“John keeps failing the deadlines”, “Joana is unresponsive during work hours”, “I do not know what my employers are doing and sometimes it feels like company just wastes money” – these are real questions my clients ask during coaching sessions. I am an adept of Socrates’ approach, so I am trying to nudge people into the right direction by asking the right questions. However, usually people usually fall into the abyss of micromanagement and come up with even more destructive ways to spy on their employees.
Record computer screens? Sure.
Turn on a web camera at random moments? Right.
Do not pay for time spent without hitting the keyboard every 10 minutes? Great idea.
Come over to employee’s desk and ask for status over and over? Well done.
TLDR
Micromanagement is less effective than aligning company and employee interests via proper goal setting. The fact that you, as a manager, are not able to set goals and understand your coworkers does not mean that they have to suffer. Nobody stops you from tracking your workers, but be ready that they will slack and leave you as soon as possible. Dropping micromanagement for proper goal setting and establishing trust is not about empathy, well-being, and being a good guy, this is purely about efficiency, effectiveness, and money.
This article will be useful for both individual contributors and managers. All of us need to pause and think about things happening around every now and then (and better make self-awareness a habit). In the end, everyone is a manager of themselves, right? Let’s consider two opposite approaches.
Track actions and micromanage
The point of view that tracking every step of your employees and micromanaging them is bad is quite popular. However, it does have certain advantages along with its many disadvantages
Pros
- easy to automate tracking of time spent or lines of code written
- work-life balance and transparency are in good shape. When the allocated time ends, the bell rings, and employees go home. Employees do not care about anything left unfinished, as they get paid by the hour
- easy switch between a full, half, or part time work. When an employee wants to switch from full-time to hourly work, it will be enough just to work the desired number of hours.
Cons
- the number of lines or hours worked do not correlate with impact or real value. People can solve a problem, but do it either by creating a monstrosity that spans across thousands of lines of code or come up with an elegant solution in a couple of lines of code.
- rules have to be constantly changed, as people adapt and optimize local optimum. This is a classic example of Arms race – when company comes up with a new way of tracking mouse clicks, employees come up with myriads of ways to simulate mouse clicks
- criteria of done has nothing to do with business value. Lines of code written have nothing to do with the business goals achieved
- low retention and motivation. People want challenges, people want to be good at something. Writing 1000 lines of code a day is not an achievement, it is a heavy sign that something is seriously wrong in the reward system
- quantity is priority. Employees are not solving problems and coming up with solutions, they optimize the number of hours logged and lines of code written
Track and align goals
Another approach is to help setting and achieving goals of your coworkers. It is not ideal, but it is opposite to the previously discussed one in almost every aspect.
Pros
- personal goals are linked to business goals, which maximizes overall success and gives meaning
- higher engagement and more often “extra mile” behavior
- more creativity, higher retention, and motivation due to deeper personal connection
- quality is priority
Cons
- higher effort from management side to set goals
- hard to formalize and track goals
- risks with crushing work-life balance if people get too engaged in the work. Management needs to provide proper guidance to prevent burnout
Which approach to choose
The answer which approach to choose is not so black and white, it depends what is more important for you.
In some cases the first approach is more applicable, as you plan to disband the team in a couple of weeks and the nature of work is quite linear and does not require creativity and there are almost zero unknowns. Making all team members “highly inspired and engaged” sounds wonderful on paper, but it takes a couple of weeks at least to establish at least some level of candor between manager and team. Pick your battles wisely.
The tracking and micromanaging your employees approach is acceptable when there are no unknowns and the project has short expected lifespan.
However, the first approach is quite rare, as usually (at least, in software development field) work has a lot of open questions and requires a certain degree of creativity and engagement (if work is easy and straightforward, then it is better to automate it completely by using some AI integration). In this case it is essential to understand that establishing trust with employees, understanding their true desires, and coming up with a plan on how to match their goals and company’s goals will certainly pay off in the future.
Research supports the point that intrinsic motivation, which is fostered by goal setting, is effective in creative fields such as software development. Check out this research (Locke & Latham, 2002) that found that goal setting significantly improves performance in tasks requiring creativity and problem-solving skills.
The happy medium
In the majority of cases the best course is to combine personal tracking (performed by employees and available only to employees, as well as explicit mention that company will never request this data and that company only suggest to do tracking) and goal-setting in close collaboration with employees.
This way it takes the best from both approaches – people control their work-life balance, but engage and dive into their work; employees are satisfied and proud of things they do; the results of work are easily traceable to the overall results of the company (the OKR framework could be particularly helpful with this).
Summary
Keep your employees engaged, trust them, value their time and effort, and achieve synergy. At the same time, help and provide assistance with self-tracking to keep work-life balance.
Tracking every step and micromanaging on a company level is disrespectful to both sides, unless both parties agree that this is the most optimal way due to the nature of work. If a company wants creativity, engagement, and inspiration from its workers, forget about tracking every step of your employees. Help them to master it themselves to achieve truly great results!