Kurt Shintaku's Blog

“How do I know my employees are actually working at home?”

“How do I know they aren’t just goofing off while working remotely?”

“Can’t I just monitor their keyboard activity or Teams presence to see if they’re doing work?”

I’ve heard all these questions asked in the past 2-3 years and if you personally have ever asked any of these questions, this article is for you.  The answer to maintaining a healthy relationship between managers and employees with work-from-home policies is OKRs – or Objectives & Key Results.

This philosophy is simple: Make sure people have measurable outcomes they are accountable for & make sure they know what part they play in the organization’s mission or goals. Vetri Vellore, Microsoft’s Corp VP of Viva Goals says the following as part of an excerpt of his upcoming book on the topic:

I advocate an approach that uses three building blocks. Objectives are clear, inspiring goals. Whether at the company, department, or team level, an objective is where you are headed—your target. Key results are measurable outcomes, which should be ambitious but achievable, and quantifiable enough to lead to objective grading. And finally, key initiatives are the individual activities whose execution will impact performance on the defined objectives.

Read the rest of Vetri’s article here:

• Microsoft WorkLab: Why Hybrid Work Makes OKRs More Essential than Ever
  https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/why-hybrid-work-makes-okrs-more-essential-than-ever

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Spoiler alert: If you’re one of those people asking if monitoring user’s keystrokes or Teams presence is a “silver bullet” for see, may I present to you, “Microsoft Awake”:  A free tool anyone can use to simulate activity to keep a workstation “online”.  There are also tools that can accomplish the same thing through a web browser.

• PowerToys Awake utility for Windows
  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/awake