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.
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?
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.
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
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
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’.
Honestly, this is where I’d put the onus on you as a manager. The senior staff may not need as much interaction, but the junior staff are the ones that will require more if your time. Daily check-ins with the junior staff can ensure the necessary “face time” and interactions that would spur additional questions from the “while I’ve got you” perspective.
Remote work requires a full paradigm shift, especially from managers. I’m in constant contact with my manager, my peers, and other related teams throughout the day. My manager “comes up to me” by pinging me on WebEx to ask for clarification or to request a task. Sometimes, he’ll ping me and we’ll jump on a call. The interaction is the same as when I was in an office, and a senior manager would come to me and ask questions.
Working remotely does not mean working in a vacuum. Instead of walking across a room to ask Lisa a question, you ping her on instant message instead, and honestly, in my last position, we worked with so many people across the country and across the world that pinging “Lisa” was the only option because she’s in Manila while I’m in Ohio.
Outside of work that requires physical labor like running a forklift or operating a physical machine, a lot of positions simply need to reconsider how they interact with employees rather than making blanket statements about how “we work better together in the office”.
