If you can't determine an employee is productive without seeing them in the office, then I don't think you ever had a way to measure productivity. These types of managers have deluded themselves into believing that butts in seats correlates to productivity.
I’m not gonna try to attribute numbers but it’s clear to many that the junior members are more prone to not adapting to remote work easily. It’s a problem, for which we need to find a solution. Not necessarily going back to office tho.
Conversely I don’t much care how you get the results. As long as they’re there when you said they would be. If you can do 10h of Netflix followed by 1h of frantic work, respect. You do you.
(Found it : https://dilbert.com/strip/1995-02-06 )
The issue is with hiring. When hiring remote junior, you need to look out for above average communication skills and debugging abilities. That's often not present for a lot of new grads entering the market because of a lack of experience or relevant work. Think of three month bootcamp grads where each week's assignment was spoon fed by the instructors who themselves are students who couldn't get a real job.
Some places that hired from that pipeline are finding out it's simply impossible to bring these programmers up to speed, but places hiring real engineers have way less issues (because a serious program will include challenging work and select for people capable of debugging and reasoning independently).
So yeah, you've got to spend some time every day syncing up with them and making sure things are on track. That's true if they're remote or in the office, but if they're remote, managers need to be a bit more proactive in asking questions and following progress.
I think juniors and, to some extent all technical new hires, are really vulnerable to the problems presented by remote work and these shitty tools we use like Slack, Confluence, Zoom, or God help you if you're in an org using Teams.
You need mentors and folks to on-board you who have a high EQ and can empathize with the position of the mentee/new-hire. That's hard.
It's also "clear to many" this is not the case.
Perhaps not all "junior members" are fungible. Perhaps this is a characteristic of their employer.
It definitely correlates! Not 100%, but a lot better than nothing.
You can at least be sure they're not working another job!
Instead, I looked at a number of things. Are you making progress? Are you getting help quickly when you stop making progress? Does your code have lots of bugs later on? Do you take constructive criticism well? Do you give constructive criticism well? Do you help out your team mates? But how fast you got work done is not something I considered at all, as long as you were showing up, not wasting exorbitant amounts of time, and not putting in extra hours if there wasn't an emergency, I figure it will get done when it gets done.
Eg, I cared about work ethic instead of productivity, and that is much harder to gauge with work from home. Without it, I feel like I have to start judging based on perceived productivity and I hate that.
That said, I personally love WFH and so do my team mates, and I know them and trust them so it isn't an issue, but I wonder about how new people will work out.
If someone is making a reasonable number and quality of commits, fixing bugs, and communicating reasonably with their colleagues, does it matter if they're "showing up, putting in the hours, and not wasting too much time"?
With on-site (and open-office even more so), it was much easier to differentiate these two. I don't want to give someone a luke-warm performance review because their work was taking longer, when in reality they were solving harder problems. I also don't want to push things like pair-programing on someone who really doesn't like it (and I assume it is worse over Teams or what not than in person).
If you have an employee who is producing very little work, you're face with a decision about whether to put in a ton of effort to try to turn the situation around or put a ton of effort into firing them and hiring a replacement.
If you know the person has been showing up and doing normal office stuff that's a huge signal in favor of "this person is making a genuine effort so I need to go the extra mile on my end." It's harder to get that kind of signal remotely.
This isn't to suggest remote work is wrong. It's just that, for managers, dealing with these kind of situations was a big part of the job and now has gotten much harder.
Treat your employees/subordinates/colleagues like they're responsible adults, and they're more likely to act like it. That means, among other things, talking to them when you notice something that seems off, rather than just thinking it's your job as the Big Important Manager to solve all problems in your own head.
Treat them like they're bad children, or like they're all constantly looking for every way possible to get more money for less work, and you're more likely to get disinterested, frustrated, and rebellious employees. There's nothing more likely to make someone act like a child than treating them like one.
No one says it is easy, but it is not impossible too. It is okay to change one's estimation after several hours/days of work. But after months working on the same codebase estimations are getting better and better.
He began working in-person as principal of Providence's E Cubed Academy on July 22, 2020. Meanwhile, he remained employed virtually as the assistant principal of Kramer Middle School in Washington D.C., a role he held since 2019.
https://www.newsweek.com/man-accused-simultaneously-working-...
I know someone who used to come in, put his coat on a chair, then go off fixing problems with desktops all over the campus. Eventually they found he was popping back to his car and doing 6 hours driving for a minicab firm.
On the other hand if you measure presenteeism in the chair I had a colleague that would sit down browsing various websites all day taking calls for some business he ran doing scaffolding or cars or something (right dodgy dealer).
If you naively trust people, you will probably be taken advantage of.
Deliberately hurting your workers by enforcing RTO because you're jealous of who else they might be working for while WFH is wrong, is what I'm trying to say. That's not feelings of jealousy, that's an act of jealousy.
And this was long before Zoom existed. Can someone explain to me why Zoom is such a big thing? We were using video conferencing in the last century without it.
a) Zoom is very good at reducing the number of clicks between a link in your email and being on a call
b) Zoom is easier to say and type than “video conferencing,” so people say it even when the actual application they’re using might differ
- Click the Link
- Click the "Start the meeting button", nothing happens
- Click "join meeting from browser" after waitint for it to eventually show me that option
- I'm in the meeting! 3 clicks
Number of clicks from a Google Meets email to a Zoom call:
- Click the Link
- I'm in the meeting! 1 click.
Plus you probably can't separate the jobs on two different laptops to prevent accidental crossing of the streams--where one or more of those laptops may be managed by a company. Could someone get off with letting some side consulting work bleed into work hours? I'm sure in a lot of cases--though it would be easier at home. But I have to believe that, as in the case of relationships per upthread, working full-time in-person and remote jobs at the same time must start looking to people like something is odd here.
As the company started to go down he got real insistent on productivity. If you weren’t doing something you were causing the company’s downfall.
Our manager (a great guy) had to have a talk with us telling us to basically look busy to avoid the pointless heat.
That owner was not the only person I’ve seen with such an attitude. Physically doing something = productivity. Even if they can’t see you and you’re playing minesweeper.
Our shop foreman was very keen that everyone looked busy if you were clocked in, you were getting paid to work so you should be working. I was trained by my seniors in the two key activities to do to avoid standing around: spraying things with a hose, and sweeping the floor. It didn't matter if you were going over what you did five minutes ago, it just had to look like you were doing something useful.
Personally I try to avoid perpetuating a culture where looking busy is important because people will find ways to look busy.
As soon as your job involves thought work, there is rarely any connection whatsoever between where the job is done and productivity. For example, in software development it's common that NOT writing code right now is the best choice if you haven't done the other steps. For jobs like this, productivity is a cycle that involves first learning, then planning, then finally maybe writing some code. Or maybe learning some more first and then continuing to plan.
Planning is by far the most important piece, and it can be done literally anywhere and even while performing another task as long as it isn't a mentally-demanding one. So, at least in my experience you literally cannot plan while coding. Not anymore than you could write a novel. But you can do it while lifting weights, going for a jog, eating lunch, sleeping, taking a shower etc. etc.
Where's the most comfortable place to plan? It's okay for that to be answered differently by different people. For some people that's the office. For many more people it's sitting at home in pajamas or whatever.
Only if butts-in-seats is your company's output. Anything else, and you still have to quantify productivity by looking at output.
The only thing this might measure is time you are available to do work, but the same can be done remotely.
I am far less distracted by the random conversations people try to pull you into, or loud chatter of teams around me, when I'm at home.
I deliver so much more at home, though I do see some value in being in the office, I just find it frustrating how many people seem to rely on the office for their social life and also loudly take video calls from their desks all day now.
As a manager it would be your job to identify those folks and treat them accordingly. Arguing that "I can't manage remotely" is mainly an admission that you can't manage at all.
For sure '9 to 5' covers this territory (eg, daycare at work for working moms), and if memory serves so do two Michael Keaton movies (Gung Ho and Mr Mom).
The old joke about Alzheimer's, "I get to meet new people every day" seems somewhat appropriate here. Forgetting things we already knew gives us lots of things to talk about.
Often, the source of the forgetting is, in fact, the assumptions made by the earlier generation that 'everyone knows' something - when the truth is that new generations were never taught those things.
So, it can be difficult for a manager to really know when their reports are working at home as much as at the office. I doubt anyone will ever be able to fully verify another without some metric, even if that's just seeing them at a desk - despite none of those methods really saying work getting done.
The other problem, correlated with this, is that when everyone is remote there will be more meetings.
It's six of one or half a dozen of an other. [1] The employees and managers all do what they can, which is never enough. In the next few years I suspect a culture will settle down around this and it will not be as suspect for people to work remote. The companies will see who works, and the remote workers will see what they need to do and not do.
[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/six_of_one,_half_a_dozen_of_t...
What managers want here is not to measure productivity, but to FEEL confident about it.
That is the issue here. Feels>Facts. And to be fair, there are few facts.
I'm sure there's a Market for Lemons in here that explains why some companies fail, "gradually at first and then all at once".