In the course of a workday, we all have something that doesn’t go the way we want it to. There are generally two reasons why we don’t get the outcome we want:

1. Someone important wasn’t committed to that outcome.

Or,

2. More likely, they were committed to something – just something else.

I think that most managers could say they work with a committed team – otherwise you would already have found ways to weed out those who weren’t. That means mishaps or low performance can more likely be tracked back to the fact that your team wasn’t committed to achieving the “right” thing – not that they weren’t committed to their jobs. Specifically, I think that most mishaps in the workplace result when we commit to solving tasks rather than focusing on the desired outcomes.

Let’s walk through an example to show what I mean.

Imagine that you work for a tech company in customer support. You are also truly committed to your job: you always answer the phone when it rings and speak pleasantly with the caller. Now, let’s pretend that your phone rings:

“Hello, you’ve reached Ralph at ITX. How can I help you?” you might say.

Now let’s extend our example and say that the person who called you responds: “Can you help me reset my password?”

“I’d be glad to help you with that,” you might say. “I’ll get right on it. Meanwhile, I hope you have a great day!” You then hang up.

All in, I’d say you did a nice job: you made the customer feel welcome and you agreed to solve their problem right away. Or did you?

What if, for example, your customer went back to their computer and tried to log in again – only to fail yet again. What happens then? Most likely, they’ll be forced to call into the customer service line yet again to ask for help – only this time they’re going to be even more frustrated.

Can you see what we might have done differently to avoid this situation?

The point is that the customer’s main issue was that he or she couldn’t get into their system. That was the outcome they needed help with. Changing their password was just a task they thought would help them get there.

But as a customer service rep, you showed only the commitment to the task – changing the password – rather than committing to the outcome that the customer actually needed: accessing their system.

How could this scenario have been played out differently if you had been committed to the outcome rather than the task?

What if, after your customer calls, you then suggest something like: “Why don’t you try logging in again. I’ll stay on the phone and see if it works. Oh – it still won’t let you in. Let me try something else.”

See the difference? Tasks are just tools to help you reach the kinds of outcomes you want. Once you’ve shifted your focus from the task to the outcome, you stand a far better chance of actually addressing your customer’s primary need, which is a big component of establishing a workable relationship with them.

This is what I mean by making the distinction of being “the cause of the matter” of an outcome versus just a task. That’s ultimately what creates the most value for the customer and for us.

Now, I understand that sometimes just changing the password does actually create value for the customer. But, when it doesn’t, you’ve wasted your time and the customer’s time – let alone the cost of the call itself. Add all that up and you’ve actually subtracted value from the relationship by focusing on the task rather than the outcome that truly adds value for the customer: getting them into their system. So why take the risk of a negative outcome in the first place?

Let’s look at another example. What if you worked in our company’s accounts receivable department and you learned that we have a customer who has an unpaid balance of more than 90 days. Your job is to collect money for the company, so you send an email to that customer alerting them to the balance along with a request to pay it. You may even call them up and, when they don’t answer, leave them a message asking them to pay. The result: you can place two checkmarks next to the two tasks you completed. “You can’t blame me,” you might now tell yourself. “I tried.”

But what if the customer continues to not pay? My good friend Gregg Gordon has a good way of framing this kind of scenario. He asks his employees what else they would do if someone personally owed them $1 million. Invariably, the employee can come up with several more ideas about how to get in touch with that person – including showing up on their doorstep everyday until they got paid. That’s being committed to being the cause in the matter of an outcome!

Now I recognize that collecting money isn’t the most fun job in the world – it’s uncomfortable at best. And that’s why we often see why people are willing to commit to a task – sending an email or leaving a voicemail – because it’s easier to do than, say, showing up on someone’s doorstep. But that’s also the power of asking someone to commit to delivering an outcome.

There may even be times that the outcome you want someone to commit to is actually impossible to achieve. If you tell your service tech that you need that computer server up and running by the morning, for instance, he might do everything and anything in his power to deliver that outcome – only to fail because of something beyond his control.

But that’s OK because he exhausted every task first before we actually learned it was impossible. Seth Godin has an interesting take on this where he distinguishes things that we believe are impossible from those that are nearly impossible. Just by adding that word – “nearly” – Godin shows us that we can change a problem from something to avoid into a challenge we can commit to, even possibly enjoy.

The takeaway for us, then, is that when we can get our team committed to the outcomes we want, irrespective of the circumstances and the number of tasks we might need to take to achieve them, that’s how we’ll create truly workable situations.

Thanks to our internal wiring, human beings favor the path of least resistance. That makes sense for many reasons. For one, it’s a survival mechanism: of course you’re going to grab the food that’s easiest to get. At the same time, we humans also hate to deal with repetitive problems. Think about the inspiration for the washing machine. Hand-washing your clothes is a hard and cumbersome task – so it makes sense that we would be driven to find a solution that would eliminate that task by inventing something that could automate the process.

But sometimes our drive to take the easy route can backfire on us – especially in the workplace. Think about the last big, complicated project you were involved with. Which tasks did you tackle first? If you’re like most people, you may have knocked out a few of the easy ones – the low-hanging fruit that you could quickly finish and that allowed you to feel a sense of accomplishment.

Far fewer people would say they went after the harder tasks first because, well, they’re harder to do.

When we think about “harder” tasks, it might include something you’ve never done before or something you don’t know how to do. Or, it could even be something you’ve struggled with in the past, which is why you might want to put off working on it to tackle something easier instead.

But when we go after the easiest tasks first, it can be less workable.

Uncovering Unanticipated Hurdles Earlier

Doing the harder things first means you are more likely to find unexpected hurdles earlier in the project. Finding hurdles earlier then means you have more time to deal with them before missing a deadline.

Let’s think about an example where you have a project that is due within a week. Let’s say it involves completing seven separate tasks, five of which are easy ones and two that are difficult. Now if you spend the first few days knocking out the easy tasks, you might feel like you’ve made some good progress toward your goal. But, you’ve also pushed out the most challenging tasks to the last minute. What happens, then, if those tasks take longer to do than you’ve allowed yourself time to complete them? What if you’ve suddenly realized that the task you left for last will actually take you two, three, or even four days to complete? You’ve just increased the risk that you’re going to miss your deadline. You’ve also taken away all the time you may have used to overcome an unanticipated hurdle.

In a nutshell, that’s why always going for the easy tasks first isn’t always workable. If you go for the harder work first, on the other hand, you can greatly increase the likelihood of your project finishing on time and on budget.

Waste Less

Going after the harder stuff first also increases the likelihood that you will finish the project. Many projects get abandoned precisely because when you do the easy stuff first, it can seem too daunting to continue once you need to move on to a more challenging task.

This happens as a result of a defective cost-benefit analysis. You looked at the benefits of the project but only weighed it against the first task. But when you realize the cost of doing the more difficult tasks (time, money, etc.), you abandon the project – which turns everything you have done so far into waste.

Let’s use another example, say something like reading a book. The easiest task when it comes to reading is buying the book: it could be as easy as a few clicks on your computer. The much harder part, of course, is making the time to actually read and process the contents of that book you bought. But there are so many good books out there filled with so many good ideas. It can be easy to find yourself clicking away and ordering a bunch of books that soon line your shelves – only you still haven’t made time to read any of them. That, too, just isn’t workable over the long haul.

Now, I understand that there actually might be times when you do need to abandon a project or a book. But what I’ve learned is that it pays to be very intentional about the projects that we even start by doing a more complete cost-benefit analysis up front.

One way to force yourself to do a better cost-benefit analysis is to do the harder stuff first.

In this case, you might want to consider doing the harder task first (reading a book you already own) before tackling another easy task (buying a book). After all, you’re only wasting your resources (the money you keep spending on books) and opportunities to learn something new (because you haven’t made time to read).

There’s nothing wrong with not reading a book. But wouldn’t it be nice to save yourself the money you spent on all those unread books, let alone all the extra clutter they’re causing?

Bigger Projects / Bigger Savings

This approach can pay off in even bigger ways when it comes to bigger projects.

At ITX, for example, we’ve found that it pays huge dividends to break up the more difficult tasks in a project into more manageable chunks as a way to make it easier to do the harder things first.

Let’s say we have a large project that will involve importing a whole series of files into a system. The hard part is building the software routine that will automate the process. After that, the job is easy: you just run the routine until all the files are imported. In this case, you have to do the hard task first. But it might also make sense to look for any other harder tasks involved with the project before you move on to running the easy automated ones.

By doing that, we then eliminate much of the risk that the project will go over budget or, give us a better chance to assess early on if it’s something we want to abandon.

In the end, you’ll find that by doing the harder tasks first almost always creates workability. And this added workability can save time, money, and headaches for you and anyone counting on you to deliver.

It used to be that when you went to work, it meant you headed to a physical location somewhere: an office, factory, quarry, shipping terminal, or wherever. But now, with the dawn of the Internet Age, more and more workers find themselves with “remote” jobs where they live and work apart from their co-workers and managers – maybe as many as 30 million of us.

Employing a remote workforce can be a great advantage to companies like mine, ITX, because it gives us access not only to talented employees who might be nearby one of our offices but also as far away as Argentina, Romania, or Spain where some of our team members live and work. It’s like tapping into an entire gold mine of talent you otherwise wouldn’t have access to.

While a remote workforce offers many opportunities, it also comes with its fair share of challenges. It’s simply not enough to just tell your employees they can work from anywhere: first you need to work hard to build the kind of culture that can support their productivity wherever they might be based.

If you don’t have the kind of foundation you need for your remote workers to thrive, you can rapidly find yourself with major problems and dysfunctions. Just consider all the waves that Marissa Mayer made when she ended Yahoo’s work-at-home policy.

At ITX, we feel the benefits of accessing the 99% plus of the global labor pool that doesn’t live near our offices far outweigh the challenges of managing a distributed workforce. Based on our experience, I’ve found that they are three key challenges when it comes to making remote work workable: accountability, geo-location, and synchronicity.

Accountability

The most common issue with a remote workforce is that companies fail to establish clear standards and systems of accountability with its workers. Namely, that they fail to make it crystal clear about what constitutes “working.”

For example, I recall a time when one of our workers asked if he could work from home on a Friday before he was scheduled to take the next week off for a vacation. I asked him why he didn’t just come in for the morning and then take the rest of the day off. He replied that he was out of vacation time but wanted to be home so he could do his laundry and pack for his upcoming trip.

The problem is that doing your laundry isn’t doing your “work.” This is why the notion of “working from home” has become almost a joke these days where no one actually believes you are actually focused on your job. I’d even wager that this was the main issue at Yahoo when they made their policy change.

If you have everyone working at the same physical location, then you can remove most of the anonymity or secrecy around what your employees might be doing. It’s a lot harder, for instance, to shop online or surf Facebook all day if your manager is walking around. And doing your laundry is definitely out of the question.

If you want remote workers, though, then you have to invest in the effort of making it crystal clear to everyone what their job is and what accomplishments by which they will be measured. Sprinkling in a few work activities like checking your email throughout the day doesn’t mean you worked that day.

But if you get the performance you need, such as the amount of software code produced or a certain number of sales calls placed, then it becomes far less important about how many hours that employee is working or when. And once you get to that tipping point, it becomes a natural progression to worrying less about where your workers are based.

Geo-Location

Once you have good standards and systems of accountability, then you can start working on the other issues that stem directly from the fact that your employees are based somewhere other than the office.

One of those issues is ensuring that every employee has access to a suitable work environment. For example, if someone works from their home alongside an infant, that might not be a suitable environment. Depending on the type of job they have, coffee shops might also be problematic because of the high number of distractions around.

Another key issue when it comes to location is finding ways for remote workers to feel part of the larger team. When you work from home, you miss out on everything from ad hoc update meetings to the after work happy hour gatherings. Even if you’re able to dial into a meeting, it’s easy to miss out on important physical cues that you can only learn from watching someone’s body language.

You need to find ways to replace these physical interactions for your remote workers so they still feel part of the team or they will begin to feel like “second-class” citizens of the company.

I attended a conference in San Francisco earlier this year called Office Optional, where I picked up a couple of great ideas along these lines from a few of the presenters (it’s worth noting that quite a few attendees of the conference actually participated remotely).

For example, from Paul Hepworth, the VP of Engineering at UserTesting.com, we learned that not only do you need the right kind of technology to help integrate remote workers, such as providing wide-angle webcams and good speakers, you can also make everyone feel like part of the team by sending pizzas to everyone. We’ve added to this practice at ITX by holding our own virtual toasts where we celebrate with a delicious beverage over a video link.

Another great tip we’ve integrated, this time from David Yee, is to establish a fulltime chat connection between members of a team. Just as importantly, every conversation the team engages in – and especially those between people in the same location – must be included in the chat to ensure that everyone is on the same page and no one is left out. That includes even non-work related or personal humorous comments because they serve as the mortar keeping the team together.

Escalation is a third crucial issue you need to invest in when it comes to your remote workforce. When everyone is in the office, it’s fairly easy to build a relationship with your boss and, when something important comes up, to walk into his or her office to try and get a resolution.

But when you’re remote, it’s much harder to do that. You can’t just raise your hand and have your boss come over and help you solve a problem. And from a manager’s perspective, it can be difficult to understand that employee’s concerns because you can’t read their body language beyond their verbal cues to assess how upset he or she might actually be.

Meeting in person from time to time or using video chat are two ways to overcome this challenge.

Synchronicity

A third challenge area in managing your remote workforce is dealing with the issues that arise when you have workers spread out among different time zones. That means you could have someone working 9 to 5 in the Eastern Time Zone and another worker on Indian Standard Time, each of whom work at the exact opposite times with virtually no overlap. If those two workers are collaborating on a project, it can be extremely challenging for them to coordinate their efforts because they can’t just hop on the phone and talk through an issue. And email really just doesn’t cut it.

Having workers in different time zones also poses challenges for celebrations and company-wide meetings – which again, can make remote workers feel like they’re cut off from the rest of the company.

To be honest, we haven’t solved this problem in our company. But we’ve found that you need to be very intentional about setting up windows of availability where those two workers understand when it is and isn’t a good time to collaborate. Another policy that we’ve found to be very effective is that any time someone holds a meeting, the results of that get together are posted on our internal chat board as a way for everyone to keep up with the latest information.

These aren’t perfect solutions – but they are steps in the right direction and ones we hope to learn from and improve upon over time.

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As a whole, the key point in managing a remote workforce is that there can be so many things you take for granted when everyone works together in the same physical location. And the challenge is to put thought into how to address the needs of your remote workers and try and replace some of what they might be missing.

When you are thoughtful about addressing those needs, you make remote work workable. And when you do that, the payoff is simply huge.

Does your company struggle with keeping your values as something more than just words on a poster in the break room? Or, how do you build values into your organization so that your company truly operates by those values?

The answer lies in not being so virtuous.

Let’s consider the most famous set of values out there, the Ten Commandments from the Book of Exodus.

When you boil it down, the Ten Commandments were a set of rules established by the Jewish people as a way to make their society more workable. If everyone were stealing from each other, for instance, or running around with each other’s spouse, that wouldn’t make for a very sustainable community.

The mistake we make is that we apply these commandments as virtues, meaning that when we violate a commandment, we fail a moral code and become a “bad” person. But that’s just not workable. It makes sense for children to honor their parents, for example. But what happens when a parent tells their kid to do something stupid, like cheat on their taxes? If the child disobeys their parent, are they now in violation of the virtue of honoring them? A more drastic example might be when someone attacks me and, in fighting back, I kill him or her. Am I wrong to have done that?

Now think about what a company does when it creates its core values. Choices common to many companies often sound a lot like virtues: trust, honesty, and loyalty. And they use these values to judge each other or, because they know they can’t live up to them 100% of the time, they just ignore them. They put them on a wall and never use them – unless they want to demonize the people they push out. But I believe your company values should be focused on driving Workability in your organization – not providing a way for people to judge each other about whether they are being virtuous or not.

Case in point: One of the values we have at my company, ITX, is integrity – widely understood as “we are going to do what we say we are going to do.” Integrity also happens to be a popular value for many organizations. After all, who wants to do business with anyone who lacks integrity?

But integrity can mean different things to different people. If I were to walk down the street and ask ten people to define integrity, each answer would be slightly different.

At the same time, if I ask each of those same people if they thought that they personally exemplified integrity, I would expect to get ten affirmative answers. “Of course I have integrity,” I would expect to hear. That’s because integrity is widely considered a virtue in our society and saying that someone lacks integrity is akin to calling him or her a liar.

In fact, I find myself out of integrity every day. I miss phone calls, show up late for appointments, and forget to pick up milk at the market on my way home from the office after I said I would.

But wait, you must be asking, how can you have integrity as a value if you admit to violating it?

Quite simply, because we don’t apply integrity as a virtue. If we did, we would create incentives for people to be untruthful about their actions because they wouldn’t want to be seen as bad. At ITX, we define integrity differently. For us, it means we will keep our word, and will clean up the mess if we don’t.

Let’s say I promise to get you a report by Monday. But, for whatever reason, I realize there is no chance I am going to get it to you on time, even though you need it for a board meeting you have on Tuesday morning. Clearly, I have failed to do what I said I was going to do.

I broke my word and hence, did not act with integrity. We’ve all been there. But that’s why our corporate values are different than virtues – because virtues don’t always lead to Workability.

When someone is out of alignment with a value, the idea is to judge the circumstances to be unworkable – not judge the person to be bad. By doing that you create an opening for the person to clean up the mess they created. And you’ve created an opening to be a resource for them rather than just being a judge.

In our example, you still need the information for your board meeting. So I need to either work late to get the report complete or be creative and get you the most critical material now, which you can use for your meeting, and then follow up with the rest later on.

Rather than judging me because I was out of integrity, you gave me an opening to take action by thinking of integrity as a value and not a virtue. Sure, you would have preferred to get the full report sooner. And yes, if I mess up again, we need to have another conversation about performance. But the point is that we put our joint focus more on solving the problem and taking action rather than on simply passing judgment, which accomplishes very little in the end.

The goal in setting values should never be about simply delivering admonishment or punishment along the lines that someone was “bad” like you might do with a virtue. Rather, when you create your corporate values, you need to spend as much time sharing stories about what your team members can do if they find themselves out of alignment with the company’s values.

Did you miss an appointment with a customer? We’re not going to fire you for it. Just figure out how to make it right. Forget to pick up something on your way home? Grab your car keys and go fix it. Workability is all about giving people the room to redeem themselves when they do make a mistake – which we all will from time to time.

Put simply, our goal at ITX is not to create a culture that strives to never break its word. That won’t lead to Workability, only a less productive workplace that aims low. When we focus on virtues, people become more reluctant to promise anything because they become worried about being judged. As a result, nothing extraordinary happens. You cannot win the game of virtues. But if you give people openings for action by building your values around Workability, you can begin to play a much bigger game with a limitless ceiling. Which begs the question: What kind of game are you playing in your workplace?

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