to completely shift to a Goal-based model? A workday that ends when you deliver everything you must deliver?

From time-based employment to (an actual) goal-based model

Delivery based models were developed for remote employees in the tech space long before the pandemic.

Now that no manager can actually be sure of how many hours did you work, we are seeing a big push from executives on task management tools, performance tracking software and so on.

And that’s an opportunity.

An opportunity to make delivery-based performance stronger, clearer, and fairer. And if that happens, why should we care about how many hours we stick to our laptops if the work is properly done?

Even if in some progressive companies this is already a reality, we might wait many many years for employment laws to slowly (if ever) adapt to disruptive changes like this one.

At the end of the day, all companies have been trying to push to a goal-based model, where what matters is what you deliver. But only a few actually succeed in making measurable objectives a reality in all departments and at all levels.

Now that all employees are out of sight, this can be the right opportunity to actually make that happen.