> These types of managers have deluded themselves into believing that butts in seats correlates to productivity.
It definitely correlates! Not 100%, but a lot better than nothing.
You can at least be sure they're not working another job!
It definitely correlates! Not 100%, but a lot better than nothing.
You can at least be sure they're not working another job!
Instead, I looked at a number of things. Are you making progress? Are you getting help quickly when you stop making progress? Does your code have lots of bugs later on? Do you take constructive criticism well? Do you give constructive criticism well? Do you help out your team mates? But how fast you got work done is not something I considered at all, as long as you were showing up, not wasting exorbitant amounts of time, and not putting in extra hours if there wasn't an emergency, I figure it will get done when it gets done.
Eg, I cared about work ethic instead of productivity, and that is much harder to gauge with work from home. Without it, I feel like I have to start judging based on perceived productivity and I hate that.
That said, I personally love WFH and so do my team mates, and I know them and trust them so it isn't an issue, but I wonder about how new people will work out.
If someone is making a reasonable number and quality of commits, fixing bugs, and communicating reasonably with their colleagues, does it matter if they're "showing up, putting in the hours, and not wasting too much time"?
With on-site (and open-office even more so), it was much easier to differentiate these two. I don't want to give someone a luke-warm performance review because their work was taking longer, when in reality they were solving harder problems. I also don't want to push things like pair-programing on someone who really doesn't like it (and I assume it is worse over Teams or what not than in person).
If you have an employee who is producing very little work, you're face with a decision about whether to put in a ton of effort to try to turn the situation around or put a ton of effort into firing them and hiring a replacement.
If you know the person has been showing up and doing normal office stuff that's a huge signal in favor of "this person is making a genuine effort so I need to go the extra mile on my end." It's harder to get that kind of signal remotely.
This isn't to suggest remote work is wrong. It's just that, for managers, dealing with these kind of situations was a big part of the job and now has gotten much harder.
Treat your employees/subordinates/colleagues like they're responsible adults, and they're more likely to act like it. That means, among other things, talking to them when you notice something that seems off, rather than just thinking it's your job as the Big Important Manager to solve all problems in your own head.
Treat them like they're bad children, or like they're all constantly looking for every way possible to get more money for less work, and you're more likely to get disinterested, frustrated, and rebellious employees. There's nothing more likely to make someone act like a child than treating them like one.
No one says it is easy, but it is not impossible too. It is okay to change one's estimation after several hours/days of work. But after months working on the same codebase estimations are getting better and better.
He began working in-person as principal of Providence's E Cubed Academy on July 22, 2020. Meanwhile, he remained employed virtually as the assistant principal of Kramer Middle School in Washington D.C., a role he held since 2019.
https://www.newsweek.com/man-accused-simultaneously-working-...
I know someone who used to come in, put his coat on a chair, then go off fixing problems with desktops all over the campus. Eventually they found he was popping back to his car and doing 6 hours driving for a minicab firm.
On the other hand if you measure presenteeism in the chair I had a colleague that would sit down browsing various websites all day taking calls for some business he ran doing scaffolding or cars or something (right dodgy dealer).
If you naively trust people, you will probably be taken advantage of.
Deliberately hurting your workers by enforcing RTO because you're jealous of who else they might be working for while WFH is wrong, is what I'm trying to say. That's not feelings of jealousy, that's an act of jealousy.
And this was long before Zoom existed. Can someone explain to me why Zoom is such a big thing? We were using video conferencing in the last century without it.
a) Zoom is very good at reducing the number of clicks between a link in your email and being on a call
b) Zoom is easier to say and type than “video conferencing,” so people say it even when the actual application they’re using might differ
- Click the Link
- Click the "Start the meeting button", nothing happens
- Click "join meeting from browser" after waitint for it to eventually show me that option
- I'm in the meeting! 3 clicks
Number of clicks from a Google Meets email to a Zoom call:
- Click the Link
- I'm in the meeting! 1 click.
Plus you probably can't separate the jobs on two different laptops to prevent accidental crossing of the streams--where one or more of those laptops may be managed by a company. Could someone get off with letting some side consulting work bleed into work hours? I'm sure in a lot of cases--though it would be easier at home. But I have to believe that, as in the case of relationships per upthread, working full-time in-person and remote jobs at the same time must start looking to people like something is odd here.