Remote work is still 'frustrating and disorienting' for bosses, economist says—their No. 1 problem with it
Remote work is still 'frustrating and disorienting' for bosses, economist says—their No. 1 problem with it
Although some bosses have recognized the benefits of workplace flexibility, many are still hesitant to adopt remote work permanently.
Remote work is still 'frustrating and disorienting' for bosses, economist says—their No. 1 problem with it::Although some bosses have recognized the benefits of workplace flexibility, many are still hesitant to adopt remote work permanently.
Summarized: micro managing remote workers is harder, and that's apparently a bad thing according to CEOs.
People will really do such incredible mental gymnastics to avoid actually learning how to quantify business value. If you don't know how to measure the value an employee has brought to your company, you don't deserve the title of CEO, as that's pretty much your job.
My job for years was building maintenance. From doing it on my own at small places to leading teams. One of the last places I worked at was a theme restaurant that had me and a part time person. The job started at 4am so I would be out of the way before they started serving guests. I had a great boss that was moved to another location, after 3 years, the new boss hated me he constantly asked me to prove my work, told me straight out that he couldn't quantify my labor cost. The first meeting we had he told me straight out that he didn't understand the position and didn't know why I was there. Needless to say I was fired after 4 months with him.
Nobody would qualify as CEO at any company I've worked for if those were the rules. I'd love to see someone try to estimate the exact value added by any single software developer working in a team
I’d love to see someone try to estimate the exact value added by any single software developer working in a team
Thats literally what the job is. You can go get an entire degree on this topic and learn precisely how you assess the value someone brings to a team. It's an entire field of study.
I didnt say its easy, its actually incredibly difficult
But... thats why CEOs are supposed to be paid such a high salary, its supposed to be super hard
However, instead a lot of shitty CEOs just short circuit out to incredibly stupid metrics for value that have been proven time and time again that they are not accurate at all, because they are easy methods and the CEO is lazy.
An actual serious CEO who knows wtf they are doing and genuinely knows how to measure company value, can indeed measure how valuable an employee is, thats their job.
But it requires a lot of work and, turns out, a lot of CEOs are actually not qualified for their positions, and would rather just slap monitoring software on everyone's laptops and metric them by mouse wiggles per hour, lines of code per day, bugs solved per sprint, or any of the other usual "sounds good to stakeholders but is actually totally useless and destructive in practice" metrics.
I'd like to see someone assess the value against cost for some of the management I've left behind.
Many of them would be right-placed shortly after.
Permanently Deleted
About 25 years ago I was brought in on contract to teach a course on networking to a group of people sent there on a job skills training thing.
Many of them wanted to be there, some didn't. And so the first thing I was told was to look for people whose faced looked green: They were inn in front of computers, and this was the Windows '95 days, and they all had Solitaire, and if I saw a green glow it meant someone had zoned out and was playing Solitaire.
Over the years it turns out a lot of managers takes pretty much that approach to managing employees. Instead of talking to people and paying attention to whether they are productive, they've gotten comfortable with looking for superficial signs of whether or not people appear to be productive.
And the first sign they used to look far was whether or not you were even at your desk typing...
Of course managers who have spent their career dependent on that as their sign you're working will freak out when they can't see you.
And the first sign they used to look far was whether or not you were even at your desk typing...
Man this is so true.. my manager HATES it when I'm not in office. Granted she doesn't interact with me and I'm not a mission critical person... But every other Wednesday is in office day.. and if she happens to stroll by and I'm not in.. I hear about it.
Middle manager gonna middle manage I guess
My gf got this from a manager 3 levels removed. She's just handed in her resignation at that place after getting a long overdue step up by looking elsewhere, because while that manager noticed if she didn't see people in the office, nobody noticed whether or not you actually did a good job. The upside of the increase of remote work, of course, being that people who do well has a larger pool of potential places to apply to in order to leave these clowns behind.
… they've gotten comfortable with looking for superficial signs of whether or not people appear to be productive.
This is really the crux of the issue. Rather than adapt the way that people are managed, it’s easier to simply stay with the status quo.
The worst part of this managerial style is that it’s so easy to “fake” work. I like to write and I wrote some of my best stories while at “work” in the office. Someone walks by your desk and sees you furiously typing away at a document that fills a whole page, and they think, “Wow! Look at her go!” despite the fact that I’m writing my 450K word fanfiction novel on company time. When the 2048 game craze took over, I had an Excel document that looked like something legit, but actually had the 2048 game in the middle of rows that talked about volume variances and efficiencies.
The appearance of work doesn’t account for anything. Managers need to account for production, i.e., here is the work that is expected, and have these employees completed the work. Even increasing the workload over time can get a good amount of work out of any employee if employers are so utterly concerned about a moment of the workday spent doing anything other than “work”.
Yes, you’re going to have employees who will just go MIA for three hours and you find out that they went out shopping or stepped out to hit a few balls at the driving range, but that is - again - a manager’s ability or inability to check-in with their team, to know what their people are working on, and ensure that deliverables are met.
I remember a game back in the day that had boss mode. It pulled up a fake spreadsheet and paused your game.
Yeah, for my part I had a constant ssh connection to a screen session on my machine at home, and could work on all kinds of hobby projects from the office when I wasn't in the mood to work and had to still be present. Whether I was there had nothing to do with it - when motivated I've often done some of my best work from home in the middle of the night because I wanted to and inspiration struck. Either way, my boss would only know if the actually engaged with me rather than go by whether I was typing. Since I love programming, but sometimes not the programming I have to do at work, I've had many managers who could've stood there behind me watching me "work" and still be unable to tell if I was slacking or not.
Won't someone think of the managers?!
Yeah, it'd be a shame if they had to do some real work instead of looking over shoulders and being a general nuisance.
I know this is sarcastic but maybe the best thing we can do to ensure remote work survives is understand what managers are bitching about so we can address it. Just assuming it’s 100% micromanaging skulduggery and telling them to go fuck themselves doesn’t necessarily help us.
I don't work in an office and as.such lack the perspective to leave an informed response. But if office managers are anything like private EMS managers, they can get straight fucked 100% of the time
I managed a remote team for 5 years. Good managers have no problem leading teams remotely. It is a question of knowing your employees and how best to make the remote environment work for their specific skills and job requirements. People trying to get monitoring software or pushing for RTO are just trying to get butts in seats and not truly managing their people.
That! I'm also part of a remote team. I have my job, If I don't do it I'm out. Whats difficult? My job can take me from 4 up to 12 hours, depending on the day and the dificulty, they don't have to pay me overtime and, believe me, I do a lot more than 8h a day most days and I'm ok with it.
Were you part of this team before going remote? What's your experience in learning more about the people never meet in person
My company was about 70% remote before I joined, and went to about 90% during covid so I had two people in office when I started and let them go remote about 18 months in.
We had lots of time together to get to chat and get to know one another. I stressed on camera time for most team calls (other calls were their choice). I also made sure to build in time fore every call to just chat and socialize. I tried to get budget for some team gatherings but we never got it. That would definitely have helped with learning about people personally.
Remote is definitely different from in person work, and I felt like I had fewer friends around work than I did in person. But I was productive and effective and so was my team. And they were happy. If I could do it again I'd definitely build in more time for regular in person meetings, maybe quarterly or semiannual, but unless I find the perfect gig in town I don't think I would ask another team to work in person full time. Its not necessary for most white-collar jobs anymore.
The Peter Principle. These bosses have been promoted to the point of incompetence, and now they're stuck alone with their confusion and nobody else to blame.
I would lose my control over my minions... Why don't you understand?
Whoops, I meant, my staff can't be monitored...
Whoops, I actually meant, I will lose the one place in life where I can actually throw around my power...
/s
Oh nooooooooo, not the bosses!! Won't someone think of the bosses????
I recently left a WFH only company. The environment was toxic and there was definitely some insecurity on the part of management regarding worker productivity. There was a much larger emphasis on constantly showing to management what you were working on and proving you were using your work day productively.
It was a culture shift I didn't adapt well to and left.
If it's salaried and your work is done and you aren't missing meetings and calls and whatnot then who cares if you're using your day 'productively'? You must be if your work was done with no major issues. Who cares if it took you 6 hours or 8?
Who cares if it took you 6 hours or 8?
Anyone wanting to get the most out of the departement/team. If you only need 75% of your expected working hours to complete your assigned workload, its completely reasonable that they know so they can give you 25% more work to fill out the rest of your work day.
Ijbol at the picture of an office floor with actual cubicles. That’s a shitty office from the 0’s or earlier. Now the shitty office standard is a bunch of shitty tables with zero privacy and everyone smushed together, for ‘teamwork’.
And the employee is on a zoom call, it looks like.
"I love taking my zoom calls on a cardboard desk in the middle of a cubicle farm instead of from my home office." --how bosses apparently think i should feel
Before cubicles, it was all open floors or offices. If you weren't high up enough for an office, even a shared one, you were out in the cattle pen. Office work has always sucked for anyone not in management.
Actually it’s all about losing company culture and collaboration if we’re not face to face.
/s
So basically, bosses can't deal with the fact that they can't step out of their room and yell at people, and therefore still want to inconvenience everyone.
I appreciate ongoing conversations about this, but I think they tend to be too broad. Managers aren't worried about the remote workers who are productive and reliable. The worry is the people who aren't. On my team, you are fully remote as long as you meet expectations. You don't, you return to office.
My wife's company recently went from a hybrid 2 days in office per week to 4 days. One month later, they're walking it back to 3 days because even managers were choosing to work extra days from home "so they could focus."
They only mention it once, but I do have issues with mentorship in a remote work environment. I just personally haven't been able to make it work. I'm sure some do.
I have some faith that eventually we'll all work it out. Just going through some growing pains.
This is a good point. Different employees require different amounts of supervision, while the person commenting might be effective working from home, there are many other people that really need someone checking in on them more often or else they aren't effective or get easily derailed on their tasks.
Managers aren’t worried about the remote workers who are productive and reliable. The worry is the people who aren’t. On my team, you are fully remote as long as you meet expectations. You don’t, you return to office.
Fine, but that mean that they have no way of measuring productivity other than the "I see him doing his work" or "I see him at his desk" methods.
They only mention it once, but I do have issues with mentorship in a remote work environment. I just personally haven’t been able to make it work. I’m sure some do.
This is a minor problem. You can implement a progressive WFH policy where the new hires must be in the office with their menthor for the initial training period and then begin to WFH for more and more days. The downside is that the company need to return to hire locally which could means to pay the new hires higher salaries.
I think there are also cases where there is value in in-office collaboration for some tasks, whether it is for different disciplines to talk together or to encourage mentor-mentee relationships that don't develop out of office.
It isn't enough to demand 100% in office work and I doubt it ever will, though.
Considering all my management besides my direct manager is remote, blows my mind that my coworkers and myself need to be in. I work in IT
I was in a job a couple years ago where our Director required us all to be in the office. Yes, in the middle of the pandemic. He and his sycophantic minion (my direct boss) were full time WFH though. Bastards.
I was an IT manager for a decade and it was much easier for me to keep my finger on the pulse of remote employees than in-person. It's not rocket science.
I think it's a generational issue too for some people. They just aren't used to working online
I don't know about that. I have two older women living in my condo building who started working remotely when COVID started, and they said they got used to it quickly.
Companies usually have some metrics they use to determine if employees are meeting their requirements and these same metrics can be used for remote employees. The problem is, they can't wring you out for extra work. Looking busy at work is important because if you complete all your tasks 100%, management will just give you more work. At home, you can complete your work in 1 hour and then spend the rest of your time for leisure. This terrifies management, because looking over your shoulder and squeezing you for extra work without more pay is the only real value they bring to the company.