Nanobots Aren’t That Hard to Manage

Lots of readers of The Wall Street Journal e-mailed Monday’s interesting and timely piece about the “new class of worker,” the Nearly Autonomous, Not in the Office, doing Business in their Own Time Staff—nanobots, for short.

It’s an especially hot topic among publications managers. Increasingly, staff members want to telecommute to save gas and time, share childrearing responsibilities, and focus less on office politics and more on the task at hand. Not all senior managers are eager to manage nanobots. The usual sticking point: measuring productivity of the worker you seldom see.

If you’re among the concerned—or if you’re convinced and want more selling points for senior management—here are six techniques that have enabled most of our company to function as nanobots for 13 years:

1. Create nanobot teams whenever two or more people are working on similar or related projects. Everyone stalls out occasionally, and talking to a colleague can help to jump-start the brain.
2. Put all assignments in writing, in more detail than if you were explaining it in person. Nanobots get the opportunity because they’re self-reliant self-starters, but as workloads grow, details can get blurry. Create a project wiki and designate a wiki master to capture and update project descriptions.
3. Set a budget, in dollars or hours, for every assignment. Few managers know exactly how to do all the pieces of every nanobot project. Set a budget anyway. Better yet, ask the nanobot to propose one. Adjust as the project moves forward.
4. Agree on priorities. Nanobots tend to be high achievers who characteristically overestimate what they can accomplish in a given time frame. That helps to explain why eight-hour days stretch out into 12-hour days, productivity falls, and mistakes get made. If your nanobots aren’t already making A, B, and C lists, they need to read Alan Lakein’s short classic How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life.
5. Treat nanobots as individuals. We can’t agree with the Journal authors’ distinction between “who is cut out to be a nanobot, and who isn’t.” Management skills can be learned, including self-management skills. Some nanobots need to be reminded to wave a red flag when they’re stuck—so remind them. Once.
6. If a nanobot isn’t responding to management direction, cut the ties. Many work habits can be changed, but persistent refusal to recognize the chain of command—unless the nanobot persuades you that management policy is dead wrong—calls for a personnel change. Explain the reasons to the others, unless you’re pretty sure they already know.