Unfortunately a lot of people are taking advantage of remote only to do much less work. In some cases at the company I work basically no work at all.
I'd be all for remote only if all those people were fired.
I'd be all for remote only if all those people were fired.
Why haven't they been? If your company's entire management structure hasn't noticed that there are a lot of people not contributing anything for a long time - or worse they've noticed and not responded to that situation - doesn't that just mean your company has incompetent management?
I've been amazed by some of the stories I've seen about the "overemployment" trend where people are taking on two or even three full time jobs at the same time while working remotely. I've worked mostly remote-first for a long time but I can't think of anywhere I've ever worked where someone who was only contributing at 50% or even 33% of what they should be wouldn't have been called out within days.
If nothing else a good employer that looks after its people would want to know if there was a legitimate and probably unfortunate reason for sustained poor performance. It could be a medical issue or maybe a bad family situation. Providing some kind of official support might be appropriate.
Of course if it really was deliberate abuse then management has to deal with that situation decisively as well. Given the dishonesty involved with secret overemployment the reaction is likely to be swift and brutal. If it's someone who just can't be bothered to do the job properly working from home then that's more of a disciplinary but not terminal matter. But one way or another management has to step in and do its own job if something isn't working.
I’ve worked at 50% or less capacity at every place I worked at. I’d say as low as 25% even. Haven’t gotten called out, remote or not.
In a sane world: The CEO makes it clear to those department heads that their future depends on their teams working, and the department heads come down on the managers. People get written up quickly for not being online working, and maybe the worst few are fired. Both the workers and the managers (who should have been watching this all along) get their heads straight.
In the real world: The CEO ordered 100% of employees back to office (still during COVID), to avoid hurting anyone's feelings by calling them out for not doing their jobs.
However, there are ways of seeing if people are doing less work that don't require forcing everyone back into the office.
* Regular check-ins.
* Measurable objectives.
* A culture of trust.
* Asynchronous, public status boards for fostering communication.
* Lots and lots of writing.
* The expectation of frequent video calls.
I have worked at remote only companies well before the pandemic and they had different organizational structures than the in-person companies.
I kind of feel like this is the only item on this list that actually matters. If you don't know what people are meant to be achieving and whether they're achieving it then either (a) they don't report to you, (b) they aren't needed and should be let go, or (c) you aren't needed and you should be let go.
Which, when I put it that way, kind of explains why some middle managers hate remote work.
BTW, failing to deliver results is not always (or even, I daresay usually) due to employee maliciousness. Other reasons someone can fail to deliver:
* They don't have the training they need.
* The task is ill-defined.
* They are in the wrong job.
* They don't have the resources they need to do the task.
* They are overwhelmed.
* They are stuck.
You could say "well, employees should be raising the red flag when this occurs" but I have found that some people don't do that, preferring to dig in and try to solve it themselves. That works sometimes, but other times much pain and time can be avoided if someone checks in and offers help/connections/knowledge.
Most of the other pieces increase time spent on communication. That is not necessarily the same thing.
Having worked remote-first for a long time and at several different places I would say the #1 thing you need to be effective is a different style of communication. You don't want to rely on large group meetings much. In fact ideally you don't want to force much real-time interaction at all. Save that for either genuinely urgent issues - which shouldn't happen often - or casual collaboration that your people set up whenever it suits everyone involved.
One big win from having people WFH - assuming they have a sensible working environment at home of course - is that they can actually do deep work for long periods of time. You don't have the constant "background noise" and casual interruptions that come with working in a crowded, open plan office. But if you want to take advantage of that then you need two things.
Firstly you need some other way of getting the useful incidental information sharing around the team. You'll be missing the casual aside when someone at the office overhears two other people on the team discussing something they used to work on that ends up saving those two people an entire day of investigation. You need ways for people to keep aware of what's generally happening that might relate to them and to make open requests for help or advice without it becoming a hassle for anyone.
Secondly you need to not keep interrupting the person trying to do deep work in new and different ways just because they're at home now. Tools like Slack and Teams might be great for giving the appearance of everyone keeping busy but they can be terrible for everyone actually being productive. Usually that happens if there is a culture of expecting everyone to be permanently online, replying instantly to messages, and updating their status whenever their response time might be more than ten seconds. Same goes for having multiple group video calls per day and insisting that tasks in a project management tool only take a few hours to do yet still require real-time status updates throughout the day so Monty Manager can "report on the team's progress" or whatever else he does to feel useful.
* Regular check-ins.
* Lots and lots of writing.
* The expectation of frequent video calls.
Meeting free days.
Yearly in-person meetups.
Leverage of online task management tools like trello.
Lots and lots of written docs and procedures.
It’ll be interesting to see what the productivity numbers reveal in the coming years.
I think I am in agreement with him? Results matter not appearances. EMs should be able to tell who is working productively and access logs are a poor proxy for that.
What do you think?
It's like a bad code review, or bike shedding. It's so easy to look at who's at their desk with their heads down. It's hard to look into what they're doing and how it fits into larger objectives.
Oh dear. I don't think you've seen corporate America.