How do businesses measure productivity of co-located workers? By how busy they appear to be when you walk by? By whether they enter the office at 9 am and leave around 5 pm? Any business that effectively measures employee productivity surely isn’t relying on anything having to do with physical location.

In truth, well managed distributed teams are often far more productive than co-located teams, because, indeed, you’re forced to measure productivity by far more objective metrics than things like “time in the building.”

10up is an agency, so most staff track their time (for us to bill hourly or measure against fixed fee estimates); and our team leaders review and authorize those entries weekly while also maintaining project budgets; it’s pretty apparent pretty quickly if a budget is being blown by an employee who is not pulling their weight, and it’s in a manager’s’ interests. We also adhere to many agile project management principals, with granular tasks (weekly milestones at most, sometimes daily) – we know pretty quickly when staff are off the reservation – faster than most co-located shops I’ve worked at.

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