Own Your Quality and Productivity
Owning our quality and productivity means having a vested interest in the value we add to our team, to our enterprise, and to our own remote career. High-value output is always in-demand.
“Success is overvalued. Avoiding failure matters more.” - James Clear
Introduction
As an elite remote professional, you must own your quality in order to stay desirable as a contractor. How, exactly, do you do that? By working hard, innovating, and outperforming your peers, you’ll remain in high demand among teammates, managers, and enterprises fortunate enough to work with you.
In the following sections, we’ll discuss concepts and skills which are critical to your remote professional journey. Develop, and eventually master, these concepts, and periodic goal increases or moving targets won’t phase you because you’ll always be ahead of the curve. You’ll also be much more comfortable as you execute your daily duties.
Mindset
Most parents don’t need to be convinced to care for their own children. And they (the parents) likely won’t need to be micromanaged in their parental duties, either. In fact, it’s human nature for parents to tend to their children. To look out for their best interest, cultivate their strengths, and ensure healthy development.
High-functioning teams often feel a similar sense of unconditional commitment to the body of work they produce. High-caliber professionals don’t need to be convinced to perform, or micromanaged throughout the process. As an elite remote worker, your quality is your legacy. Your body of work is your offspring.
No one should need to convince you to be accountable for your own deliverables. They are yours, and yours alone. Resist the temptation to blame others or evade responsibility. If you aspire to fulfill your professional potential, you must take ownership of your output by maintaining personal standards for quality and productivity.
You must take radical responsibility for your results, and view it as your job to overcome any obstacle (even external ones) in pursuit of top performance. This mindset will be the bedrock of your success, throughout the RemoteU program, and in your professional career.
Metrics
Knowing exactly where your quality and productivity stands, and how you stack-up among your teammates, are critically important for advancing the goals of the enterprise (and your own career). You need access to meaningful metrics in order to track and monitor personal and team performance.
Here in RemoteU, both the quality and quantity of metrics you can access (including negative feedback) are by design. In fact, the culture of our entire company is rooted in data-driven value creation. If you aren’t currently tracking your personal and team performance metrics, or are unaware of how to access them, immediately reach out to your manager for guidance.
Insights
The data you track is only as valuable as the insights you gain from it. It’s not enough to simply access your metrics. You must monitor and analyze them on a routine basis, then transform them into actionable insights.
Seek guidance from your manager on best practices for metrics monitoring, including how to uncover the insights which best drive performance improvement. Eventually, you should become an expert on your own metrics, as well as those of the team and of the enterprise.
Immerse yourself further into your team metrics than even your manager. Develop a routine for tracking and analyzing metrics. Your analysis should prompt questions such as,
What are the key characteristics of each work unit? How does one differ from the next?
What lessons can I learn from the top- and bottom-ranked performers?
What characteristics do top-ranked performers share?
Are there outliers or anomalies present in the data? If so, what are their root causes?
Questions such as these, and the insights they produce, are sure to improve quality on your team and drive long-term enterprise growth.
Planning
Metrics-driven insights won’t yield much value (if any) until you take action on them. You’ve uncovered opportunities for the improvement of your personal and team results. Now, you must plan (and execute) accordingly.
Utilize a spreadsheet to create the 12-week calendar you’ll use to document your personal goals and planned actions for each week. Once you’ve created your calendar, schedule time with your manager to present and discuss your plan. Solicit feedback to further improve your plan.
Keep your manager updated on your progress, and report meaningful deviations from plan as soon as you become aware of them. Track quality and productivity (both personal and team) against the goals you’ve set. With consistent use, this sheet will become your roadmap for performance improvement.
Feedback
Periodic check-ins with your manager allow for accountability and for the solicitation of ongoing feedback, which you’ll use to continuously improve quality. Accepting negative feedback, graciously, is an important skill in RemoteU, and beyond. Genuinely accepting, and immediately integrating feedback into your workflow, are also critical.
When opportunities are missed, lessons can be learned if we stay humble enough to listen. Avoid the temptation to blame others or make excuses when errors occur. If quality or productivity drops, immediately focus on what you will do about it. Take action to remedy mistakes. Communicate issues as they occur, and as they are resolved.
Above all, leverage feedback (particularly negative) to improve processes and deliverables within your personal and team production.
Accountability
Here’s a one-question pop-quiz:
Who on your team is responsible for automation and improvement?
Your manager
Your teammates
You
All of the above
Did you guess D?
Well, in the strictest sense, D is correct. However, this is a trick question. For the purposes of this article - and its impact on your long-term career - we would suggest that C is actually the correct answer.
This is a fundamental tenet of asynchronous culture. Individuals who are deeply accountable for their own production avoid spending time and energy ensuring the production of others. In essence, it’s enough for each of us to say, “I am responsible,” so long as we mean it. And so long as we do it.
But let’s be realistic. Will all of your teammates and managers - at all times - hold themselves deeply accountable for their own production? Of course they won’t. However, as a committed student of RemoteU, you’ve already increased your chances, exponentially, of not being counted among that class.
The truth is that under-performers exist in every enterprise who negatively impact overall results. If you discover an under-performer negatively impacting your own team, then it’s doubly important that you maintain your own personal commitment to excellence.
Many workers (remote and on-premise) have deeply-held beliefs that automation and improvement are the sole responsibility of management. However, these are everyone’s job. As you evaluate your TMS, identify the steps where you can improve quality. Look for biggest areas for automation and pursue them. Run small automation experiments and continue to share the results with your manager.
Conclusion
In the end, it is you who cares most about your own career and personal goals. When you underperform, a well-meaning manager may intervene on your behalf to save you - or at least to give you the benefit of the doubt while they delay firing you.
However, in a contractor world, if you fall behind long enough, you’ll eventually be replaced, period. This sounds cold, but these are the facts. As an elite remote worker, you no longer have the luxury of a traditional office environment where working undistracted for less than 50% of your time is the standard.
To excel in the remote field, take full ownership of your quality and productivity, now, and future success will surely follow.
Examples
"By the end of day 2, I delivered a total of 7 units at 86% FTAR, whereas the goal was 12 units at 100% FTAR. I set a new goal for day 3 to get back on track: Deliver remaining 7 units at 100% FTAR. However, I failed FTARs for 2 of my units which caused my FTAR to drop to 79%. I took extra measures in ensuring 100% FTAR for the remaining units I’ve yet to deliver. I reviewed previous failures of other ICs before submitting my work so that I can avoid those failures. I had 82% FTAR by the end of Day 4."
🏆 The IC update above is a good example because:
The IC measured himself objectively, using metric data instead of simply stating they were below the goal.
Below the goal, the IC took charge of their own productivity, and set a higher goal for the next day, to get back on track.
🏆 Another good example, as a story:
Ahmed K. delivered an own-your-productivity type task where his ZBT was less than 10 seconds. Ahmed was at the top of the chart, and was clearly happy with his result. On the last day, however, he realized that he was no longer the top-performer. Another IC had delivered the unit faster.
Instead of simply accepting that 2nd place would be good enough for graduation, Ahmed decided to own his productivity, and seek out improvement. Ahmed challenged the new TP, and ultimately delivered the unit as fast as the new TP. So, they ended up sharing the top-performer spot together.
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