SAN FRANCISCO–The coronavirus pandemic and work-from-home scenarios have quickly established a new maxim among American companies and credit unions–employees are just as productive, if not more so, when working from home. But is it true? One person is saying no, while also sharing five tips for boosting productivity.
Kristen Berman, a behavioral scientist, said the “promise of uncompromised productivity paired with freedom is alluring,” but added, “color me skeptical.”
Writing on FastCompany.com, Berman, who cofounded Irrational Labs, a behavioral economics design company, with Dan Ariely and who was on the founding team for the behavioral economics group at Google, observed that “while software can ostensibly replicate the features of an office, there are some underlying behavioral tricks that physical offices have mastered. We may not want to discard them so quickly.”
Where to Start
The first place to start is not-so-obvious, she said: habits.
Noting how often people complain about being unable to start new habits, Berman said, “There is a foolproof way for you to start a new habit, achieve your goals, and improve your life. Surprisingly, this system works across cultures. It’s known to everyone. You’ve even tried it. It’s called work.
“Work works,” wrote Berman. “It gets us to do small things (show up on time, respond to boring emails) and big things (launch new products that never existed before). It helps us create habits and track progress. It allows us to learn hard things quickly.”
Accountability Attributes
Berman said workplaces are basically a “giant group accountability system,” the attributes of which include:
- We sit next to our team members every day from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. We work on different tasks–right next to each other.
- We have daily or weekly meetings that ask team members to report everything they did yesterday and will do today.
- We have team meetings with key stakeholders that require presentations to be prepped weeks in advance.
- We have progress trackers that send out status reports on the project timelines.
- We have shared deadlines that make us look bad if they’re missed.
- We are part of quarterly and annual goals that are published to the company.
- We have performance reviews to ensure we hit these goals. But if we don’t hit the goal? We debrief after it to change our strategy next time.
“The craziest thing? At almost every corporation worldwide, work looks like this. Regardless of culture or domain, most companies have agreed on this structure,” said Berman.
Public Behavior
Berman said at work, behavior is public.
“Work makes our behavior visible to other people to help get us to get things done. Want to launch an incredibly complex product that requires building new innovations? Create a small team and commit to a public launch with aggressive timelines,” said Berman. “Personal goals are in the private sphere. In the private sphere, we struggle. In the public sphere, we understand there is an underlying norm about what should happen. We self-regulate on the basis of anticipated consequences of going against that norm.
Accountability is really just expecting you might have to justify your actions to others in relation to a preexisting norm. And it works.”
Speaking to a new norm in place at many credit unions, Berman said meetings that once were in person are now on Zoom or online. “People often keep their video on for the first five minutes and then they turn it off. This reduces accountability and may lead to more distraction,” she wrote.
Five Tips
Berman offered these five tips for staying on track:
- Keep Video on for the Whole Meeting. “If you’re in person, you’d likely avoid checking email or surfing the web. Keep the same norms alive for remote meetings,” Berman said.
- Articulate and Coordinate Start & End Times for the Workday. “This creates a norm for when people should be on. While ‘working hours’ may feel implicit to your team, it should be re-articulated to ensure people are aligned in the new coronavirus quarantine era. As a bonus, this also helps people set boundaries on their work and not work late nights.”
- Post Public Updates About Daily or Weekly Progress.“Engineers have operationalized this for years. It’s called a daily meeting, a 15-minute check-in to discuss blockers and the day’s priorities. It may be time for nonengineers to jump on the bandwagon. An easy way to start is with a Slack (or other messaging) channel devoted to updates.”
- Add More Deadlines and Decision Points. “We’re all really good at procrastination–like, really good. But there is a solution. Deadlines help drive action. They help us focus and avoid getting distracted by nonessential tasks. One easy hack: Ensure meetings focus on making a decision. The meeting will become the deadline for teams to prepare their input.”
- Group Your Meetings Into Blocks. “Put meetings back to back instead of scattered throughout the day. Research says it will make you more productive because your blocks of time feel less scarce. This applies when in the office or not, but is especially important for work-from-home life since distractions may be higher.”