How We’re Solving the Problem with Digital-First and Remote Teamwork

A new kind of pressure to prove our productivity has emerged.

We’ve felt it. You’ve probably felt it too. There’s even a great poem by Canadian poet Rupi Kaur called ‘Productivity Anxiety’, which sums it up quite nicely.

i have this productivity anxiety
that everyone else is working harder than me
and i’m going to be left behind
cause i’m not working fast enough
long enough
and i’m wasting my time

(That’s just a small excerpt. If you want to read the full poem, you can grab Kaur's book, home body .)

When you work in a digital-first or remote team environment, no one can see what you’re doing for most of the day. Fact.

You can’t see what anyone else is doing either, though, which makes teamwork, team management, and proving our collective productivity and engagement to our work a real challenge.

And as the onset of the pandemic sent more than 40% of the American workforce into a full-time work-from-home reality, this problem became a glaring one.

The problem with digital-first and remote teamwork

As a ‘solution’ to this digital-first and remote teamwork problem, we’ve become increasingly tethered to our messaging apps, our video telephony solutions and our task management platforms. We have to be because we need information, project updates and answers to questions—and because we desperately don’t want our managers and co-workers to think we aren’t working.

We also feel pressured to respond to messages, calls and emails well past the end of our work days, especially if our teams happen to work across multiple time zones. None of these feelings are unfounded, nor is any of this truly a new phenomenon for the remote worker.

“Even prior to the pandemic, managing teleworkers presented unique obstacles,” according to Sharon K. Parker, Caroline Knight, and Anita Keller in a Harvard Business Review article on change management.

All of this productivity-proving and attempts at teamwork—with the continual back-and-forth messaging, back-to-back video meetings, and ongoing task-tracking and status-updating—takes up precious time for employees, for managers and for companies in general.

And the solution to that? Just work more.

Logically, we know more hours worked doesn’t mean more productivity though. In fact, studies have long told us more hours actually result in less productivity .

So what’s really important, then? And what should we be building our solutions around instead?

Output.

And this is what Produce8 is all about.

Produce 8 hours of output in…just however long it takes

At the end of the day, all most managers and business owners really care about is output. What are their employees producing that’s actually moving the needle?

“We’re not punching into clocks anymore—that’s the shift that’s happening,” said Ryan McGinnis, VP, Marketing & Product at Produce8.

This mentality of valuing results over hours worked is an important part of what inspired Produce8.

But this brings us back to that challenge we touched on earlier: digital-first and remote teams have limited visibility into their output, productivity and engagement.

Our team believes the core solution to solving all of this is transparency.

We’re making digital work more transparent for remote teams

We created Produce8 as a way for you and your team members to get real-time visibility into the digital work getting done across your entire tech stack.

Each of your business applications contains heaps of data about the productivity and output taking place inside them. So why not just get your apps to update the team for you?

Produce8 does just that, pulling all the events and actions created by all of your team members into one central location—automatically.

Seeing what your team members are working on and how they’re structuring their days serves as proof of productivity without all the distractions and wasted time that come with continual pings, check-ins and status meetings.

And more importantly, fewer distractions and less time wasted means everyone can allocate their time more meaningfully—whether that means producing work output or spending more time with their kids.

Transparent digital work environments also make it easier for teams to establish more successful working habits.

• What’s really working to move the needle, and what isn’t?
• And how can the team or maybe even the company as a whole make shifts toward the most efficient work patterns, processes and policies?

The future of work for digital-first and remote teams

In a Global Workplace Analytics survey that focused on office workers, 71% of U.S. respondents said they want to continue working from home, at least weekly, when the pandemic is over. That includes 34% who said they don’t want to go back to the office, ever.

Another study from Growmotely found 97% of surveyed entrepreneurs and professionals want continued remote work flexibility for the long haul.

So we can safely say the future of work for digital workers will involve hybrid work models of some sort. But the models we currently use aren't working.

As Kaur wrote beautifully later in her poem:

magic doesn’t happen
cause i’ve figured out how to
pack more work in a day

We’re passionate about creating a solution that enables digital workers and their teams to produce the necessary output to be successful at their jobs while casting off time-wasting tasks and hours worked purely for the sake of hours worked.

We want to help people reconsider and reimagine their work habits. And we want to move teams toward work models and teamwork strategies that actually work for real people.

Ultimately, this is going to lead to companies that are stronger, more resilient and more profitable, as well as more attractive places for people to grow and build careers.

Healthy companies, healthy teams, healthy people.

That’s what we value most.