Solving the Work Transparency Problem for Remote Teams

Joel Abramson was sitting on a Zoom call with 12 CEOs from across various industries—a group of trusted folks he’d known for a long time. This was right at the beginning of the pandemic and people were settling into work-from-home mode.

“All of these CEOs went around the room and said to me, 'I just don't know what my people are doing’.”

They lamented over how they had no way of figuring out what work was being done and how productive their team members truly were. They needed a solution for their remote teams.

Abramson has worked in tech for more than 25 years, services provision for over a decade, and has been part of the tech venture-capital world for over a year. He currently serves as the Chief Strategy Officer at IT service management company Fully Managed, as well as a Partner at Top Down Ventures and the Chief Executive Officer at Produce8 —but we’ll get to that in a moment.

“Here's what you can do,” said Abramson.

He’d heard about an employee monitoring software solution on the market that was the de-facto solution in the space.

“Install it on all your employees' machines and it will tell you everything they've done,” he told the group.

The general consensus? Revulsion.

Responses ranged from, ’Are you f***ing kidding me?’ and, ‘I would never install something like that. That's spyware,’ to ‘I trust my employees’ and ‘that's why we have managers’.

In the days following that meeting, six of the CEOs contacted Abramson to say that, while they didn’t like the particular software solution he’d mentioned, the problem still hadn’t been solved either. And did he have any other suggestions?

“My answer was ‘no’, but it was enough of a question for me to think, ‘well, how are we going to solve this problem’?”

That’s when Chris Day and Mark Scott were brought into the fold.

Effectiveness is measured in outcomes, not hours worked

Abramson, Day and Scott began kicking around the idea of a solution that wouldn’t monitor exactly what employees were doing each day, but rather observe where they were spending their digital work time and what were the results?

So the question became this: how would they take this problem of not knowing what remote team members were doing and create a solution that resulted in greater transparency, clearer operational awareness and higher team performance for remote workforces—without sacrificing the privacy of the individual?

An original concept name of Work4 was thrown around, inspired by Tim Ferriss’ 2007 book The 4-Hour Workweek.

“I think all of us calibrate our lives to be as effective as we can. We hate busy work, we hate bullshit work,” said Abramson. “That’s a common trait. The new-age worker is all about efficiency and work-life balance. ‘Where am I spending my time online and how does it impact my life and wellbeing’?”

That original name evolved to Produce8, inspired by the concept that, while we all aim to produce eight hours worth of output in a day, it doesn’t really matter how long it takes us to get there. If you can produce, in just four hours, the equivalent work that someone else does in eight, why should you work an additional four just to put in the time?

It’s about what you produce, not about how long you work.

Taking the work out of managing remote teams

“In every medium shift, the first thing you have to do is pull forward the norms of the last medium,” Abramson recalled hearing from an early conversation with a venture capitalist.

If we look at remote digital work as the new work medium, then we know we have to pull forward an understanding of time and how people are putting in their eight hours of output a day.

“In an office, you’d just look around. ‘Is John working today? He's not at his desk. Is he at the dentist, is he sick or is he just in the bathroom?’ So that's the first thing you're pulling forward in a distributed work environment.”

We’ve solved some of this already with remote communications applications and project management solutions. But of course, all of this requires inputs in order to see the outputs. It requires effort and updating and maintenance. It requires a burden on time and output potential.

We need a shift in the way we manage inputs and outputs for remote and digital-first teams.

"From there, we can start to find efficiencies, eliminate distractions and shift our focus to managing the outputs irrespective of the inputs."

The other necessary shift is a culture change.

Purpose-built for collective awareness

“I think for the individual, the team and for the manager, creating an open work environment with transparency around what's happening in the day and what we’re doing with our days is something that still has to cross the chasm,” said Abramson.

He gave the example of tweeting for the first time.

There's anxiety around it because you know you're going to send a message out into the world that everybody can see. Entering into a transparent digital workplace is similar.

Produce8 is not purpose-built for spying on employees. In fact, it’s anti-monitoring. There are products to do that if that’s what you want.

Produce8 is purpose-built for solving the problem of digital team transparency, said Abramson.

“As the platform evolves, we’re committed to figuring out all the value that can be achieved around this, not just from a company perspective, but also from the perspective of remote teams and individuals.”

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