Measuring Remote Team Productivity or When It All Goes Wrong Part 5 of 5 Keeping Work In Its Place

November 12, 2021

Measuring Remote Team Productivity or When It All Goes Wrong Part 5 of 5 Keeping Work In Its Place

This is the fifth and final article in a series about keeping work in its place. As a reminder: emails are equivalent to messaging and I'm specifically referring to work situations involving remote teachers and students in educational contexts.

This last article is a grab bag of smaller stories to wrap up my topic of Keeping Work In Its Place. I'll prime you where we are going so that you can keep up.

Measuring Remote Team Productivity is about using spreadsheets to discover the chilling truth that remote workers tend to over work, not under work.

Take a Chill Pill is about directing students to be responsible unto themselves. It's not a sin.

Slow Down Responding To Students is about supporting and backing up remote teachers so that if they do not answer a message, there is a support system filling in the whys and hows.

What Happens When It All Goes Wrong is Heather's own story of checking email during a vacation, that lead to the direst of consequences. What was lost was more important than a job.

Education Is An Insatiable Monster - I've been tagging these articles with this phrase all along. It's the unpleasant underbelly of the education profession. I'll explain what the problem is. Spoiler alert: I don't have a tidy solution.

Measuring Remote Team Productivity

Close up image of numbers on a spreadsheet.

For this story, I have to go backwards in time quite a bit and then forward in time.

Many years ago, when I was within my first few years of working full time remotely, the university I worked for started a data collection effort. We had to fill in spreadsheets of every work activity we did down to the 5-minute increment. To which, smarmy Heather asked her boss if she could create a category for her time called Filling in the Damn Spreadsheet. My good-hearted boss said yes.

What predicated this census of remote activity was a long-standing belief (that has NEVER GONE AWAY) that remote workers are lazy and don’t actually work if they can help it. Human Resources had reported that remote workers were not taking time off. Bosses put their suspicions and the HR data together and said “Ah ha! Everyone is out there relaxing. They are not working at all! They are eating bon-bons, sitting in the sunshine and answering an email or two once in a while! That explains why our success rate never rises!"

So we filled out the spreadsheets for weeks and sent them in.

The results chilled our bosses to their bones. It didn’t surprise us remote workers at all.

Folks were actually overworking.

Anyone who was scheduled for an 8 hour day was actually working 10 hours.

Anyone who was scheduled for a 10 hour day was actually working closer to 12 hours.

The reason no one was taking leave was because we felt like we could not take leave. The punishment, in terms of catching up on or worse, student loss, was too devastating to risk. So folks worked all the time; we worked through holidays, sicknesses, everything. There were many times when folks were ON WORK TRIPS doing work right in front of the university and folks would have their laptop open, typing away on emails during training sessions. When asked why, the answer was “If I don’t answer these emails now, I’ll never catch up.”

Take a chill pill

Woman walks in a relaxed manner on a beach.

One time when I was on one of these work trips, I was caught by one of my colleagues walking down the street, literally with my hands in my pockets looking like the embodiment of relaxation. She said “Why do you look so different to everyone else here, who is basically panicking?” I said “Because I told my students to shut up.”

Now…I actually did say that to her, my colleague, because that language was acceptable with her. But I didn’t say “shut up” to my students. I professionally informed them that I would be traveling for work and that for a few days, they would have to make do on their own. Translation: Find your own ISBN number for the Chemistry textbook!

And I lived.

Did I mention I earned a 100% satisfaction rating from my students?

The end of that story is that 3 hours a day of emails was, in my experience for that job, normal. I was not going to budge on that. And I was NOT going to suspect my faculty, once I became a manager, of being lazy.

Slow Down Responding to Students

Man holds up sign that says forgiveness.

We had an expectation to answer student emails within 4 working hours of receiving the email. Most of the time, we hit that metric ‘with bells on’ but I never cracked down on my team on that metric. I would hold them back when an email was from an --ahem-- upset (that’s a very kind word) student. I told them, “If anyone asks, I’m taking responsibility for you not answering that email today. I’m specifically asking you to NOT answer that email today.”

Why?

I have learned from personal experience that

the email you write tomorrow will always be better than the email you write today.

Why is that?

Forgiveness. I had learned that with time (an overnight, often) I could be much kinder and forgiving of my students. I could answer better. I might have thought of more solutions.

So as a boss, I’d ask my faculty to put on forgiveness “like a shirt.” I said “You don’t have to mean it, but I want you to truly try this. You have to be authentically looking at this problem from the student’s perspective” (aka remember the days YOU struggled in college). Many times, a student was simply being difficult because they felt that they were hurt by us first. It was a tit-for-tat war breaking out. But we could stop it.

Even if a student was wrong in every possible way, we could find forgiveness for them. My favorite line was “No one wanted this to happen to you” because it was true! We didn’t want our students to have difficulties! Starting with that acknowledgement and pouring forgiveness on the student solved many problems. (To be clear, you can forgive a student even if the student is totally in the wrong. This isn't about being dumb, it's about being hyper-aware of their perspective. This is active listening, in other words, in action. You listen, but you don't necessarily agree.)

The most common response after we had composed a kind, understanding email was “Oh thank you! I was so upset! I’m sorry. It’s just been so hard to go to college with…” and you’d get the backstory. I was amazed at the backstories that had nothing to do with the problem at hand but you’d learn that the student was facing some unimaginable obstacles.

Adding in time and forgiveness meant that a great deal of student issues never had to go past me and go to my bosses. Problem solved.

(P.S. If you'd like more tips on what to say to slow down to responding to students or how to craft off-hours email coverage - ask me!)

What Happens When It All Goes Wrong

Woman leans on railing with look of distress on her face.

OK, what happens when Heather doesn’t follow her own advice? What happens when she checks email on her day off, in the middle of a vacation? She worked when she should not have been working.

Oh, it got ugly fast.

I can’t remember the impetus but I checked my email on a Monday in the middle of my annual birthday week off. I must have been thinking “Oh, I need to check on this other issue something-or-other.”

To my horror, there in my inbox was notification that a major accreditor of our coursework was pulling accreditation because they didn’t find one of my courses to be rigorous enough. If we lost that accreditation, I’d lose faculty immediately because about ¼ of the university would close. I sat there, tears welling in my eyes thinking “Oh my God, what are we going to do?” I saw others on the email thread. So somehow, I shut down my computer, gulped back my tears, and hoped that if it was necessary for me to come into work from vacation, my boss would let me know. But it was Monday and I would not be back at work for 8 more days. There was plenty of time for the worst to happen. With me out, around 4 of my faculty could be unceremoniously fired before I came back.

I worried every minute of the next 8 days. Vacation destroyed.

When I came back into work and started reading through my emails, I found out what happened. One person on the thread had replied, “Hey, I know the chief accreditor. I’ll give them a call.” So the accreditor was called. The rigor of my course was explained. A little back room “Hey, it’s all good, whatcha gettin worked up about” conversation and problem solved.

No one was fired.

No one was dumped.

But I lost my vacation. All because I checked my email when I wasn’t supposed to.

So I share this story because I know plenty of folks are going to counter this Keep Work In Its Place series with comments like “It’s all fine and good to say, but in real life…..[dire situation/consequences]” or “These actions put people’s jobs on the line!” or “You will be accused of not helping students!” I wanted to show you that I’ve walked the line of ‘everything being on the table’....everything… my job, others' jobs, students' success and students’ failures. Through it all, the better decision was to preserve myself to fight another day. Work when you are at work. Don't work when you are not at work.

It can be considered a numbers game and I hope you’ve seen that through my stories. When one teacher or instructor or faculty member is saved from burnout or overworking, they go on to help 10, 100, or thousands of students in their teaching lifetime. But when I lose one student, I have thousands to replace that one. Sorry!! I know that’s REALLY hard to read, really. But you have to know where to invest if you have limited resources and unlimited demand, which is what online education is.

Education is an Insatiable Monster

I used to subscribe to the idea that I had joined a noble profession, education. Education is ‘the gift that cannot be ungiven’. Oo, that was my favorite.

But then one day I read that Education is an Insatiable Monster and I paused to really think. The article is about building buildings and then recruiting students. Then building buildings and recruiting more students. It's a geographical, place-based problem that puts universities in a cycle that never stops eating; it is insatiable. No one stops it.

Complex metal and plant sculpture with text "Education is an insatiable monster. When is enough, enough?" Made by Heather Dodds in Canva using an image from Unsplash.

Philosophically, education is a field in humanity where we never argue that one has had 'enough.' When does one have enough? I’ve heard medical suicide patients claim on their last day of life that they learned something new! When do you reach ‘enough’ learning?? No one ever argues AGAINST learning.

Translated to online learning, how can teachers, then, argue against:

answering that parent's text question?
answering that student email before the assignment deadline?
being offline for a few hours or a few days? (ahem, we called those weeknights and weekends but teachers don't get them)

When can teachers disconnect? As I think of some major problems I know of in education (e.g. grade inflation, rising tuition, unfair & cruel teachers, institutionalized racism), they point back to this central force; education never gets enough. Even today, people on both sides of the COVID-19 vaccination debate think that the other side simply has not learned enough!

That is not to say that Education is wrong and we need to stop it. It just means that we need to be vigilant and watch out for problems. Overworking --now, in this remote teaching world-- is one of those significant problems.

Keep work in its place.

This was the article that started this series: Defending a Teacher's Right To Disconnect.

Article 1 I am the woman who did not check her email and lived.

Article 2: You replied too quickly!

Article 3: I'm going camping!

Article 4: 6 Days A Week

Now turn off LinkedIn for awhile. Go look at some nature. We'll be here when you get back.