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
“Bosses” can go fuck themselves, alongside the astroturfing scum that keeps pumping out articles trying to validate the idiotic decision of returning to offices.
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.
As a manager, agreed
Fair. I’ve had a few bosses like that.
The average manager has no clue on either of these questions.
But being in person wouldn’t help.
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.
I have a pretty similar work flow. I stay on top of my crap, they stay on top of theirs and everyone’s happy. As long as they’re doing what they’re supposed to I don’t give a damn if they’re also taking some down time during their day.
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.
It’s actually not that hard. If the assigned tasks are being fulfilled within set parameters there’s really nothing to observe and keep track of. What they’re worried about and what they can’t monitor and observe is what the employees are doing outside of those tasks.
My friend works from home he does all his work and in the down time he’ll run errands, work out, and play pool at his local bar. Whatever. His work is fully completed and submitted and his performance views are top notch.
And that’s pretty much the only thing employers need to be worried about. How well the work is being completed.
Fuck the office.
Yeah tracking task completion and quality of the tasks done is all I’d care about too.
I’d even go as far as to set up a bounty board for one time tasks up for grabs. Each one comes with a payout according to how much additional work someone’s gotta do to get it done, with big emergency items paying out vastly more than small time stuff that can be done at any time.
Stuff related to achieving company stretch goals would be given the pay bonus but also some fun extras like extra PTO or a “gift card” for a grocery trip or some other necessity expense. Basically just cutting them a grain dole check since subsidizing major household expenses is a proven means of giving people the space for social advancement.
It’d be my way of saying “I know you don’t have to do this in your contract duties, so have a little incentive for the extra helping hand!”
I think the manager’s struggle is when things aren’t completed in the time expected. Is it because there were unexpected unknowns that added more time, or is it because the person is just fucking off and not working? When the employee is WFH, this is a much more difficult question to answer.
This is a valid point, but should be something that gets addressed on a case-by-case basis since it’s inevitably about that specific employee’s productivity.
Of course it’s case by case, however it’s an incredibly common dilemma for a manager, and one that becomes near impossible to gauge properly when the employee is remote.
When the pandemic hit and I knew I was going to be working from home, I feared that my productivity would plummet and I’d miss the office. I reassured myself that it would only be a couple of weeks and then everything would go ban to normal. (Boy, was I naive!)
When I started working from home, though, I found that I loved it. I’m more productive without people chatting me up or managers looking over my shoulder.
I’m even eating healthier. When I went into the office, I’d pack all the food I’d think I needed for the day. I’d always overpack and then, with the food sitting right there, I’d snack throughout the day. Now, I can take the time to prepare healthy meals in my kitchen for lunch and snacks, while close, aren’t within arm’s reach.
I’m now permanently work from home and loving it. If I ever looked for another job, Work From Home would be a huge selling point. I’m not going to say I’d never go into another office, but if I had two job offers except one was work from home, I’d pick that one.
Dude it’s amazing. I had my reservations as well. I did a lot of preparation ahead of time, but now I’m never going back.
It’s actually not that hard. If the assigned tasks are being fulfilled within set parameters there’s really nothing to observe and keep track of.
Apologies for nitpicking, but they do need to track if the task is completed or not, especially when there’s a chain of tasks that need to be completed in a certain order for the overall goal to be completed.
Otherwise, yeah, I was coming here to post the same thing, you don’t need to watch your workers while they’re working, you just need to confirm that they finish the tasks you assign them. If they have blocks on their tasks they’ll let their manager/lead know.
My friend works from home he does all his work and in the down time he’ll run errands, work out, and play pool at his local bar. Whatever. His work is fully completed and submitted and his performance views are top notch.
I had 2 people like that back when the pandemic started, the only “grown-ups” in the team - married and with children. They were doing some tasks manually but you could tell it’s stressing them out because you could see them work until 8-9PM, sometimes even later. And you would constantly hear their kids in the background - probably a difficult adjustment to make at home in the beginning.
So I had to sit them both down and sell them on the idea of automating everything. They liked it (they prefer automating things also), but mostly said they’d never have time for it, because of all the priority stuff they need to work on. So I asked them to work on automating the tasks in-between other, more important ones, and if they were ever getting bothered by management, send them to me and I’d run interference. We came up with a plan, we had milestones for ourselves, the whole thing.
I had to lie in some meetings and claim we were working on what management wanted(and take a lot of shit for being late sometimes, or just flat out saying ‘no’ to requests, which didn’t get me any fans either), but it was worth it in the end. A year and a half later, they were done. Instead of working together until 8PM, they were each working 2h per week by the end. The rest was their time to enjoy, I never asked how they spent it. Along the way, it was even visible how each automated task would clear their schedule even more.
A few months in, they started being really great together and working as a team, completely covering when the other was missing, not needing their hand held with anything… Just awesome to work with them. 4-5 months after we started, they were no longer doing overtime - there was no need to, the tasks which took the longest were now a script. 8-9 months in, you’d have trouble catching them both at work at the same time - they’d cover one for the other, and tasks would still get done. Easy to say to upper mgmt “yeah, they’ve been doing this intensive activity which usually takes a lot of time” - no questions asked. They would never drop the ball, and in return I’d never bother them about how they got organized, I trusted them completely to deliver on time and take care of the hiccups. Beautiful stuff.
We kept this to ourselves until we left the project (just a few months after we were done), at which point I had them create a presentation for management, showing how they improved the situation (wanted them to show off their achievements, it’s not often that we get to do it. And maybe also allow the people taking over to understand why this was so important and to continue using the automated way instead of the manual way). I specifically asked for a page with statistics, cause I wanted to make sure the point got across. They proudly had that slide showing how the workload went from 80-100 man hours per week to 4 man hours per week. Upper management saw it, I could see the guy’s eyes light up at this. Unfortunately they never understood how to use it and how to apply it to future teams. I checked back this year, they’re using the manual way. Their loss.
Probably one of the best duos I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with. People with full lives and responsibilities, who got their work done, were reliable, were self-organizing, and the only thing they needed were some guidance and some backup when they were being pressured to finish some random donut’s idea of “important tasks”, and in return I could always sleep easy knowing that I don’t need to worry about anything if it’s in their responsibility, cause they will get it done. I appreciated them while working with them, and even more since not working with them.
Your former coworkers are incredibly lucky that after showing management how to turn 80h/week into 4h/week, they didn’t keep the automation train going. Because the very next thing they would do is lay off 90% of the staff and make the remainder still work full time.
Automation should do what you did - give people more time off. Just about every corp uses it to minimize labour costs, though.
This wasn’t the type of job that laid off. Always new work, can’t always automate everything.
Management probably didn’t realize that the work was getting automated.
Skill issue.
I know it won’t be popular, but I don’t possibly see how remote work is better for work itself.
I was WFH for about 10 years. I had my first child, needed to parental leave (from a very small company), and they gave it to me. But I offered to “WFH” when the baby was napping and stuff so if they needed me for things I could make it work. Even after the time was up, things were still going well, and my commute was long, so they agreed to allowing me to WFH a few days a week. Eventually we moved because of my wife’s job and then the pandemic, and I told them they either had to fire me or allow me to WFH 100%. They agreed to the latter.
It was a god send, without a doubt. The flexibility I had while my wife was busying with medical school/residency/fellowship was amazing. Being able to run out the door in the middle of the day for stuff was fantastic. And not having to commute is a thing of beauty.
However, after a couple of years, I realized how damaging it was to my productivity. No more ad hoc meetings where we grabbed a couple of engineers and sat down and quickly brainstormed something. It’s much harder to reach out to someone over the internet than it is to just turn around and ask something. My career also started to stagnate.
When we finally settled down, I decided that I would focus on my career and pursue a new job. The new job is hybrid and, also amazingly, is only about a 15 minutes bike from my house. I don’t know how I would have been able to start a new job without being in person. It’s so much easier to just ask someone a question than it is. The collaboration we have is also much better than the previous 8 or so years I was fully WFH.
And as this article points out, it’s the flexibility that I think is the best thing. No one bats an eye if you say you need an extra day at home that week. Or you need to go home because the plumber is coming. Or you’re stepping out for a couple of hours for the doctor. This seems to be a permanent fixture at my new job.
Now, as I said, this is purely from a work perspective. Individually speaking, staying home is way better, especially if you have a shitty commute. I get that and would never say anyone should go back into the office. But I think the number of people who are actually way more productive at home are few and far between, the rest just really like the set up so they’ll pretend it is way better for work, or even convince themselves it is way better. But the more and more the numbers come in, the more and more it’s clear that generally speaking people are less productive with remote work.
It’s going to end for most, and it’s probably best to think about what best suits the needs to the individual and the business rather than clinging to the idea that it is superior in all ways.
I agree flexible is better than full wfh. On top of everything else you mentioned, going to work gets you outside, at least briefly, and gives you a chance to interact with people you don’t already know.
gets you outside, at least briefly, and gives you a chance to interact with people you don’t already know.
So does grocery shopping.
The part about remote work that has caused things to stagnate is that most companies still aren’t setup to hire out of their own state. So it’s not done much to open the gate to opportunities that are a great fit and can be done remotely, because I’m in the wrong state. And there’s still an attitude of “what would somebody in that place possibly know about things here”. The likelihood I will ever be domiciled in the same place as where my perfect job happens to be is super unlikely. This is 95% employers just discriminating based on location because they don’t want to do paperwork or have an open mind and 5% not having the benefit of in-person collaboration.
Purely anecdotal and subjective experience here, but my long-term productivity was improved by wfh. I have autism and ADHD, and certain accommodations that I need to be productive can only really happen at home. Asking for the lights to be dimmed or even to listen to music to keep from losing my mind during a 12- hour shift on no sleep was basically impossible (deemed unreasonable for the employer to allow), and I personally needed more than just that to keep up. I’ve had to leave multiple jobs due to cracking under the stress of the environment and being unable to focus long enough to actually work anymore. Since becoming 100% wfh, self-regulating is a no-brainer most days, and I can maintain productivity for longer stretches of time with shorter recovery periods for burnout. The working world is harsh for certain people, and it stops many neurodiverse groups from actually being able to contribute our parts to the ever-hungry capitalist hellscape we cling to for our livelihoods.
Sure, I understand that it’s definitely true for some people. Which is why I said they were few and far between.
Ah yes, arguing against all the real evidence because of your feelings, typical
Agreed. I’m a supervisor of inspectors and it is a lot easier to have impromptu meeting and assign tasks in person when I can just look around the room. We did WFH during covid for about 2 years and it was definitely harder to monitor work being done and make sure everyone was on the same page.
There’s definitely some real benefits to in person collaboration, but even when I’m in the office (a large majority of the time since I need to test on hardware) I mostly just send a slack message for 99% of things. If it’s a really pressing need I’ll go find them in person, but I could also just call people online.
Whiteboard sessions are better on a physical whiteboard, but I think everything else goes perfectly fine over chat or voice call.
Instead, I find motivation to be my biggest reason to come into the office. Sure, I still waste a lot of time on lemmy in the office, but I’m still more productive more often when I’m at my desk.
Instead, I find motivation to be my biggest reason to come into the office.
Completing the tasks so you can get your paycheck to pay your rent/mortgage doesn’t do it for you?
j/k, kind of.
In all seriousness, lack of motivation can hit a human being anywhere, especially they’re doing a task they don’t like doing.
But I think the number of people who are actually way more productive at home are few and far between
You’re assuming everyone has the same career/job, life experiences, and perspective that you do, as well as the same home office situation.
At the end of the day, they don’t have to be more productive, they just have to be productive enough to complete the tasks their boss gives them to do well.
Finally, chatGPT quantity of comment tends to be overlooked. You might want to try to make your point more succinctly.
You’re assuming everyone has the same career/job, life experiences, and perspective that you do, as well as the same home office situation.
I would argue the opposite. It’s the numbers that tell me it isn’t working well. My personal experience just backs that up. All of the people claiming that it’s been good for them, if they aren’t blowing smoke or deluding themselves, are the ones thinking their individual experience is the same as others.
At the end of the day, they don’t have to be more productive, they just have to be productive enough to complete the tasks their boss gives them to do well.
Unless the question is which is better from a productivity and a business perspective.
Finally, chatGPT quantity of comment tends to be overlooked. You might want to try to make your point more succinctly.
I guess I could have done without my personal anecdote, but this is what leads to unnuanced and thoughtless positions. Like the current top level comment.
I would argue the opposite. It’s the numbers that tell me it isn’t working well.
Citation required.
Also, are you saying that all jobs are done exactly the same way?
Unless the question is which is better from a productivity and a business perspective.
But that’s not the question being asked.
The question being asked is that can the work be done from home, sufficiently.
I guess I could have done without my personal anecdote
No it wasn’t just your anecdote, it’s just you were way too verbose.
Also, that’s usually a technique used by those who want to redirect the narrative, by throwing over verbose amounts of text out there, so that people turn away from the conversation being talked about.
So its better to be direct and distinct, to get your point across. If that’s your actual goal, that is.
Given that companies, including ones that are KNOWN to be on the bleeding edge (FAANG) and even some whos entire product revolves around WFH (ie: Zoom, Google, etc) are pulling an RTO im not really sure why you are now trying to pigeon hole and pick apart their point, while at the same time saying its not succint. They dont really need to cite anything if folks have been paying attention.
I would agree with the OP here. As a working manager and Individual Contributor at my company, I was spending an inordinate amount of time managing people and their tasks that when in office are perfectly fine performers. But at home they were not. My company also doesnt allow you to just fire people not making goals, thats not how it works, it opens them up to lawsuits of all kinds and there are plenty of weak managers out there, including where i work. Theres an entire process and almost any company with more than a couple hundred employees will be this way too.
I do have folks that are (and were) FTR before COVID and even some of them have struggled because COVID caused their home dynamics to change. Suddenly they arent the only ones home now and other factors become distractions. And not all jobs can be scheduled, many are responsive in nature.
The reality is, on the whole, most adults these days don’t seem to have the self discipline to WFH full time. Some do, and sometimes on sites/platforms like this one or HackerNews you may get an unusually higher concentrations of those rockstars that can handle it also discussing it. But for most, on the whole that doesn’t seem to be the case.
One hell of a chatGPT strawman.
TBH a conversation with chatgpt is more engaging than one with you. So there is that. Since i guess insults are all you can resort to if bad faith arguments fail.
Not trying to insult you, trying to call you out for what you really are.
Citation required.
https://fortune.com/2023/08/03/remote-workers-less-productive-research/ https://www.npr.org/2023/08/04/1192246138/the-evidence-on-remote-work-is-changing https://time.com/6294640/remote-work-winning/
The question being asked is that can the work be done from home, sufficiently.
It’s unlikely that many companies are going to be okay with their labor costs going up 10-20% due to less productive workers, so it is effectively the question being asked.
Also, that’s usually a technique used by those who want to redirect the narrative, by throwing over verbose amounts of text out there, so that people turn away from the conversation being talked about.
We’re talking around 550 words here, taking less than 2 minutes to read for the typical adult. The idea that this was done with ulterior motive to overwhelm people with words cracks me up.
From the article:
BARRERO: It’s anywhere up to a negative 10% effect on productivity.
I think Corporate America can handle up to 10% productivity hit for the welfare and happiness of their employees. The work will still get done.
The question being asked is that can the work be done from home, sufficiently.
It’s unlikely that many companies are going to be okay with their labor costs going up 10-20% due to less productive workers, so it is effectively the question being asked.
No, its not.
You keep moving the goal posts.
We’re talking around 550 words here, taking less than 2 minutes to read for the typical adult.
The comparison is done in relation to all other comments that are posted and their lenghts, not your one comment.
You passed the threshold of verboseness that would turn people off from continuing to read, regardless of the word count.
Also, different age groups can be reading these comments, not just adults.
I think Corporate America can handle up to 10% productivity hit for the welfare and happiness of their employees. The work will still get done.
Ultimately I agree. I explicitly said that we need to stop pretending that it’s better in all ways, and that we need to have an honest discussion to balance the needs of the individual with productivity.
You keep moving the goal posts.
Disagreed.
Also I love how you spent more time complaining about the length of my post than actually making a point.
If you want thoughtless black and white sound bites, I’m probably not the type of person you want to be having discussions with.
Also I love how you spent more time complaining about the length of my post than actually making a point.
Oh I’ve made points, you’ve just been ignoring them, causing me to have to repeat myself to make my point.
If you want thoughtless black and white sound bites, I’m probably not the type of person you want to be having discussions with.
I want intellectually honest conversations with real human beings. I don’t have to agree with them, but I don’t want to be wasting my time either.
If the work gets done, then congrats there are no problems
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?
what do you need all these managers around for?
I think a lot of careers are bullshit but we somehow tolerate them so the rich kids who went to college for them don’t have to work at burger king.
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
Last meeting with my boss he told me “I don’t know what you’re doing but keep doing it because you’re the most productive employee we’ve got.” Having a job where it’s easy to see what people accomplish day to day clearly helps though…
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”.
Daily reminder: economists work for banks, not for us.
But the biggest disadvantage of remote work that employers cite is how difficult it is to observe and monitor employees
I’m sure these employers hire external contractors. Do they insist on observing and monitoring those contractors? Are they going to insist their contracotr’s employees be active on Teams at all times?
I hate the idea that if working from home for an employer is somehow different from working as a freelancer from home.
Pre-pandemic, bosses relied on desk visits and peer monitoring, which occurs when co-workers notice and comment on each other’s work, to keep employees on track in the office, and there is no clear replacement for them in a remote setting, Pollak explains.
Again: If they hired a contractor, would they want to “drop by their desk” to comment on their work? Why do they insist on treating employees like Clients from Hell?
“It’s hard to know which measure these software programs track even matters,” Pollak adds. “A lot of knowledge work is done in video meetings, or offline in phone calls, research and brainstorming, and it’s impossible to quantify all of that.”
Yes, exactly. So stop trying to quantify it. Quantify the results of that knowledge work. A results-focused management style works best for remote work, not hovering over your peons waiting for them to make a mistake.
“If the pandemic and ‘great resignation’ taught us anything, it’s that managers need to be intentional and engaged with employees to be truly effective,”
Holy cow, managers need to talk to their workers! Thank The Invisible Hand this priestly Economist has brought this nugget of wisdom from the Ivory Tower.
Also, I love that the image for this article is a bleak and soulless office. I don’t know how people see this and still wonder why nobody wants to be there.
Sounds like they need retraining or firing then. They need to learn some CRM skills.
I shopped around and recently got a new CRM that works better for what our company is doing, and helps keep tabs on everyone’s workload and time tracking and it’s so good.
And I’m not even managing anyone, my department is a one-man army. It’s just really really nice to be able to hold yourself accountable, take relevant notes for future reference, and see what workload I have every day. I’m still busy and stressed to fuck, but the load off my brain trying to remember every single job I have is phenomenal.
I don’t need a meeting or a phone call or an hour standing at anyone’s desk, I just open a dashboard and go ‘Cool I can see what’s coming, whats been done, whos working on it, and all the documentation and logging I need to be informed about how it effects my work’ in seconds.
Breaking: Bosses’ number 1 problem with remote work is actually the best part
Hey Boss -
Ever since TV remote was invented, you don’t even walk up to the TV to change the channel - why the fuck you need to call us back to the office and breath over our necks? Unless you are a pervert (a lot of you indeed are) - you don’t need to stare at our faces (or our asses) to assess our work, learn to embrace the zoom age !
You reportee (who is still hanging around because the pay is okay, I can work from home, and don’t have to bear your shitface every morning)
