By Mark Gibbs
Network World, 8/31/98

Managing people is hard. I know, I've run three technical support groups so I have experienced how complicated, repetitive and frequently frustrating management can be. But creating an effective organization with happy members is also enormously rewarding.

But traditional ways of managing people are less effective in the intranet era. For the reasons behind this, we need to consider how our businesses have changed.

First, the speed of business has increased dramatically. We have to make decisions faster, and we need information faster. If we don't respond as well as the customers expect, our now global competitors are only too ready to do so.

To make decisions faster, we have to build organizations that have less formulaic business practices - we can no longer rely on rigidly structured approaches to doing business.

Rigid structure, I would argue, is the reason groupware is generally unsatisfactory. Intranets, on the other hand, have developed so fast because they provide the right amount of structure without too many constraints.

While intranets provide a more effective basis for group support, they also reinforce the separation of staff and management. Many workers use e-mail, the backbone of intranets, as the main channel for communicating with other employees and with the rest of the world.

More staff members than ever before require PCs to do their jobs. Along with this we are seeing the curious phenomenon of managers who manage by e-mail. This may sound acceptable, but the fact is e-mail is far too constrained for effective management and most managers don't express themselves well enough to get the best out of it.

Combine management by e-mail with increased work force mobility (seeing customers sells more than calling them on the phone) and telecommuting, and managers are becoming disconnected from those they manage. And when the two are disconnected, evaluating employee performance becomes difficult if it is done in a traditional framework. The old way still used by many managers is "management by wandering about." The theory is that managers can drive their employees to effectiveness by looking over their shoulders.

But when your employees are mainly online or using applications and quite possibly not even in a central office, managing by wandering about obviously doesn't work.

Now it comes as no surprise to me that one of the complaints I keep hearing from managers about intranet service and Internet access is that they provide an opportunity for the staff to waste time. Typically cited are nonwork-related surfing and e-mail, and the endless tweaking of intranet content. Sure, these things happen, but before you start blaming the technologies consider what's behind these apparently time-wasting activities.

The first problem is managers' perceptions of what defines nonwork-related surfing and e-mail. If this is evaluated by looking over a worker's shoulder (whether in reality or by looking at server or other access logs), it will take you a lot of research to really know that the activity is truly not work related.

Many managers think, for example, that e-mailing jokes isn't relevant to work. On the contrary, passing around jokes and other tidbits is a great way to build relationships.

Next is the issue of constructive playing. Fooling around with intranet content is a requisite for skills development. Languages such as HTML and JavaScript aren't easily mastered without developing an insight into how they work - something that comes quickest when you play.

Consider page design. Unless you look at other people's designs, deconstruct their work, then adapt and extend, you wind up reinventing the wheel. Sure, you can figure out for yourself how to create JavaScript-driven buttons that change as your mouse passes over them. But why? Hundreds of people already have written the code, which is available for examination.

So what is the new way of managing staff in the intranet era? Simple - you have to rely on quantitative measures of individual performance rather than qualitative assessments of whether the staff appears to be doing its job.

And guess what? Intranets can make management easier. By providing online job definitions, defined work objectives and feedback, the need to keep an eye on staff disappears and the organization focuses on what really matters: results.

Gibbs, a really good manager, can be reached at imcolumn@gibbs.com.