Bosses Are Clueless That Workers Are Miserable and Looking to Leave
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
In my experience, most managers are clueless about employee morale and whether they are looking to leave, unrelated to the pandemic conditions. I can see how this would be exacerbated today, but I would be surprised if this wasn't always true both across the board and especially for newer employees, women, and minorities out of desire of "not wanting to complain" if they see their position as somehow riskier to begin with.
That said, as someone who has worked from home 100% previously, I predicted the barriers with work time would break down. My colleagues initially applauded being able to work from home with almost a sense of disbelief, and for a couple of months, all of the routine problems people had kind of faded away.
I think there was a sense of gratitude from management that ANY work at all could be done like this, considering how un-trusting of work from home they were. And we were happy to finally be given some trust.
But now? All the "old" problems from the office are catching back up to us, the gratitude on both sides is waning, and IMO because there's less "water cooler" commiserating, people are "suffering in silence" more with less of an outlet.
With office mindset, I mean:
* Emphasis on video calls over audio-only calls
* Emphasis on synchronous communication (calls) over asynchronous (IM, Email)
* Loads of small yet highly interruptive meetings often (again, synchronous video communication)
* Management still largely sitting in its own ivory tower
* Still pushing a 9-5 mentality heavily favoring morning people
Sure, we got rid of commutes, open offices and the likes. But we can do so much better. It doesn't exactly instill confidence that we can move to fulltime WFH or even WFA (work from anywhere) structures. Additionally, all these things emphasize methods over results, which poor management tries to cover up as "but we are emphasizing results, see, you make your coworkers so much happier with video meetings!"
NB: I'm not trying to enforce my preferred way of working as the "one and only way". If you prefer video calls and meetings often, you do you. I'm just getting tired of the inverse happening, people like me being told "this is the one and only way, and if you don't agree you're not a 'team player'".
I don't understand this. If the budget is frozen, that means it still contains money for salaries of those two team members that are no longer there, so I assume the salaries are no longer paid to them. Which means, the same money could be used to pay two new people... or maybe just one new person, if the new employees are more expensive than old ones.
Eh, just kidding!
I expect it's almost impossible to get honest feedback from someone you can fire at will, as most companies and bosses can.
Usually the email will say, this survey is completely anonymous, here is your unique link, don’t forward it to anyone else
;-)
I think we need better tools and processes for the work from home era. Cal Newport calls this the hyperactive hive mind.
In the office you had all of these meetings and interruptions so the real work got done outside of normal hours basically.
With work from home it is a lot of trying to get the right information and aligning with others. Then the rest of the work gets done outside of that.
Teams is so awful that using it all day every day is exhausting. Zoom is noticeably less fatiguing, but none of them are great.