“Bosses” can go fuck themselves, alongside the astroturfing scum that keeps pumping out articles trying to validate the idiotic decision of returning to offices.
So their own job has no value. Got it.
Lol, get fucked. I’d sacrifice 50% of my pay before going back to the office full time.
Hey, I’m hiring for 50% of your pay. Come work for me.
Cool, what do we do?
We make soap
We make soap?
The best soap
People say it’s great soap, the best soap, good people.
Let’s make a rule not to talk about it too much
I am going to the movies.
there is a lot of steps and landmines to avoid in order to do it fairly and responsibly
A lot of less steps to do it the other way.
My team can’t work remote since 99% of their job is fully hands on. As long as the work gets done and crunch time is crunch time I don’t care.
Won’t anyone think of the people in positions of authority?!
Meanwhile, how often do you see stories about the dehumanization and police harassment of the human beings our society banishes to our innumerable tent cities to die of exposure for the crime of being sub-optimal capital batteries?
Shit like this is why I laugh when politicians and oligarchs show concern for things that “threaten our way of life.” As if our society with core values of greed and sociopathy has anything of actual value worth maintaining.
From the perspective of the bottom 80%, let this capitalist dystopia collapse into dust. From the perspective of those homeless Americans left to die by our supposedly ethical nation, it’ll just be another tuesday, but maybe one where they won’t be harassed or killed by law enforcement simply for seeking shelter from the elements.
Uh-huh… Mmm hmmm… Ok, decent read that brings up some interesting points from the perspective of the employer. Employers need to monitor, but monitoring destroys morale. Do you propose a solution?
Invest in middle managers as connecting leaders between front-line employees and upper management and encourage them to work one-on-one with their direct reports to outline clear workflows and expectations.
FUUUUUU-
So have middle managers do middle management stuff is the solution?
Inceedible!
Middle management can’t do its job? Hire more middle managers! Brilliant!
How did they monitor people in the office? If they weren’t able to point to SMART metrics that show work getting done, wherever that work gets done, they’re bad managers. “Asses in chairs” is not a SMART metric. “Active on Teams” is also not a SMART metric.
Damn, it’s hard to keep track of my workers… how can I offload this task on someone else so that I only have a game of telephone understanding of my business
Because they’re fucking morons that don’t deserve to hold the reigns
I’m just glad that so far my job has held at 2 days in office. It still sucks and I’m way less productive in office than I was when I was WFH full time, but it could be worse.
I think this issue does reflect on bad management. They don’t know how to monitor their team’s output, justify their existence or curb bad employees without being in the same room. That’s on them, not WFH.
So glad my boss trusts our team. Quite literally only have a 30 minute meeting with everyone, once a week.
Very rare they ever ask anything from us. If they ever do, I make sure it’s a priority and it gets done.
I thought you would say 30 minutes a day, and here I thought “hey not so bad”. 30 minutes a week?! We opened every workday with 45minutes to 1h and a half “stand-up meetings”. We had full days dedicated to talking about scrum every now and then. Nothing ever got gone, nothing worthwhile was ever discussed, it made my hate my profession. Man I am not going through that ever again.
You sound like you worked at my last company also. Scrum is good in principal, but in practice it was just another thing people used to pretend they were valuable rather than actually being valuable. You know you’re doing it wrong when you have to have meeting about how to have meetings before each meeting.
We didn’t have a scrum master but a new development leader implemented it in practice and managed it amazingly. He really made sure that time isn’t wasted and the meetings were short, concise and everyone loved it after a few months. Work processes improved greatly, they used to be in chaos because management were (and still are) a bunch of imbeciles and supposedly didn’t listen to the developers regarding how work processes should be improved.
But then his probation was over with a 3 month period of notice, and upper management started fucking with him because he refused to sign a legally binding contract of responsibility for the entire company’s infrastructure which wasn’t part of the deal, and was out of his scope (leading the development teams != being responsible for the entire company’s infrastructure).
They started going behind his back and slowly destroyed what he had built and after a while he couldn’t handle it and resigned effective immediately because they threatened him with a lawsuit regarding something he didn’t have anything to do with but was management’s fuckup.
This is the whole story affirmed by my coworkers and him, some of it I saw real time but I’m still on probation, looking for another job. This dev lead guy really liked some of our work for and told us if there’s an opportunity he would want us to come with him and keep working together, just the company sucked ass. And I’ll gladly do it because he was amazing.
Edit: added some context and grammar
I think it is a common theme where the people in control both want “things to improve” while simultaneously hating any change that might threaten the backward-ass way they like to run things. The more the place is in need of change, usually, the stronger they resist.
My story isn’t as extreme, but at one place I worked the owners just burned through amazing managers, always butting head in stuff they barely understood. Ultimately we ended up with someone who didn’t like confrontation and who would let the owners do as they wished, which sort of defeated the purpose of this new role.
i always thought it was peak laziness to basically go through entire work days and stories by just chaining endless meetings. Barely any heavy lifting ever gets done, people just spit just enough nonsense to preface the next meeting. I much prefer small corporations where the product (still) actually matters.
Do those managers actually believe they’re making things better? At that point you’re wasting so much time talking about being productive instead of being, you know, productive
As the other commenter said, it is all busy work to make themselves (and anyone else who care) feel productive. It looks good, calendars are filled with important-sounding discussions, and they’re also the ones getting the “praises” when they announce what “their” team is doing in various meetings when higher ups are present.
They looked and were very busy in the office, never sitting in one place. I think remote work essentially reveals that they’re essentially just casually chatting on zoom all day long. The decorum is really what makes things look important.
On a final note, I had to replace my manager for 1 month, and I inherited a ton of 1h+ meetings every week. It was ridiculous, I felt like cancelling meetings most week but I didn’t want to look like I was slacking off, so I was basically just doing the equivalent of standup meetings with the various teams and devs and cutting it short. That’s it, a bunch of people telling me their progress for a few minutes a day and I was effectively replacing my manager on top of my actual role. Whenever something blocked progress I would simply tell people who to connect with and ask of they wanted me to setup a meeting or preferred to use the live chat. That’s about it.
It makes them look productive tho. Their calendars always look full, because they are really busy being in all those meetings. The circular logic works out just fine for them. They are all input, they have no outputs.
When I was supervisor at my old job, that’s quite literally all I did. The title at this position is technically a step down, but everything else has improved.
Better pay, benefits, full wfh, and work load is 1000% less.
deleted by creator
Congratulations on getting to add “former” to that bosses name.
It’s possible more collaboration would have helped, but so would properly speccing the project…
Breaking: Bosses’ number 1 problem with remote work is actually the best part
I think the biggest problem is that employers used to require that we do all the work we can do. The easiest way to achieve that is to observe that no one is slacking off. With Home Office there is suddenly a need to find out what is a reasonable workload. They seem to fear that they don’t get occupy the employees 100% of the time and as usual on capitalism it is not enough when you produce enough bit when you produce all you can.
I find it odd and oppressive how important this detailed oversight and control seems to be to employers. Home Office compatible jobs are mostly computer and thus “brain work”, and here productivity never has related linearly correlated with “time staring at monitor”. In office there would be plenty of smell talk, coffee breaks, diddling with smartphones and other ways to relax in between. These breaks are an important part of the productivity cycle, giving the mind a chance to process ideas and problems. In other countries/cultures there’s more reliance on the concept of good faith: I work at a company that uses home office contracts by default. I can go to the office if I want, but I don’t have to. Last time I’ve been there is five years ago, long before COVID. The company does not track our computer activity ( illegal here anyway) or working hours at all. Obviously it is still my duty to task the hours I spent working for clients for billing reasons, but that’s it. The bosses expect that we spend our time in a manner that is beneficial to the company. If one runs out of work, it is expected to notify one’s boss so be take can be found and assigned. Of course they still keep an eye out for slackers, but the metric never is working hours or office hours, it’s “what have you spent your time on and how has it benefitted the company?” This approach leads to us employees reciprocating the trust shown. This is the first job I never minded putting in extra hours at critical days, because I know I’ll just plan on more off hours or even off days during calmer weeks, giving myself to balance the hours. And no, I don’t have to get approval from my employer to do that, as it is expected I schedule my time offs in a manner that is least disruptive. This means I just ask a colleague working on the same or similar projects if he’s gonna be there so clients have a point of contact in case of emergency. I don’t think I ever can work for a conservative, controlling employer again after having enjoyed this level of mutual trust and maturity in the working environment. It’s almost as if I’m self-employed, but with all the benefits of being salaried.
Pretty much the same for me. Treat me like an adult and I will behave like one. Treat me like an asshole… guess what.
The even better part: this leads to colleagues bring similarly motivated, making teamwork a joy.
Sure, very rarely a new guy tries to exploit the trust and slacks off too much, but even with this little oversight, people notice and they get kicked swiftly. Nobody wants dead weight on their team.
In office there would be plenty of smell talk, coffee breaks, diddling with smartphones and other ways to relax in between
But don’t you miss the smell and all the diddling…? 😛
My job before the pandemic was already partly home-based. I ran a prototyping/short run job shop. We would do anything from weird trophies for strange award ceremonies to product prototypes to obsolete unobtanium car parts…you name it. I would spend about half my week at home communicating with customers, ordering materials, drawing up plans in CAD, then spend the rest of the week in the shop actually making things.
A LOT of my design work was actually done standing in front of my couch folding bath towels. Or in the kitchen loading the dishwasher. Tasks like that gave me something to do with my hands while I could zone out and picture the thing I needed to build, turn it over in my mind, look at all the details, how does this part attach to that part? What materials are needed here? How many rivets do I need? etc. I could stop folding towels the second I wanted to sit at the computer and draw/write something.
What the owner of the company wanted to know: Did I get the job done by the deadline set by the customer? Did the job meet the customer’s design specifications? Was it on or under budget? Long as the answers to those questions were “yes,” all was well. Because that’s what let us bill the customer and make money.
Their No. 1 problem with it is how difficult it is to observe and monitor employees
Um, no. Like others here have pointed out, the overwhelming majority of office workers have to turn in countable digital product of some sort for their job production. LOOK AT IT. Was it the quantity and quality required of them? Well, there you go.
Also, what the hell are you on about, hypothetical boss? In today’s technical age, so many bosses can just remote view a worker’s screens (even when the workers don’t know that it’s happening in real time).
It’s creepy to spy, but if you really suspect someone’s away from keyboard extendedly when they aren’t supposed to be, you can literally just look in.
“I can’t monitor my employees” is such a weird complaint when counting is a thing and tech tools are out there designed to let you overview your workforce.
They are too stupid to actually review your work. No, they need to SEE you doing your work.
I manage a team of remote workers. About half of them are doing great. The other half are constantly struggling to meet their metrics/manage their time effectively. I’ve talked to them repeatedly about this and coached them on various ways they can do better but they’re not getting it. If they were in the office where I could watch them it would be a lot easier to help them because I could see where they are messing up as it happens rather than just trying to talk through it with them after the fact based off recordings and reports.
That being said. I would never force anyone to work from the office if they didn’t want to. They are all free to do so whenever they want and I advised that it might help them to get where they need to be but it’s not a requirement. At this point their success or failure is their responsibility.
I love WFH but there is no denying it has a learning curve. Those who have adopted it fastest are those who already have skill communicating remotely: IT, gamers, amateur radio, some other hobby groups. Those who are struggling are often just untrained communicators. Don’t focus on training to them to work remotely so much as focusing on how to communicate as part of a team. I would start with asking them to check in once a day around a mutually agreed time just to say whether they’re doing alright or being blocked by something. Anything that opens the door will get people talking more regularly.
So you would sit over their shoulder and watch them work? Why not ask them to bring you into a call the next time they run into an issue? How would you be notified they need help if they were in the office.
I wouldn’t sit over their shoulder watching them work all the time. I have my own shit to do and don’t have time to babysit everyone but they sit near enough to me that I could overhear what was going on or see them fucking around on their phone or whatever and jump in as needed instead of waiting for them to ask for help.
I am more than happy to any questions they have as it is. The problem is that they don’t do that. They think they can wait until the next time we talk to ask and by then they have forgotten whatever it was.
Yeah if they’re not getting it remote I highly doubt they’re going to get it with you obsessively watching them. That’s a ridiculous idea
i’m not confident they would either, I just like to give everyone as much of a chance to succeed as possible… or at least come to the conclusion that they’re not cut out for this on their own so they can find another job before I have to fire them. I also do think some people work better without all the distractions that come with being at home. I know that’s the case for me which is why I work from the office.
Again it’s their choice. I’ve done all I can for them.
Also, if they’re not getting it done remotely, there’s absolutely no guarantee they’re going to get it done in an office. Results matter, and good managers and good employers should realize that. If you get your work done and you do a good job, then that’s what matters. Of course, it’s not always that simple with office politics etc.
They are living with the constant assumption you’re not doing much work because that’s what they are doing every day.
Ding ding ding
“I am unable to focus for long enough to work from home, therefore nobody can and everyone is lying. Also, the numbers saying it’s more efficient are lies.”
Definitely. I actually look at my teams’ overall performance as well as on an individual basis. Crazy concept right!? It would also stop an interoffice politics and drama that are massive time wasters.
My company just announced they aren’t interested in remote work even though our call center is all internet driven with heavy metrics and they know that office space costs thousands or tens of thousands a month. It’s baffling.
If the work gets done, what’s the problem?
This is how you realize that management spent a good chunk of their day just checking on employees while not actually doing anything, and now they’re being exposed for having to find ways to fill their day while employees are still being as productive as they were previously.
