Why Managers Fear a Remote-Work Future
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
> "Ultimately, Spielberg balked, and last month his company even signed a deal with Netflix, likely because he now sees the writing on the wall: Modern audiences enjoy watching movies at home."
Yea, because movies are stupid expensive. 20 years ago it was literally half as much to see a movie. You want more people in the audience in a theater? Lower the price. The simple economics behind this are astonishing. You're competing with the home experience which has become a lot better over the last decade. Which direction did you seriously expect this to go?
Get rid of matinee and make that the standard price at every hour on Sun-Thu.
I second this, but movie theaters no longer fill that gap for me.
I can only speak for myself. I used to enjoy going to the movies. At some point, how theaters are managed changed dramatically. If people were disrupting the movie, I could have the manager remove the person. This is no longer the case. Every manager I have interacted with in the last few years was passive and hands-off. I can't even get a refund if I have a bad experience. So my options are put up with the idiots, leave the theater, walk into a near-by theater playing the same film or risk a police incident if I remove the person. I have removed people and even had the manager thank me, but that is super risky and not my responsibility. Needless to say, movie theaters are no longer an immersive or enjoyable experience for me.
Or I can watch a movie at home, as many times as I wish without interruption. I have invite as many people as I wish. I can implement any sound system I desire. I don't have to wait for what might be a boring scene to use the restroom. It is a fully immersive and enjoyable experience. I just watched "Nobody" at home, twice. Great movie btw, highly recommended if you enjoyed John Wick but wished the fight scenes were a little more realistic in terms of the main character getting hurt in every fight. Some day I will get VR and make the movie even more immersive.
I love, love, love going to the movies and do it as often as I can. That said I spend 75% of my mental energy anxious about shitty theater behavior. When my kid is old enough to drag along $20-30 for the latest Marvel movie at home is going to become an increasingly good deal.
We've got a great art-house/rep theater in my town that plays an astonishing variety of films, but even that is often filled up with idiot frat boys laughing at the serious parts and occasionally yelling things at the screen. I'm seeing the new Nic Cage movie, Pig, tonight and because he's in a lot of schlocky movies (apparently this one isn't) I'm dreading the crowd response.
Now, even before corona, I almost never go.
The reasons for watching at home is better:
* Access, back then there was a huge delay in movies being available. * Quality, before DVD's and HD TV's the technical quality was much much higher than TV's with VHS tapes or cheaper home cinema projectors. * Not annoying people, very often the movie experience was disturbed by people who had to comment on the movies or talk constantly among themself. The cinemas did not seem to care.
I think managers can suffer from impostor syndrome, possibly even more than their employees. It's pretty easy to spot the behaviors of an insecure manager. Micromanaging. Needing to know all the details. Any now, not having face time as a means to assess his employees.
Remote work means managers need to learn a new way of doing their jobs. I don't think it means they will become redundant. I think it is more a matter of the discomfort some people get when required to learn a new job: "Can't I learn this?" "Will I be competent?" "This makes me uncomfortable." "It's just easier for me to make my employees come into the office."
Part of the status is signaled by showing how many <<subordinates>> they have and giving orders to them.
Part of the status is signaled by beign able to be out of office whenever they want vs the worker bees that must be at the office 9-to-5 M-to-F.
Having to politely ask things on slack to a worker bee that is probably working lying on a couch with a smoothie in it´s hand is a manager vision of hell.
tl;dr: it´s not a lack of workers performance, but a wounded manager ego.
edit: I have never been downvoted as fast as in this case. It took less that a minute. Did I struck a nerve?
and real ones who don't like that some people think they provide a lot less value to the world than they've convinced themselves
They always dogpile me when I say remote work means you can do 10-20hrs of work for the same pay as a FT office job. That puts them on full tilt - "how dare people work less."
Are people finding that managers have become more efficient in remote settings?
You need more, as being visible to upper management might not be enough in a future where actual work output might get emphasized over personal appearances.
As managing your own underlings by their work performance is arguably harder then managing them by metrics like "she's always 9-5 at her desk" and "I do like his choice of tie and suit".