Ever since the outbreak of Covid-19 and the ensuing lockdowns that resulted in most companies being forced to adapt to a remote working business culture, the question of whether work should be outcomes-based or inputs-based has started to come to the fore.

Employees increasingly believe that compensation should be based on performance, not time spent.

For many traditional, old-school business owners, work is about inputs. In other words, employees are paid for their time and are therefore expected to put in a certain amount of hours every day ‒ preferably in an office where they can be monitored to ensure that they deliver the number of hours at their desk stipulated in their employment contract.

However, a new line of thinking is becoming increasingly popular and gaining traction across the working world. Outcomes-based work does not concern itself so much with what employees put in when it comes to their hours spent but rather on whether they deliver certain outcomes.

Does Time Spent Matter?

Traditionally, employment contracts are about buying a person’s time. However, modern-day outcome-based employment contracts require employees to deliver a certain level of performance with certain measurable deliverables that will determine whether the employee is doing their part or not.

How many hours they spend achieving those deliverables, which parts of the day they choose to work (whether in the morning or evening), and where they work (whether at home or an office) are all mostly irrelevant factors.

What matters is whether the employee is delivering the outcomes that are expected. It is understandably challenging for employers to measure the productivity of their workers when they are not at the office where they can be monitored.

However, switching to an outcomes-based employment model provides a means to assess productivity by what is delivered, which is a fairly easy metric to assess.

Ensuring An Outcomes-Based Work Culture Is Not Abused

It is important, however, that checks and balances be implemented as both employees and managers can abuse the system. Managers could implement targets that essentially make it impossible for employees to find a reasonable balance, pushing them to work far more than they otherwise would to reach unreasonable outcomes. On the other hand, employees could abuse the freedom afforded them and fail to deliver up to the required standard.

Establishing A Work Culture

One of the challenges of implementing outcomes-based work with remote workers is that there might be difficulty in establishing and maintaining a corporate culture, which is often defined by the office and how things work there. Without the office, it becomes difficult for relationships to form and for a work culture to develop, particularly with new employees unfamiliar with the company and its culture.

To maintain a company culture, some concessions might need to be made, such as having mandatory office-based work days once a week, regular team-building exercises or regular meetings to ensure that everyone touches base frequently.