MBWA and WFH can be friends
In the late 80’s, Tom Peters popularized the term “MBWA” signifying the importance of “managing by walking around.” The concept is deceptively simple: just walk around your workplace and observe how work gets done and you’ll gain huge insights into your business process and employees. Many managers learn far more this way that they would by reading KPI charts or other traditional business metrics.
The (mostly) reality show “Undercover Boss” encapsulates the idea well: you won’t truly understand how your business runs unless you stand next to people doing the work and observe the reality of what the job entails. It’s eye-opening, humbling, and often reveals the innovation employees use to overcome obstacles.
Why it’s challenging
How does this translate in a dystopian present where we’re hermetically sealed, walled off, remote, testing regularly for a deadly virus, peering at each other on camera and commenting on each other’s Zoom backgrounds or home furnishing? Add a sprinkle of “trust your employees” and “don’t micromanage me” and you’ve got the perfect recipe to remain truly clueless how work gets done. Sure, it might get finished, but your jaw would drop if you saw how some of your team actually completes work, or how quickly they do it.
Are they lazy? Some might be, but most people aren’t lazy. They just weren’t truly, thoroughly, competently trained. They were shown “how” to do it, but didn’t necessarily get rigorous review to see if their “muscle memory” actually learned how to complete each step. Instead, someone may have looked at the result without bothering to see how much work it took to get to the finished product. This helps explain why some employees feel they are “overworked” but management feels they should be able to accomplish more in less time. Both of them are right: if you do a process slowly because you didn’t master it, then you will feel overworked compared to someone who learns how to do it more easily. The manager is justifiably confused why it’s taking so long to finish the work, but they may not be delving into the reasons.
How do you recreate the benefit of MBWA when you can’t exactly walk around and observe your team while they work?
How to start
The bad news is it’s awkward. The good news is that you can still accomplish it with some ground rules and boundaries.
First, stop asking the question “do you know how to do this?’ — that seemingly harmless inquiry when answered in the affirmative is remarkably dangerous. The moment you ask it and your colleague answers “yes”, you stop understanding how your team works.
Instead, ask “can you show me how you do this?” — this is the only true way to understand if someone has learned something in the way you want it done. If asked “do you know how to do this” and they said yes, they might be doing something far too casually. Conversely, they could be doing a process far too meticulously or wildly inefficiently and wasting time.
What not to do
When you ask “can you show me how you to this”, there’s one catch: you must observe in silence. You may need to suppress the urge to blurt out “are you crazy, aren’t you aware there’s a much easier way!” Just watch while saying nothing, then collect your notes and review with your training staff how you could have such a disconnect from how your team is trained and how they actually do the work. It’s humbling, excruciating, and eye-opening.
The goal here is that you aren’t being cross-trained — they needn’t narrate as they go. By engaging them in conversational understanding of the process they do, you’ll learn about difficulties with a process, workarounds or other issues that make the job harder than you likely expected it to be. The more senior a manager you are, the more shocked you’ll be about how much more complicated things appear to be.
How do you do have this interaction when your colleague is working remotely? If it’s an information worker, find screen-sharing tools like TeamViewer, or have them just share their screen on a Zoom chat. To repeat: these sessions are not training sessions. You’re merely learning about how things have been learned, whether correctly or incorrectly.
If it’s a more physical type of work, consider a FaceTime chat or other video sharing. It’s awkward, but if it reveals significant over or underdoing of steps, it will be worth it.
Eventually we’ll all be able to “walk around” in virtual reality but since the remote work explosion happened faster than most people had a chance to plan for it, it’s important to capture the benefits of MBWA: it’s an essential tool for organizations to adapt and thrive.
