Is Work At Home working?

To tell if you Work at Home program is working out, you ideally need measurements on how well the in-office situation was working out for comparison. Without these, most of your analysis of the situation will be based on conjecture and subjectivity. Not that conclusions cannot be made, but they won't have the WOW punch you're looking for.

Some measurements you should know about your team, regardless of your work location include:

• Engagement scores - Using some sort of periodic survey, through a 3rd party or your own, that measures how actively committed your associates are to your team, your product, your company, and your mission. 
• Sick days - Average number of unplanned time off for physical or mental health.
• Turnover - Average number of associates that leave your team in a given time period. Be careful with this measure! If an associate leaves because they received an internal promotion or opportunity based on their desired growth path and your support for them, that's not negative. Make sure you have a means to separate turnover into subcategories to tell those stories.
• Requisition Fulfillment Rate - Average length of time it takes to hire someone in to any open positions in your team.
• Diversity - This can be tricky. There's privacy issues involved. And you don't want to appear to be driven by a quota or some equal opportunity ratio. While you may not "measure" this, a diverse team is a stronger team, and worth bragging about. 
• Budget - Comparison of your actual spend to your budgeted cost, and how well you meet that budget (or hopefully come in under!)
• Delivery - Comparison of your actual delivery dates to your scheduled delivery dates, and how well you provide on-time service (or ahead of schedule).
• Quality - This can be two-fold. There are hard numbers, such as the number of incident tickets you receive, the amount of downtime, etc. But there are soft numbers, such as how well the service actual meets the customer's need, the ease of use, etc. Ideally, you would measure both.
• Net Promoter Scores - Customer loyalty metric, which basically assesses the likelihood that your customer would recommend your service.
• Customer Satisfaction Surveys - Other measures of how well you are meeting customer expectations, providing them with innovative solutions, being a trusted partner for their needs, and so on.

I'm sure you can think of more. For those thinking this doesn't apply because you don't sell a product or "face the public", I challenge you to open your minds a bit. Each of us is providing a service to someone else, a customer, or else you wouldn't have a job!

Now that you have all those numbers, what next? You should compare those numbers while you were in the office to the results after you have been at home for a while. Work at home should have a positive impact on at least one of those categories, while not negatively impacting any. If work at home is really working, you will see improvement in multiple categories and no setbacks. 

If you are seeing a little setback, you may be able to address this through education and support. Sometimes it takes a little while to get the hang of work at home, so don't be too quick to judge or overreact. But, if you are seeing multiple setbacks, or significant ones, it may be time to re-evaluate.

If everything is the same, where you've seen no setbacks but no gains, then it is still not working. Work at home should be driving something, or you wouldn't be doing it. You might as well stay in the office if you can't improve by being at home.

Manage by measuring

Probably the most popular question I hear from managers about working at home is "How will I know my people are working if I don't see them?" To this my answer is always the same: "How do you know they are working now?"

If you are managing only based on the fact that you see someone's smiling face at their desk from 8-5, then you are a bad manager. Yes, I said it. The truth hurts sometimes.

Management should always be based on measurement. You should have a system in place that allows you to set goals and track progress towards those goals. Those goals should be SMART goals and have enough meat to really hold someone accountable for their work. They should focus on delivery, quality, effectiveness, customer satisfaction, and value-add.

I've seen associates do all sorts of things while in visible distance from their leaders. They spend all day on Facebook. They moonlight with a 2nd job. They daydream and wander aimlessly just collecting a paycheck. They may even be trying to do a good job, but may not be competent or need help. If you aren't measuring from multiple viewpoints along the way, you won't catch it until it is too late and you could, in fact, bring yourself down as a result.

So riddle me this - Would you rather

1. See your team members but have no idea if they are really performing, or
2. Never see your team members but have high confidence in their performance based on tangible measurements?

Hopefully you answered #2! If you are truly doing your job as a manager and have a measurement system in place, then physical location becomes inconsequential.