Last week, I wrote about my goal of becoming an early riser. Today, I want to highlight how flexible working hours, and in turn just trusting your employees can do wonders for your team (especially if they are remote).
It may seem a no-brainer to trust your employees, yet I have worked closely with organizations and in teams who felt the need to exercise their control through trying to enforce special hours—even for a distributed team.
Here’s the thing, while I am not strictly against office hours (they are good for lots of reasons!) being able to shift away from them can make sure team much more productive. Plus, I am a firm believer in that putting trust in people is one of the best ways of making them excel at what they do.
If you have good internal communication channels, it is more likely that flexible working hours will actually improve your teams output, rather than the other way around because let’s face it, much of our days are, and should be, spent working by ourselves and trying to be productive.
Looking for my quick recipe? Go the middle ground. Let people be flexible with when they work, as long as they get the work done and as long as they overlap somewhat so that the same is actually working at the same time because issues do arise that are best solved spontaneously together.
Apart from that, trust your employees to do a good job—whenever they want to do it—and I promise that you’ll see an improvement in your team output.
