The great executive-employee disconnect

Agreed that we're rare and vastly outnumbered by people with bad motivations though.

Meanwhile, the company president was a friend of a friend, worth 8 figures, and just a normal dude.

He was fired like 2 weeks later.

https://youtu.be/XS_Lzo4S8lA?t=5m20s

Much of this social dimension of power is lost without a physical presence in an office, and I think a lot of managers and bosses fear this.

Meritocracy is never totally there, but it is more practiced in the engineering roles.

For management, it's who you know. And who you have beers with at the end of the day.

In a large e-commerce company at which I once worked I was both a manager and an IC. My family grew from 1 kid to 3 during my three plus years there. So I never could stay late to have those beers with the other managers. My career there suffered (in addition to all the other awful stuff).

When you looked around, teams were almost always composed of people that looked the same way. That company was 60% East Asian heritage, either India or largely Chinese immigrants. The teams were often grouped along ethnic lines. It makes sense, if English isn't your first language, you would prefer to work with people who spoke your first language.

But, that's the point. We hire people that look like us. And management isn't a meritocracy, so you want to be in the office to make sure people see your face and get to know you. They will more likely listen to you, consider your opinions, etc. if you are meeting face to face. It is vital for managers to keep their jobs.

The exciting thing is perhaps this will be a Renaissance for a better form of manager. But, of course, the Renaissance also had Machiavelli, and there will be lots of people who will successfully subvert this new reality.

Executives are there to ensure that happens, and having employees onsite makes it easier.

As far as I can tell, Bezos would sack every manager at Amazon if he could, and have every employee work from home, if that was best for Amazon's bottom line. I bet he'd love to save on salaries and office space. Yes, I hear a few Amazon employees are quitting, but it's not because he's just too nice to his employees. As far as I can tell, his entire philosophy in business is to make everyone a replaceable cog, and replaceable cogs don't really need managers or desks (especially if he could make everyone work from home, in some kind of mechanical turk type system). But he hasn't made it work.

Maybe I'm wrong about Bezos, or he's wrong about how to make profits (and just happened to luck out getting rich). But surely someone else would just say "get everyone to code at home and don't have managers" and they'd destroy the competition with lower overheads and greater productivity, but there's not many of examples at scale.

Here's how this debate will go:

"Managers are needed to keep employees on task, so it needs to be onsite".

"Wait, can't we just have performance reviews?"

"So why not just have freelancers for everything?"

It's basically a rehash of the theory of the firm - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm

Employers don't know who is doing the best work. Sometimes it's virtually impossible to judge. But they can know that employees sit in a cube for the right amount of hours, and are apparently trying to get work done.

It might annoy brilliant people (and people who think they're brilliant) that they can't just be judged on the quality of their work, but in reality the company is paying for time, not results, as they really can't just the quality of results all that easily.

Yes, they can have 360 performance reviews, or negotiate everything as some kind of contract, or count lines of code or some kind of function points. There's plenty of problems with all of these, and it also means more work and probably a lot of ugly office politics. But unless it's something where results are easily judged then really just forcing people to be at their desks looking busy is going to be one of the best ways of ensuring that on average they get results.

Your theory seems to rely on a rather uncharitable set of assumptions.

I wonder if an alternate explanation could be that the manager job role tends to involve a lot of talking to other people, and that there's something advantageous, or at least more fun, about doing that in person?

Or perhaps the type of people that become managers tend to lean more toward extroversion, and thus on average managers enjoy in-person social interaction more?

I often meet and talk with people for 6 hours in a day. Have you ever talked on video calls for 6 hours in a day? Every person has a slightly different quality of microphone setup, you can't make eye contact, it's harder to read social cues, you can't get fresh air by doing a walking 1:1, etc. It kind of sucks, like, a lot. Especially for people, like myself, who ended up managing because they simply enjoy being around other people. It's just not that fun to talk to a plastic rectangle all day.

Now, I do still sneak in some IC work from time to time, and it's obviously great to do that remotely. And I understand that most of my reports spend most of their time doing that kind of work. So I wouldn't push them to go back into the office; remote work is the right thing for the team overall.

But if you surveyed me, asking whether I'd like to return to the office? Fuck yeah, I'd like to. But my motivation has nothing to do with your ungracious views on managers needing to feel like bigshots. I'm sorry that you've evidently worked with poor management to the extent that this is your worldview.

Similarly, I quite like working from home and walking around the house (getting drinks/snacks/etc) looking at the garden. That's all something I've worked for - things I planted or bought or paid off - and it's comforting to see it.

> If anything, my "big shot" factor is higher remotely than it is in person. Physically, I'm just a normal person, made of meat and vulnerable like anyone else.

This truth has been caricatured in many movies and TV shows, where the boss speaks from some large screen on the wall. Or think of Star Wars, when the bad guy is talking to the Dark Lord, who shows up as this massive 3-d projects.

Bosses are also advantaged when it comes to commutes. They may have designated parking space closer to their office, maybe even a car with a driver.

Having more money also open other options, like hiring people to do housework when you are not at home or living in a location closer to your workplace.

Spitballing: Director and above are executives, managers remain knowledge workers.

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My observation is that executives at any given publicly traded company are functionally insane. Whatever executive daily activities involve, it's disconnected from real work and real world.

They generally have nicer clothes and hygiene. So it's not all bad.

The transmutation from Manager to Director is kind of fun to watch. The Body Snatchers meets Battle Royale.

Reading this article was like reading a playbook of what my org's senior leadership team is doing.

And yeah, I think it is going to end real well, for me. I was getting comfortable and this RTO plan is the kick in the pants I needed to start looking for a new employer.

I really love my job, but I'm not coming back. Period.

It boils down to this: let me go remote now, or let me go remote later with a salary match. Or don't, I don't care, I'm not coming back in.

In my last (and final?) office job, I worked in an open office environment. One team would have their daily meetings 3 feet behind my head, so I'd have to wear headphones. My coworkers all wore headphones, so I'd have to ping them via Slack or do a dance to get their attention. To have any privacy for meeting, I'd have to book a conference room, sometimes many floors or buildings away from my actual desk. I can't think of anything my desk actually provided for me, other than a place to park my laptop-hauling backpack.

Working from home lets folks customize their workplace anyway they want. Personally I sunk a lot of my own money into getting a great chair, standing desk and an external monitor setup that I like instead of having to try and get procurement/IT to get something that’s “ok”.

I’d call that a disconnect.

You say "a lot of employees take advantage of work from home to work as little as possible" - I guarantee you that's not what employees are setting out to do. No one went, at the start of the pandemic "oh thank God I am remote; now I can not do my job". What they're facing is a variety of things; reduced social bonds (not just at work but generally), a deviation from normalcy (which creates stress and makes productivity harder), and likely a culture that was transplanted from in person, without figuring out how to make remote work.

But your statement is definitely how a lot of managers think, "people are taking advantage", which is why the fix, according to those managers, is to bring people back in, where they can feel the pressure of being watched.

So you're not wrong in describing motivation...but the implication that these managers have correctly diagnosed and solved the problem is wrong.

What I've noticed is that without going into the office, the -already existing issues- become more apparent and more morale sucking, and it makes it harder to care about (and thus do) the work. Every obstacle feels harder because I don't have social glue to make me feel it needs to be overcome. Etc. The correct solution isn't to reinforce that social glue to better trick people into overlooking the issues, but to identify and fix the issues. But that's harder than mandating people come back into the office.

If this is a genuine concern it is profoundly naive. If someone is slacking off at home, they will be doing the same slacking off in the office, just with extra steps of convincing you that they are busy.

If you have no means of evaluating that people are not delivering other than eyeballs on them, then your organization is deeply broken.

They can look at the status quo under the pandemic, and say "this would be better if people were in the office". Doesn't matter if things are going well, or things are going poorly; the pre-existing bias determines the conclusion.

Monthly reports aren't helpful there. Really, the only meaningful data point is "what is going to make the company the most successful". And, there, the better execs are looking to enable hybrid workplaces, where people can work remotely or onsite, whichever enables them best, and the technology and practices support that, since they recognize remote is an opportunity, and that it also prevents talent bleed due to poor morale. The worse execs are trying to mandate returning to the office, thinking that that's the only way to be successful, and are completely discounting the effect on morale.

Of course you have a certain point when the company is small and in one location and no need to talk to external parties often. It's far from universal. And everyone with their own mic and camera is way better than the dude that's always too far from the mic and only the people that are in his location can understand and converse with him etc.

What I've seen is that people who frequently would speak little in person, will sometimes have a LOT to say on the doc. They're more direct and less self-deprecating too.

The changes that remote has forced in many ways have changed, and potentially removed some of the cultural barriers that were in place before; much like an internet forum allows a level of confidence and directness that a person may not feel in person, so too has that particular change seemed to enable some people to find their voice.

I'd imagine that even for things that are still zoom meetings, it has changed things too; more agenda driven, more need to raise your hand or be polite when you realize multiple people have started to respond and still carve out time for the people who spoke up but aren't going next, rather than just interrupt and now soandso has the floor, etc.

I don't know any of these things to be the reason, but I could easily see it leading to a different and more egalitarian experience for women and people of color.

“The survey was administered by Qualtrics and did not target Slack employees or customers.”

I think from the introduction section they are targeting employees of Fortune 500 companies, but they are restricting the sample to those that don’t use slack… I think this is going to generate a biased sample.

There is also some discussion of “of executives currently working remotely” but they don’t discuss the count of respondents.

The methodology section has some definitions:

“Respondents were all knowledge workers, defined as employed full-time (30 or more hours per week) and either having one of the roles listed below or saying they “work with data, analyze information or think creatively”: Executive Management (e.g., President/Partner, CEO, CFO, C-suite), Senior Management (e.g., Executive VP, Senior VP), Middle Management (e.g., Department/Group Manager, VP), Junior Management (e.g., Manager, Team Leader), Senior Staff (i.e., Non-Management), Skilled Office Worker (e.g., Analyst, Graphic Designer).”

There is some discussion of “executives,” “managers,” and “employees,” it seems a little difficult to tease out from the text which group is being talked about, though.