Last week I wrote about not buying people’s time. If you’re not buying time, you have to know what you are buying. This is harder than buying time, so we buy time as a cop out. It’s hard for two reasons.

One is we often don’t know how to explain what we want but “we know it when we see it”. Assuming for a minute that our knowing it when we see it is consistent (and it often isn’t) it still helps to explain what we want, so the other person knows.

The other reason is we don’t know how much is enough or when the job is done. Most knowledge work is like that. If I’m painting a room it’s obvious to me or anyone watching if I’m done, and before that, how much I have left to go. If I’m doing a marketing report, or researching competitors on the web, how do you know when you’ve done enough? It could go on forever. Generally what happens is you do it till something else becomes more urgent. Sort of like on Thanksgiving when you eat till the game is on. Then you doze in front of the game till you’re hungry. Then you eat till it’s time to take a nap etc.

So try this. Imagine your employees worked the night shift. And you came in every morning and never saw them.
How would you know what they’d done?
How would you know who did a good job?
How would you know how much work was left to do?

Try that for each person’s job. Write down your thoughts. Discuss with them.

You won’t get all your answers doing this exercise, but it will help.

Takeaways. Describing expected results and managing that way does the following:

• …Makes people better able to self-evaluate. This improves employees reviews.
• …Frees up people to work at different times and in different places
• …Makes it possible for you to travel and still monitor what’s going on
• …Makes it easier to replace people as the company grows and train their replacements.