For many organizations, the decision to add staff members has historically come down to seeing overtime figures go through the roof. Simple enough to justify when a small group of frontline employees are all putting in 50+ hours each per week. In that case, it’s easy to crunch the numbers and see where another pair of hands is needed. However, that only accounts for the hours worked, not necessarily what comes out of them.
Productivity isn’t something that can always be verified by time-stamp.
Especially now as remote work has fundamentally changed the nature of clocking-in.
The last 16 months have shown that mere physical presence in the workplace has been overrated. Throughout most of the pandemic, the lack of face-to-face time has made it impossible to really know when or how much people were working. That’s unlikely to change very quickly, even as things slowly return to normal. Those who have adjusted to working from home aren’t about to snap automatically back into place, particularly if they feel working outside of the office has even increased their cognitive output.
Time to stop measuring productivity in hours
As Jared Lindzon wrote in a past Fast Company article, “In the distributed-work reality of 2021, cognitive output has become the primary way for most companies to evaluate productivity. [This increased focus] means that we’ll need to double-down on our processes and systems to ensure that we’re [not only] getting things done, but that we’re getting the right things done.”
Employees who can thrive in ambiguity and uncertainty, making sound decisions without someone looking over their shoulder, are now among the most valuable of all staff members. They are the ones who have shown the ability to make something out of nothing, adjust their priorities on the fly, and take proactive actions without being told. In turn, that makes them very much in demand.
Here at TempExperts, it’s also what puts them on our radar.
The right person for the job, right away
TempExperts is a full-service temporary and temp-to-perm staffing agency that gets it. The pandemic has taught us how to better recognize the cognitive talent of individuals and their ability to produce tangible results. As Robert Pozen, a senior lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management, put it: “[Job seekers] should spend real time figuring out what their goals, priorities, and objectives are, and agree on success metrics on how you can tell after a week or a month whether you have achieved those.”
That interpretation matches our own thoughts on cognitive output, how it determines which candidates we bring to the table and our follow-up process. Every backstory is a little bit different, but most share a common theme of successful “before-and-after” projects. Proof of the independent exercise of strategic thinking at work. When we see evidence of that in applicants, we go above and beyond to place them in the position best suited for their singular talents—fast!
Meet your match
TempExperts serves local markets in Florida, ranging from Tampa and Clearwater to St. Petersburg and Sarasota, as well as prominent employment centers in Wilmington, DE, Philadelphia, PA, and New York, NY, among others, specializing in Light Industrial, Professional Office, Legal, and IT job openings.