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.
Fixing things before they break? What an alien concept
Where my wife works they don’t fund the maintenance department, instead they put a maintenance expense in everyone else’s budget and make facilities bill them like they are an outside contractor. Stupidest business model.
I bet he figured out what you were worth when the place was disgusting a week later lol
Or…I’m not sure what building maintenance is in this case and maybe no cleaning involved but whatever he’ll know when it falls down.
Some cleaning, but mostly making sure the monkeys moved and the latex elephant went off on schedule, also the kitchen items like the fryers, pizza conveyor, and dishwasher were ready to go at all times.
I feel like the problem for maintenance is that it doesn’t flow in steady units of output like production tasks. You don’t have a maintenance team to keep them at 100% use, but to make sure that everything else is at 100% functioning.
You don’t go buy a mop when you have a flood you keep one standing by. Maintenance is like keeping a rental mop on hand, sure you can use it for the little things while you wait for the big one and that’s when they shine.
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.
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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 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
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
