Managing in a Digital-First Work World

Early into the pandemic, there were a handful of companies that took very public and forward-thinking stances when it came to remote and hybrid work.

Shopify dubbed itself, ‘digital by default’. Twitter told its employees they could work from home ‘forever’. And Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said, “we’re not going back.”

The concept of the workplace had shifted for many, but not without questions and concerns.

“If we're moving to this digital-first work world, how do we, as a company, transition a thousand people to working from home and do it effectively?” said Mark Scott, CEO of managed service provider Fully Managed.

“That was the first question.”

Scott has been in the tech game for more than two decades. He founded and scaled N-able (NYSE:NABL)—a leader in IT technology solutions for managed service providers (MSPs)—that sold to Texas-based Solarwinds for $120M. It was subsequently spun-out separately and taken public. He then started his own MSP, TUC, which successfully merged with Fully Managed in 2018. Since the merger, he has helped grow the business’s revenue three-fold to $100M and its team from 150 people to north of 400. And most recently, he led the business through acquisition by Canadian communications giant, TELUS (NYSE:TU; TSX:T).

Needless to say, Scott has had a front-row seat to the surge of remote, hybrid and digital-first work culture.

“There's this business problem that needs to be addressed first, but there’s an individual problem as well,” he said.

So what does that look like?

Key pillars of the digital worker

The way Scott sees it, there are a few key pillars for the digital-first work world:

• IT experience, which includes the technology tools as well as the services, support and security around that.
• Employee experience, including on-demand human resource service management and online learning management services and support.
• Work analytics, comprised of insights into digital work productivity and application utilization.

As COVID-19 progressed, most companies quickly cobbled together and adopted various solutions and some form of infrastructure to support work-from-wherever environments.

But there was a missing element that Scott couldn’t stop thinking about.

An operating system for the digital-first work world

How can owners, managers and teams gain a clear view of what everyone's actually doing, where they’re doing it and what they’re accomplishing in remote, hybrid and digital-first work environments?

That’s what was on Scott’s mind.

Sure, there are tools for task-tracking, checking in and status updating—but those come at a cost. There’s a great deal of effort involved in keeping these solutions up-to-date, and the over-communication and over-burden quickly become overwhelming at all levels of a company.

As it turned out, Scott’s co-worker Joel Abramson, the chief strategy officer at Fully Managed, had these same questions rolling around in his brain. And the answers could only be found in data no one was even collecting—yet.

Remote and digital-first employees spend their days interacting with, and working within, the various pieces of their companies’ technology infrastructures. So what can their activities tell us about their productivity and the effectiveness of their work patterns, both as individuals and as a collective?

Scott and Abramson brought their concept to Chris Day, Fully Managed founder/board member and CEO of investment firm Top Down Ventures . Day quickly took the idea to another level, incubating the concept into reality, then tapping one of his Top Down “top guns” Ryan McGinnis to build out the strategy and product development team. From there, this missing piece of the remote workforce operating system evolved, grew legs and became a whole lot more than just a concept. It became a company they called Produce8 .

While the team was interested in surfacing data around remote, hybrid and digital-first teamwork patterns, the individual use-case potential became clear as well.

“With Produce8, a person can start to look and say, ‘here's what my work activity stream looks like’,” said Scott. “‘I think I was really productive today. So what does that look like in terms of the applications I've used and how much time I spent on them?’ And what were the outcomes?”

This is the personal productivity analytics piece of the platform. Individuals have the ability to look across all the applications they use in a day and really understand their typical workflow.

“From there, you can start to extend it to the team,” he said.

Where's the team spending time as a whole across the entire technology stack? And what’s being accomplished collectively?

“It’s a way of making sure we’re productive individually, we’re productive from an overall team standpoint, and ultimately this will benefit the company as well.”

How can we do remote, hybrid and digital-first work better?

“I think we all know digital-first is not going away,” said Scott, “and I think we all know many people are more productive working from home.”

Having a platform that clearly shows remote individual and team workflow dynamics as well as the measurable outcomes being accomplished simplifies and streamlines the management of this entire environment.

With Produce8, individuals can view their workdays with a more critical eye to ensure they’re making the best use of their valuable time. If you have a clear timeline of everything you do and accomplish in a day then you can spot your inefficiencies and work toward producing the same output in less time.

Produce eight hours of output in...however long it takes, and no more than that.

Teams can use this productivity data source to not only reach goals collectively, but also shift individual strategies based on how other team members are seeing success. All for one, and one for all.

In an office setting, this kind of collaborative learning and idea-sharing might happen more organically. In a remote or hybrid work environment, open and transparent digital teamwork makes this possible while simultaneously avoiding the more negative forms of in-office co-worker distraction.

And from a managerial perspective? This platform provides some much-needed visibility into where teams are spending their time and what they’re accomplishing—without the continual interruption of check-ins and status meetings. This makes it simpler for team leaders to report on KPIs and make business decisions based on real-time data.

It also helps them keep tabs on team and individual engagement to help ensure positive morale and to retain great talent—a key factor in growth.

The next generation of the digital-first work model

“When you boil it down, there are really only two reasons why we make technology investments,” said Scott, “one is to improve customer experience. And the other is to improve employee experience."

While there are countless communication and task-management solutions out there to support digital and distributed teams, Produce8 is the first to tie them all together and create a clear view of the entire digital workplace for teams. It’s the first to automate productivity and workforce management, and it’s the final pillar to create a strong operating system for the digital-first work world.

This article is the first in our three-part series on the founding and founders of Produce8: Mark Scott, Chris Day and Joel Abramson .