• hightrix@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    There is a great way to monitor employee’s performance. This one weird trick will save you losing your best employees!

    Are their tasks getting done on time and with quality work?

    Congrats! You just learned how to treat your employees like adults.

    Now kindly fuck off and let me continue to work in my underwear.

      • hightrix@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        I actually like daily standups. I know many don’t, but they can be really useful.

        What did you do yesterday. What are you doing today. Any issues for the group?

        Then get back to work!

        • cooopsspace@infosec.pub
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          11 months ago

          Daily standups are fine, but they need to be like 10-15 minutes tops. And between 10am-1pm. Putting them at 9am sharp is just rude.

          • AbidanYre@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            A few jobs back the director was having daily standups with the whole dev team for 60-90 minutes and sometimes longer.

            The goal was to figure out why the project was behind schedule… yeah.

            • cabbagee@sopuli.xyz
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              11 months ago

              What I used to do was make notes at the end of the day. Just a couple short bullet points to say at standup and help me get back on track a little faster the next morning.

            • SeaJ@lemm.ee
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              11 months ago

              Ugh. I hate being on the west coast of the US. Most office jobs start at 7 or 8 AM here.

              • Nyanix@lemmy.ca
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                11 months ago

                God, I hear that…plus I usually need to meet with my coworkers in India, so I’m often needing to start meetings at 6 AM. I am nooooot functional that early

                • SeaJ@lemm.ee
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                  11 months ago

                  I usually had to do that for Europe. Most Indian coworkers I have worked with work a later schedule so there has always been a bit of overlap. Generally the Europeans I have worked with have been German and they generally have a labor rep on the board so they can fight against messed up work schedules.

          • grue@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            Keeping the meeting short was the whole point of them being “standups” (as opposed to “sit-downs”) in the first place!

            Frankly, even 10 minutes is excessive: it means either people are talking too much or your team is too big.

            I’m fucking sick and tired of cargo-cult managers adopting the trappings of agile without understanding WTF they’re for.

            • griD@feddit.de
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              11 months ago

              Ha! Yes.
              For the first time, we are trying out a full scrum team in our company, with an external “scrum master” who really seems to know what he’s doing. It’s bloody amazing. Small team, the daily meeting has yet to exceed 10 minutes and is usually <5 minutes, the planning and refinement meeting keeps everyone in the loop. The rest of the time I can just be a happy code monkey :)

          • finestnothing@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            My stand-ups are at 10 am (11 am for most of the team), last between 3 and 15 minutes depending on how many of the 7 of us show up and how much everyone has to say, then we all go back to what we’re doing. My project manager and boss both care about the work that gets done rather than monitoring us to make sure we’re working the entire time, and we actually get reasonable (even generous) timelines for most things unless it’s something super important.

            I love my job.

            • TheaoneAndOnly27@kbin.social
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              11 months ago

              I’m the same way. If I could start work at 5:00 a.m. and be off by noon or 1:00 p.m. I’d be happy. It’s just hard to find people who want to do therapy at 5:00 a.m. 😂

              • seth@lemmy.world
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                11 months ago

                I’d love it if therapy hours were before and after normal work hours. On Betterhelp they are, but I gave up on it after a couple tries when I couldn’t find a good fit.

                • TheaoneAndOnly27@kbin.social
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                  11 months ago

                  I’m allowed to set my own hours, so if it was telehealth I could theoretically do late night or morning appointments if I want to. I just haven’t really thought about that. When I eventually have my own practice. I really do want to have weekend hours and evening hours, before I worked with a lot of parents and that was one of the biggest issues was when do you have time for therapy when you’re chasing a toddler. Or like I remember when I would have friends who worked as bartenders, they wished that they could do therapy after they got off work but sometimes that would be two or three in the morning.

        • NaibofTabr@infosec.pub
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          11 months ago

          This would be a massive waste of time if it were with the whole team every day. I don’t need to know what every other employee on the team is doing every single day, and I don’t need to spend time listening to them explain it. I’ve got shit to do.

          • Taleya@aussie.zone
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            11 months ago

            My husband holds his team meetings at 3/4pm ish on friday on zoom with beers. Afterwards he tells everyone to fuck off home.

            THAT is how you do it. It turns into a pile of geeks talking geek and part post-mortem, part decompressing from the week and they’ve actually had some absolutely mint ideas rising out of deformalising the dev pileup.

              • Taleya@aussie.zone
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                11 months ago

                nah yeah, mate. You spend the arse end of your friday workday drinking beer and talking shit in an informal setting and then fuck off early

                • Flaky_Fish69@kbin.social
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                  11 months ago

                  the problem is, then i a can’t leave at lunch if my shit’s done. And lets be honest, nobody was doing shit on friday anyhow…

                • BoofStroke@lemm.ee
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                  11 months ago

                  I’d rather be doing that on my own time, or something more productive with friends, thanks.

          • Haywire@lemm.ee
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            11 months ago

            We used to have a rigorous schedule. Arrive at the office between 8-830. Make coffee and chat. At 9am we started the daily meeting. We all read what we were going to do today to each other. By then it was 1130 and so we broke for lunch. After lunch, at 1300 we would do the thing we said we would do. At 1530-1630 we would submit out updates to the project management system and produce tomorrow’s report for us to read to each other. 1700 we would go to the bar then head home around 1830.

            When I started working for myself I would usually start around 9 to finish at noon, including travel time.

          • Neato@kbin.social
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            11 months ago

            It wouldn’t be explaining it. It would be your teammates telling everyone where they are on the projects you all work on. If you aren’t working the same projects, then you aren’t on the same team. Or you need sub-teams. If your work is so independent you don’t rely on anyone else’s work and vice versa, then you probably don’t need standups.

          • hightrix@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            I agree with you. That’s why we make our teams small enough in size that standups are 10min max, usually more like 5.

            That said, it can be really beneficial to hear that Joe is working on something similar to a thing I’m going to start today. He may be able to give me some lessons learned or point me to a library.

            But I completely agree that big teams a make this an annoyance. I used to be on a 20 person team and standups were completely worthless.

            Now, we have 3-5 devs per team and it’s usually really quick.

        • JBloodthorn@kbin.social
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          11 months ago

          I was doing daily technical meetups in the morning so that my team in India and the more local members could stay in sync and ask each other questions. Usually 10 minutes, but occasionally an hour or more when we had to go way out into the weeds.

        • merc@sh.itjust.works
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          11 months ago

          Do you mean standups where you are actually standing up? Many places I’ve worked have called a daily meeting a “stand-up” but it has been an hour-long sit-down meeting.

          Then there are the actual “stand-ups” where the tall guys tower over the group, and the shorter people (typically women) are either talking into the chests of those guys, or they’re craning their necks up at painful angles.

    • Melkath@kbin.social
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      11 months ago

      But… but… but…

      It’s proving that my 25 years of being paid 3 times as much as the people I “manage” has been a complete scam the entire time!

      • Hawk@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        11 months ago

        Hey, if they’re getting all their work done on time, they’re probably not getting enough work /s

        • Melkath@kbin.social
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          11 months ago

          And the 9 floating around managers will figure out to send THAT email, right?

          Oh. Wait. No. You right.

          Dem 9 gonna have 7 pointless meetings.

          So frustrating how a remote world is exposing that…

          Edit: not sarcastic. Satiracle.

          Call me Candide.

    • xkforce@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Thats the thing… boses are basically saying that they cant do that. They cant actually measure how productive people are so they fall back on watching them like a hawk

    • TSG_Asmodeus (he, him)@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      You’re overlooking that most managers don’t actually do anything, so they need desperately to justify their positions. I have a manager who has seven hours of meetings every day, five days a week. We make a fucking app. It barely changes month to month. What on earth are you spending 35 hours a week talking about?

      The manager has so little to do they just micromanage everyone, and cause a massive backlog of work that doesn’t have to exist.

      I always thought that Office Space was satire, but it really is like that in a lot of companies. I spent more time updating managers than doing actual work since I started this position.

          • FaceDeer@kbin.social
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            11 months ago

            Why do you need physical access to employees that don’t do their work on time or up to quality?

            • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.club
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              11 months ago

              Training and education have been found to occur better in person than online.

              If someone needs help, shouldn’t they be given the best chance at success?

              • FaceDeer@kbin.social
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                11 months ago

                I’m going to want a citation on that. I learn just fine on my own, and I’m sure many others do too. If you’re really concerned about giving people “the best chance at success” rather than just forcing them into boxes then you’d be presenting options.

          • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
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            11 months ago

            Is requiring all employees to spend multiple unpaid hours in a car during rush hour in order to put them in unattractive cubicals or desks akin to prison cells, where they are only allowed to shit x amounts a day, and where the manager keep looking over the shoulder to see if you are not wasting a minute thinking about anything other than work a punishment?

            What do you think?

      • Lifecoach5000@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        My company has a management mentorship program for remote employees. The boss actually travels to different employees homes and will stay with them and work with them at their house for the week. This keeps the execs happy enough to know that they’ve got middle management keeping an eye on the employees, while also allowing the remote work with no fuss. It’s an interesting approach for sure.

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    11 months ago

    Actually it’s simple. Work well done? Cool, the employee is working. This “monitoring” mentality needs to fucking die.

    • pensivepangolin@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      But then how do you justify keeping “middle management” hall monitors on a payroll after admitting they’re pointless?

      • Cobrachicken@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Well, they could focus on distributing or coordinating things and assembling results, things they now leave to those who’s job it definitively not is.

    • stolid_agnostic@lemmy.ml
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      11 months ago

      It’s this thinking that allows the business bro to think that they contribute to the world while they are really no better than you average insurance company.

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    11 months ago

    “In probably unrelated news, remote workers love how they can’t be micromanaged or watched over their shoulders and are frustrated and disoriented by return-to-office plans.”

    • moistclump@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      The kinds of bosses that don’t want me working from home are the exact ones I want to hide at home from. The ones who already aren’t a micromanager I’m actually quite happy to come into the office and work with and around.

      Been on both sides and Oof. Luckily now with a boss that’s happy to have me wfh but I don’t take him up on it too much cause I just genuinely like being in the office!

    • moistclump@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      The kinds of bosses that don’t want me working from home are the exact ones I want to hide at home from. The ones who already aren’t a micromanager I’m actually quite happy to come into the office and work with and around.

      Been on both sides and Oof. Luckily now with a boss that’s happy to have me wfh but I don’t take him up on it too much cause I just genuinely like being in the office!

    • moistclump@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      The kinds of bosses that don’t want me working from home are the exact ones I want to hide at home from. The ones who already aren’t a micromanager I’m actually quite happy to come into the office and work with and around.

      Been on both sides and Oof. Luckily now with a boss that’s happy to have me wfh but I don’t take him up on it too much cause I just genuinely like being in the office!

    • moistclump@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      The kinds of bosses that don’t want me working from home are the exact ones I want to hide at home from. The ones who already aren’t a micromanager I’m actually quite happy to come into the office and work with and around.

      Been on both sides and Oof. Luckily now with a boss that’s happy to have me wfh but I don’t take him up on it too much cause I just genuinely like being in the office!

    • moistclump@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      The kinds of bosses that don’t want me working from home are the exact ones I want to hide at home from. The ones who already aren’t a micromanager I’m actually quite happy to come into the office and work with and around.

      Been on both sides and Oof. Luckily now with a boss that’s happy to have me wfh but I don’t take him up on it too much cause I just genuinely like being in the office!

    • moistclump@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      The kinds of bosses that don’t want me working from home are the exact ones I want to hide at home from. The ones who already aren’t a micromanager I’m actually quite happy to come into the office and work with and around.

      Been on both sides and Oof. Luckily now with a boss that’s happy to have me wfh but I don’t take him up on it too much cause I just genuinely like being in the office!

    • moistclump@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      The kinds of bosses that don’t want me working from home are the exact ones I want to hide at home from. The ones who already aren’t a micromanager I’m actually quite happy to come into the office and work with and around.

      Been on both sides and Oof. Luckily now with a boss that’s happy to have me wfh but I don’t take him up on it too much cause I just genuinely like being in the office!

    • moistclump@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      The kinds of bosses that don’t want me working from home are the exact ones I want to hide at home from. The ones who already aren’t a micromanager I’m actually quite happy to come into the office and work with and around.

      Been on both sides and Oof. Luckily now with a boss that’s happy to have me wfh but I don’t take him up on it too much cause I just genuinely like being in the office!

    • moistclump@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      The kinds of bosses that don’t want me working from home are the exact ones I want to hide at home from. The ones who already aren’t a micromanager I’m actually quite happy to come into the office and work with and around.

      Been on both sides and Oof. Luckily now with a boss that’s happy to have me wfh but I don’t take him up on it too much cause I just genuinely like being in the office!

    • moistclump@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      The kinds of bosses that don’t want me working from home are the exact ones I want to hide at home from. The ones who already aren’t a micromanager I’m actually quite happy to come into the office and work with and around.

      Been on both sides and Oof. Luckily now with a boss that’s happy to have me wfh but I don’t take him up on it too much cause I just genuinely like being in the office!

  • Naja_kaouthia@sh.itjust.works
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    11 months ago

    I’ve been working remotely for almost a decade now and have been a manager for 6 of those years and I do the following:

    Is [EMPLOYEE]’s work getting done? If yes then do nothing aside from thanking them. If no then talk to employee and/or start the corrective action process.

    I have neither the need nor the desire to hover over them. They’re grown ass adults.

    • The_v@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      A few issues with your method for the average manager.

      What work exactly is the employee doing?

      How do you know if it is being done correctly?

      The average manager has no clue on either of these questions.

      These managers rely on wandering around the office judging productiviy by who looks busy and holding constant meetings to hear themselves talk.

    • frank@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      I managed a support team of about 30 people at a fully remote company. I’d check their numbers of closed cases, review cases when customer feedback was bad, and take into account any other side projects they were working on.

      Praise when people did good and have one on one talks with people that were falling behind to see what the cause was so we could work on it. It’s not that hard.

      • Naja_kaouthia@sh.itjust.works
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        11 months ago

        I have a pretty similar work flow. I stay on top of my crap, they stay on top of theirs and everyone’s happy. As long as they’re doing what they’re supposed to I don’t give a damn if they’re also taking some down time during their day.

  • anon_8675309@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    So don’t. Give your employees tasks and then leave them the hell alone. If they don’t get things done, find a new employee.

    • criticon@lemmy.ca
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      11 months ago

      I had a one on one with my boss today. He told me he was very happy that sometimes he doesn’t even know what I’m doing, but he doesn’t get any complaints and all my deliverables are on time. I am for help when I need it and before everything is urgent

      Meanwhile he needs to babysit the two most senior employees and have daily meetings with them because they don’t deliver anything on time and is going to force them to go to the office twice per week. I guess not everyone knows how to be responsible, but at least my boss knows he can trust some people

      • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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        11 months ago

        Last meeting with my boss he told me “I don’t know what you’re doing but keep doing it because you’re the most productive employee we’ve got.” Having a job where it’s easy to see what people accomplish day to day clearly helps though…

      • itsprobablyfine@feddit.uk
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        11 months ago

        I think this is what a lot of people here miss. Yes many people can be productive from home, but a few are not and I could see them ruining it for everyone on some teams. If you say ‘just fire them’ you either work for a terrible company or have never been a manager. It doesn’t work like that, for good reason.

        The other one I think a lot of people miss is training. I’m not worried about my senior engineers, I’m worried about my junior engineers. The juniors specifically complain about seniors not being around to train them and I worry about their career development. Obviously it depends on the role/type of work/etc, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect some time in the office for senior positions that are responsible for training others. My junior staff shows up to the office voluntarily every day because they see a lot of value in it in terms of technical growth.

        And before you say they can just call/message. Sure, but they won’t. Even in the office I have to go up to junior staff and only then do I get the ‘well while you’re here’. I know there’s a lot of shit managers and shit companies out there but I think blanket saying ’ any form of any level of in office work is tyranny!!!1!’ is really oversimplifying things. Also, not everyone writes code for a living, you’re in a bubble. I’ll now accept all your hate

    • guacupado@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      This is what the problem is. If you trust your team, you don’t need middle management whose sole purpose is to hover around. They’re the ones complaining to uppers about wanting in-person time. If everyone’s at home checking off their milestones, what do you need all these managers around for?

      • superguy@lemm.ee
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        11 months ago

        what do you need all these managers around for?

        I think a lot of careers are bullshit but we somehow tolerate them so the rich kids who went to college for them don’t have to work at burger king.

      • Elderos@lemmings.world
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        11 months ago

        I could write a long-ass reply to this, but I’ll get to the point, I rock at multi-tasking and juggling all my priorities. It makes absolutely no sense to me that some random dude should get to what I can and can’t be working on, for the only benefit of meeting made-up deadlines and not mixing “points” up in some burn chart. I am good at this because I know how to exploit my brain to fill my entire days with relevant work. If you assign me stuff at random because of office politic it is gonna be shit.

    • tiita@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      This is correct.

      They can’t adapt or change. They don’t know how as they are too comfy and stuck in their ways…

      But then they force us to read “who moved my cheese”…

      • lennybird@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        It also likely reveals that for many of these managers, their role as micromanagers is completely unnecessary. So they have an identity crisis, unable to justify their position.

        My department has transitioned to WFH and it’s been wonderful. Every single employee much prefers it and my boss notes that productivity has increased while “issues” have subsided. That’s what you want to see.

        Now that I’m doing WFH, I will forever seek a job that enables me to do this at least 75% of the time.

  • Gabu@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    “Bosses” can go fuck themselves, alongside the astroturfing scum that keeps pumping out articles trying to validate the idiotic decision of returning to offices.

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    11 months ago

    It’s actually not that hard. If the assigned tasks are being fulfilled within set parameters there’s really nothing to observe and keep track of. What they’re worried about and what they can’t monitor and observe is what the employees are doing outside of those tasks.

    My friend works from home he does all his work and in the down time he’ll run errands, work out, and play pool at his local bar. Whatever. His work is fully completed and submitted and his performance views are top notch.

    And that’s pretty much the only thing employers need to be worried about. How well the work is being completed.

    Fuck the office.

    • Skates@feddit.nl
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      11 months ago

      My friend works from home he does all his work and in the down time he’ll run errands, work out, and play pool at his local bar. Whatever. His work is fully completed and submitted and his performance views are top notch.

      I had 2 people like that back when the pandemic started, the only “grown-ups” in the team - married and with children. They were doing some tasks manually but you could tell it’s stressing them out because you could see them work until 8-9PM, sometimes even later. And you would constantly hear their kids in the background - probably a difficult adjustment to make at home in the beginning.

      So I had to sit them both down and sell them on the idea of automating everything. They liked it (they prefer automating things also), but mostly said they’d never have time for it, because of all the priority stuff they need to work on. So I asked them to work on automating the tasks in-between other, more important ones, and if they were ever getting bothered by management, send them to me and I’d run interference. We came up with a plan, we had milestones for ourselves, the whole thing.

      I had to lie in some meetings and claim we were working on what management wanted(and take a lot of shit for being late sometimes, or just flat out saying ‘no’ to requests, which didn’t get me any fans either), but it was worth it in the end. A year and a half later, they were done. Instead of working together until 8PM, they were each working 2h per week by the end. The rest was their time to enjoy, I never asked how they spent it. Along the way, it was even visible how each automated task would clear their schedule even more.

      A few months in, they started being really great together and working as a team, completely covering when the other was missing, not needing their hand held with anything… Just awesome to work with them. 4-5 months after we started, they were no longer doing overtime - there was no need to, the tasks which took the longest were now a script. 8-9 months in, you’d have trouble catching them both at work at the same time - they’d cover one for the other, and tasks would still get done. Easy to say to upper mgmt “yeah, they’ve been doing this intensive activity which usually takes a lot of time” - no questions asked. They would never drop the ball, and in return I’d never bother them about how they got organized, I trusted them completely to deliver on time and take care of the hiccups. Beautiful stuff.

      We kept this to ourselves until we left the project (just a few months after we were done), at which point I had them create a presentation for management, showing how they improved the situation (wanted them to show off their achievements, it’s not often that we get to do it. And maybe also allow the people taking over to understand why this was so important and to continue using the automated way instead of the manual way). I specifically asked for a page with statistics, cause I wanted to make sure the point got across. They proudly had that slide showing how the workload went from 80-100 man hours per week to 4 man hours per week. Upper management saw it, I could see the guy’s eyes light up at this. Unfortunately they never understood how to use it and how to apply it to future teams. I checked back this year, they’re using the manual way. Their loss.

      Probably one of the best duos I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with. People with full lives and responsibilities, who got their work done, were reliable, were self-organizing, and the only thing they needed were some guidance and some backup when they were being pressured to finish some random donut’s idea of “important tasks”, and in return I could always sleep easy knowing that I don’t need to worry about anything if it’s in their responsibility, cause they will get it done. I appreciated them while working with them, and even more since not working with them.

      • Eranziel@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Your former coworkers are incredibly lucky that after showing management how to turn 80h/week into 4h/week, they didn’t keep the automation train going. Because the very next thing they would do is lay off 90% of the staff and make the remainder still work full time.

        Automation should do what you did - give people more time off. Just about every corp uses it to minimize labour costs, though.

    • TechyDad@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      When the pandemic hit and I knew I was going to be working from home, I feared that my productivity would plummet and I’d miss the office. I reassured myself that it would only be a couple of weeks and then everything would go ban to normal. (Boy, was I naive!)

      When I started working from home, though, I found that I loved it. I’m more productive without people chatting me up or managers looking over my shoulder.

      I’m even eating healthier. When I went into the office, I’d pack all the food I’d think I needed for the day. I’d always overpack and then, with the food sitting right there, I’d snack throughout the day. Now, I can take the time to prepare healthy meals in my kitchen for lunch and snacks, while close, aren’t within arm’s reach.

      I’m now permanently work from home and loving it. If I ever looked for another job, Work From Home would be a huge selling point. I’m not going to say I’d never go into another office, but if I had two job offers except one was work from home, I’d pick that one.

      • lennybird@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Dude it’s amazing. I had my reservations as well. I did a lot of preparation ahead of time, but now I’m never going back.

    • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      It’s actually not that hard. If the assigned tasks are being fulfilled within set parameters there’s really nothing to observe and keep track of.

      Apologies for nitpicking, but they do need to track if the task is completed or not, especially when there’s a chain of tasks that need to be completed in a certain order for the overall goal to be completed.

      Otherwise, yeah, I was coming here to post the same thing, you don’t need to watch your workers while they’re working, you just need to confirm that they finish the tasks you assign them. If they have blocks on their tasks they’ll let their manager/lead know.

    • PhlubbaDubba@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      Yeah tracking task completion and quality of the tasks done is all I’d care about too.

      I’d even go as far as to set up a bounty board for one time tasks up for grabs. Each one comes with a payout according to how much additional work someone’s gotta do to get it done, with big emergency items paying out vastly more than small time stuff that can be done at any time.

      Stuff related to achieving company stretch goals would be given the pay bonus but also some fun extras like extra PTO or a “gift card” for a grocery trip or some other necessity expense. Basically just cutting them a grain dole check since subsidizing major household expenses is a proven means of giving people the space for social advancement.

      It’d be my way of saying “I know you don’t have to do this in your contract duties, so have a little incentive for the extra helping hand!”

      • eric@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        I think the manager’s struggle is when things aren’t completed in the time expected. Is it because there were unexpected unknowns that added more time, or is it because the person is just fucking off and not working? When the employee is WFH, this is a much more difficult question to answer.

        • ElectroNeutrino@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          This is a valid point, but should be something that gets addressed on a case-by-case basis since it’s inevitably about that specific employee’s productivity.

          • eric@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            Of course it’s case by case, however it’s an incredibly common dilemma for a manager, and one that becomes near impossible to gauge properly when the employee is remote.

  • HeavyDogFeet@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    They’re frustrated because it shows that they aren’t necessary. People can just get on and do their work without some micromanager breathing down their neck.

    • DrMango@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      This is true. Your job as a “boss” should not be to command and control but rather to remove obstacles preventing your workers from doing their jobs effectively.

      A good boss trusts their employees to do their work, but is comfortable working with them if there is an issue with their performance.

      • pomodoro_longbreak@sh.itjust.works
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        11 months ago

        Exactly this. I like my manager, but they busy themselves with their own job and making sure I’m not going to quit. If they had time to look over my shoulder, I would question their utility to the company.

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    11 months ago

    I hate remote work because it means I have to pay attention to overall output and the progress of the project instead of constantly surveilling and lording my authority over the workers, who I view as subhuman tools for my own enrichment.

    Does that about sum it up?

    • Nalivai@discuss.tchncs.de
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      11 months ago

      A lot of the time there is no way to tell if the work is getting done because most of the jobs have at least some amount of bullshit job woven into it. Most of what people do is just time filler.

      • TheOakTree@lemm.ee
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        11 months ago

        This is a symptom of jobs undervaluing good workers…

        If working harder gets you no raise, then why would anyone work harder than they need to?

        • Chr0nos1@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          I’ve discovered this at my current job. I worked tons of unpaid overtime (I’m salary), did everything I could get my hands on, I was getting compliments from upper management, my reviews were stellar, etc, etc, and my raise was 3%. My rent went up more than my paycheck did. After that, I started doing only the bare minimum. Some days I even play some Xbox in the afternoon to kill time. My latest review was excellent, and I got a 5% raise. They can go fuck themselves. I’m not going to work any harder for this company than I absolutely need to. Working less got me a bigger raise.

          • Leg@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            I’ve noticed with each increase in my income, the work has gotten easier and easier to do. The opposite result of what I have been told to expect. We have nothing in common with a meritocracy.

          • wookiepedia@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            Food for thought: I bet you were happier when you were working less and taking time. Good things (career wise) seem to find happy people.

  • bemenaker@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Is the work being finished and timelines being met? Congratulations, you know all you need to know.