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.
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.
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.
… 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.
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.
Oh nooooooooo, not the bosses!! Won’t someone think of the bosses???
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
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.
And if someone else takes 8 hours to do the same work that I did in 6, so they assign me 25% more, it’s reasonable for me to expect to be paid 25% more too.
Of course not, silly. They’ll just promote the 8 hour person to something they’re more suited for.
Yes of course you should be compensated based on ability and performance.
lol such a chud comment
“The juice bag has a quarter left.”
That’s an incredibly flawed analogy…
Why throw away a juice bag, that you bought and paid for with the agreed sum for the full amount, without drinking all the contents?
Were not talking employers draining your life for more time than you agreed to give them. If X amount of money for Y hours is what you agreed on, why do you feel entitled to not pay your part of the deal in full?
Well, are they being paid for their time, or for their output? If they’re being paid for their time, then if their work for the day takes 10 hours do they get paid more? That just seems like incentive to work slower.
Your contract probably specifies time, not output, so you’re being pair for your time.
And yes, many who finish early with assignments just use the extra time to either work less or generally slower. That’s quite normal and completely understandable, I do that too. Nevertheless, you/we probably should inform our employers that they’re not getting full bang for their buck with your current effort, if you’re consistently underloaded.
SQUEEZE THE JUICE BAG, FLESHY!
If I had a boss like that, you bet your ass I would purposely wait to turn things in later and look busy until then.
I can see this being an issue in an agile development environment.
Work gets assigned points based on various factors. You learn how many points a team can do every X weeks (all teams will be different, each team tries to hone in on what they can do and how they number it)
If you complete all your work on time, great! If you don’t, that’s okay too, but if you complete early, you’re still supposed to take more work. Maybe it’s something that QA doesn’t need to test so it doesn’t mess up everyone else. Documentation, experimenting on something, or maybe QA does have bandwidth to test it too. Either way, you do something.
If you can never finish it all, you figure out why and adjust the total points you can take each period. If you always have left over time, you figure out why and increase the points you can take. If it’s a one off reason, don’t change anything.
But if “I did all my assigned work” is the answer to then slacking off, that’s not what it’s supposed to be. All tickets done doesn’t mean don’t do more.
Don’t know why you got downvotes, that’s the correct answer to the question.
I guess people don’t like that managers are supposed to maximize efficiency and took it out on you for saying as much.
It sounds like the company was being proactive in making sure that people did their jobs and were being productive. Not everything is daily production; some projects can take weeks or months.
Thats what project management is for, especially tools like Agile.
But project management isn’t just a one way system, a project manager needs input from those working under them.
It sounds like there is an issue with having that discussion.
Yeah. I feel like a lot of the people here like the idea of WFH, but don’t understand that it is really easy to become a cog in a manager’s Gantt chart and “doing your job” can mean wildly different things to your manager.
That’s not exclusive to WFH.
But it can become a lot worse with WFH, especially as the level of communication goes down. And if you hear the complaints from a lot of people here, they are apparently working with managers that don’t do that.
I don’t see any evidence for this.
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
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.
