The first time I was offered a remote role as a Director of Engineering, my immediate thoughts were about how I could make sure people in the remote office were staying busy.
I’m embarrassed to think about that now. Now I realize that trying to monitor busy-ness is about as useful as measuring people by the number of lines of code they write.
And yet, I regularly hear of managers who are making similar mistakes. They evaluate people by their Slack “online” status, their response time to individual tickets or emails, and the frequency of their participation in on-site meetings.
But tracking how much work gets pushed through your people doesn’t necessarily correlate with how much work gets pushed through your system.
When you focus on team velocity more than on individual throughput, you often find improvements in very different places, such as endorsing asynchronous communication over fixed meeting times and giving people the autonomy to make more decisions without needing management approval.
There are many more ways to improve team velocity without concentrating on personal throughput. If you’d like to discuss your situation in more detail, let’s talk. Visit stevedwire.com/talk to start the conversation.