Are your metrics right for a remote workforce?

by Joseph K. Clark

So much of what we do at work has to be measured. There is a sense that if something cannot be measured, does it even really exist? Indeed, if a project or function can not demonstrate how it is being estimated clearly and clearly, its ability to secure approval or signoff is dramatically reduced.

Metrics, key performance indicators, objectives, key results (OKRs), and measuring progress all link back to a need within organizations to ultimately quantify the return on investment. When we worked in one place, most metrics were tied to outputs – achieving sales targets, ship code, and maintaining a positive net promoter score. 

Changing environments demands new metrics.

But how have those ways of measurement changed in the last year? Do they consider the challenges and opportunities that come with remote working? As Dan Montgomery, the founder and managing director of Agile Strategies, said, the current situation “is a great opportunity to get better at managing people around outcomes rather than tasks or, worse yet, punching a virtual clock to prove they’re working. Many employees working from home have big challenges, including bored kids, sick relatives, and an unending stream of bad news. They need the flexibility right now and will appreciate your trust in them.” Having that flexibility is particularly critical in uncertain times. “Now more than ever, the goals that we’re setting are so critical for us to be able to navigate what happens next,” Ryan Panchadsaram, co-founder and head coach of What Matters, said.

remote workforce

Defining a clear vision

But how do we set those goals? One mistake many businesses make is not aligning targets and objectives throughout the industry. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a start-up, a scale-up, or an established sector leader; you’re lost without a goal at the company level. Chris Newton, VP of Engineering at Immersive Labs, calls this “Vision – it all needs to have an evident, inspiring, well-understood company vision that is guiding every department in the business. You’re talking about the whole wider business, not just product and tech. There has to be a clear direction for the company.”

Chris was talking as part of a recent Indorse Engineering Leaders panel discussion. Once you have that big Vision, he says, “Underpinning that will be the product and tech side. You will have your product vision: “What are we trying to achieve for our customers through the product”. Then you have the engineering vision that underpins the product vision. It is complementary to the product vision, and it supports it. The engineering vision & strategy lines up to delivering the best customer outcomes through the product vision.” Only once that big picture is in place a business can start to work out how it will get there.

The proper framework for transparency and function

Chris was particularly keen on Objectives and Key Results, or OKRs. “Objectives framework, such as OKRs, can be a potent tool for getting that prioritization and alignment right. It’s great to clearly link what software engineers and managers do on the ground and how that ties back up to top-level objectives.”

What this brings to an organization is transparency in goal setting. From senior executives to team members, everyone is clear on how objectives are created and how what they do helps drive results.

Having that process is critical to determining what action will be taken. As another panelist, Nik Gupta, Software Development Manager at Amazon, highlighted, getting the basics right is vital. Nik and his team “spend about two months getting our metrics right. We are just figuring out the metrics we should track worldwide – are they instrumented and reliable, and how would we validate them, etc.? It is essential to get that framework built before you start delving into ‘what projects are we going to do and why.'”

It looks like it will vary, and it can be easier for some functions than others, as Smruti Patel, another panelist, highlighted. As Head of LEAP and Data Platform at Stripe, she has found that the former is more accessible to measure than the latter. For LEAP, “the metrics here are more tangible. It’s easier to measure how much you’re spending on your infrastructure or how much time the customer sees when they request.”

However, on the data infrastructure side, “some of the inherent qualities or principles from the platform that the internal users require are security, reliability, availability, and leverage, in terms of product enablement, which then enables Stripe’s users. Identifying the right metrics for infrastructure work has been challenging here.”

To solve this, Smruti and her team looked at leveraging learnings from LEAP and seeing how they could be applied to the Data Platform. 

Prepare for change

However, while it is essential to be clear on what you should measure, being too rigid once defined is counterproductive. Panchadsaram pointed out that “OKRs were never meant to be these rigid rails; they were meant to be a tool for your teams to commit to something collectively.”

In a blog for O’Reilly. Com, former Rent the Runway CTO Camille Fournier, echoed this sentiment: “Measurement needs to be focused on the right goals for right now, and you should expect that what you measure will frequently change as the state of systems and the business changes.”

That can only be achieved when metrics are aligned throughout the organization. For metrics to be relevant in the current climate, they need to be aligned with a company vision which is then cascaded down the organization. It is a process that needs to be rigorous to inform the work teams need to do, but it also needs to be flexible. When the situation changes almost daily, it is the only way organizations operating with remote teams will develop useful metrics.

Related Posts