There is a great way to monitor employee’s performance. This one weird trick will save you losing your best employees!
Are their tasks getting done on time and with quality work?
Congrats! You just learned how to treat your employees like adults.
Now kindly fuck off and let me continue to work in my underwear.
I actually like daily standups. I know many don’t, but they can be really useful.
What did you do yesterday. What are you doing today. Any issues for the group?
Then get back to work!
Daily standups are fine, but they need to be like 10-15 minutes tops. And between 10am-1pm. Putting them at 9am sharp is just rude.
This would be a massive waste of time if it were with the whole team every day. I don’t need to know what every other employee on the team is doing every single day, and I don’t need to spend time listening to them explain it. I’ve got shit to do.
Do you mean standups where you are actually standing up? Many places I’ve worked have called a daily meeting a “stand-up” but it has been an hour-long sit-down meeting.
Then there are the actual “stand-ups” where the tall guys tower over the group, and the shorter people (typically women) are either talking into the chests of those guys, or they’re craning their necks up at painful angles.
But… but… but…
It’s proving that my 25 years of being paid 3 times as much as the people I “manage” has been a complete scam the entire time!
Hey, if they’re getting all their work done on time, they’re probably not getting enough work /s
My supervisors are the worst with this.
I work a physical labor job and the supervisors are supposed to help with that. What they do instead is idie away chatting and spending inordinate amounts of time “doing” it work.
Thankfully, in a backwards sort of way, after one of them tried dodging their work when the venue needed to be turned over for a city council meeting, our manager has throughly chewed them out.
Still, I don’t have much faith in them, but we’ll see where that goes.
You’re overlooking that most managers don’t actually do anything, so they need desperately to justify their positions. I have a manager who has seven hours of meetings every day, five days a week. We make a fucking app. It barely changes month to month. What on earth are you spending 35 hours a week talking about?
The manager has so little to do they just micromanage everyone, and cause a massive backlog of work that doesn’t have to exist.
I always thought that Office Space was satire, but it really is like that in a lot of companies. I spent more time updating managers than doing actual work since I started this position.
My company has a management mentorship program for remote employees. The boss actually travels to different employees homes and will stay with them and work with them at their house for the week. This keeps the execs happy enough to know that they’ve got middle management keeping an eye on the employees, while also allowing the remote work with no fuss. It’s an interesting approach for sure.
Is that real? No way in hell I would be hosting my boss for a week. I’m not even sure where they would fit.
Actually it’s simple. Work well done? Cool, the employee is working. This “monitoring” mentality needs to fucking die.
But then how do you justify keeping “middle management” hall monitors on a payroll after admitting they’re pointless?
“In probably unrelated news, remote workers love how they can’t be micromanaged or watched over their shoulders and are frustrated and disoriented by return-to-office plans.”
The kinds of bosses that don’t want me working from home are the exact ones I want to hide at home from. The ones who already aren’t a micromanager I’m actually quite happy to come into the office and work with and around.
Been on both sides and Oof. Luckily now with a boss that’s happy to have me wfh but I don’t take him up on it too much cause I just genuinely like being in the office!
The kinds of bosses that don’t want me working from home are the exact ones I want to hide at home from. The ones who already aren’t a micromanager I’m actually quite happy to come into the office and work with and around.
Been on both sides and Oof. Luckily now with a boss that’s happy to have me wfh but I don’t take him up on it too much cause I just genuinely like being in the office!
The kinds of bosses that don’t want me working from home are the exact ones I want to hide at home from. The ones who already aren’t a micromanager I’m actually quite happy to come into the office and work with and around.
Been on both sides and Oof. Luckily now with a boss that’s happy to have me wfh but I don’t take him up on it too much cause I just genuinely like being in the office!
The kinds of bosses that don’t want me working from home are the exact ones I want to hide at home from. The ones who already aren’t a micromanager I’m actually quite happy to come into the office and work with and around.
Been on both sides and Oof. Luckily now with a boss that’s happy to have me wfh but I don’t take him up on it too much cause I just genuinely like being in the office!
The kinds of bosses that don’t want me working from home are the exact ones I want to hide at home from. The ones who already aren’t a micromanager I’m actually quite happy to come into the office and work with and around.
Been on both sides and Oof. Luckily now with a boss that’s happy to have me wfh but I don’t take him up on it too much cause I just genuinely like being in the office!
The kinds of bosses that don’t want me working from home are the exact ones I want to hide at home from. The ones who already aren’t a micromanager I’m actually quite happy to come into the office and work with and around.
Been on both sides and Oof. Luckily now with a boss that’s happy to have me wfh but I don’t take him up on it too much cause I just genuinely like being in the office!
The kinds of bosses that don’t want me working from home are the exact ones I want to hide at home from. The ones who already aren’t a micromanager I’m actually quite happy to come into the office and work with and around.
Been on both sides and Oof. Luckily now with a boss that’s happy to have me wfh but I don’t take him up on it too much cause I just genuinely like being in the office!
The kinds of bosses that don’t want me working from home are the exact ones I want to hide at home from. The ones who already aren’t a micromanager I’m actually quite happy to come into the office and work with and around.
Been on both sides and Oof. Luckily now with a boss that’s happy to have me wfh but I don’t take him up on it too much cause I just genuinely like being in the office!
The kinds of bosses that don’t want me working from home are the exact ones I want to hide at home from. The ones who already aren’t a micromanager I’m actually quite happy to come into the office and work with and around.
Been on both sides and Oof. Luckily now with a boss that’s happy to have me wfh but I don’t take him up on it too much cause I just genuinely like being in the office!
The kinds of bosses that don’t want me working from home are the exact ones I want to hide at home from. The ones who already aren’t a micromanager I’m actually quite happy to come into the office and work with and around.
Been on both sides and Oof. Luckily now with a boss that’s happy to have me wfh but I don’t take him up on it too much cause I just genuinely like being in the office!
I’ve been working remotely for almost a decade now and have been a manager for 6 of those years and I do the following:
Is [EMPLOYEE]’s work getting done? If yes then do nothing aside from thanking them. If no then talk to employee and/or start the corrective action process.
I have neither the need nor the desire to hover over them. They’re grown ass adults.
A few issues with your method for the average manager.
What work exactly is the employee doing?
How do you know if it is being done correctly?
The average manager has no clue on either of these questions.
These managers rely on wandering around the office judging productiviy by who looks busy and holding constant meetings to hear themselves talk.
That sounds like the manager is the one not doing their job and is in need of monitoring.
I managed a support team of about 30 people at a fully remote company. I’d check their numbers of closed cases, review cases when customer feedback was bad, and take into account any other side projects they were working on.
Praise when people did good and have one on one talks with people that were falling behind to see what the cause was so we could work on it. It’s not that hard.
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.
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”.
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.
