This YouTube talk by George B. Thomas advises managers that trust is built by consistently meeting shared expectations. The speaker argues that setting clear deliverables and outcome-focused metrics (e.g., number of deliverables, traffic increases, leads generated) is better than relying on proxy activity monitoring (e.g., Hubstaff screenshots, keystroke monitoring) which encourages being "online" rather than producing quality work.
Chapters
Trust is built when expectations are met consistently over time. You're way better off purely meeting the bar over and over and over than one week we're way above the bar, we're doing the craziest things and the next week we're way below the bar. It's great if you exceed expectations as well, but if you consistently are hitting them and those are set shared expectations, that's the key piece here. So that setting expectations piece is the strongest piece, is it that I want to be able to see that your computer is on for eight hours a day and how many keystrokes you hit. Is that the expectation that you're setting for people? I don't think so. Subconsciously, that's often the expectation that does get, you know, hey, we're going to plug in Hubstaff so we can take screenshots of your computer every 10 minutes and I can know when you're online or not online. Like the expectation is be online and be busy. It's too easy for that to steer away from the expectation being produce really good work. And here's what that looks like. Here's the metrics that are tied to that. Here's the number of deliverables I expect, here's the amount of traffic increase I expect, here's the amount of leads generated that I expect.
