1. Be a really good 'in person' manager (able to foster a good in-office culture, motivate and coach people effectively in real time).
2. Be a really bad 'remote' manager.
Not saying RTO mandates are a good idea, but to say it's masking poor management as a black and white statement lacks nuance.
Stock Market returns during WFH vs Stock Market returns during RTO. (free money, zero-interest rates, meme-stock mania had nothing to do with it apparently)
It's a click-bait article to attract gen-zers and HNers and it has worked like a charm
Also, the tools a manager needs for 'remote management' is very different than what's needed for in-person.
It's also very possible managers are not given the tools needed to manage a remote workforce.
People in office do tend to communicate organically with the humans around them, but online it's much harder.
Increasingly more over time, I have come to really miss the office I went to every day before I worked remotely. I miss having coffee and lunch with people, saying hi on the way in and out, and I really miss having team meetings and 1:1s and brainstorming sessions in person. But I don't miss my desk even a little bit. I spent as much of my time as possible working from private cubbies.
When I'm working, I don't want people around, and I don't want to be pulled into "organic" communication. In practice, the best process (for me) in an office setting was to ping people asynchronously - "hey let me know when you have a moment, I want to brainstorm about xyz" - and then get together when it works for both of you. But this is the same process used in remote work!
The downside is you can't walk-and-talk or get a coffee together or find a spot with a whiteboard, everything is soul-sucking video calls. But for me, losing the "organic"-ness of communication, specifically, is a pro, not a con.
Then you need remote "telemetry", meaning access either to chat messages, email, tickets, etc. and a way to process it at scale (without reading everything) in order to defuse sticky situations based on partial infos or misunderstandings. Such tools can be panopticon-y so you need to explicitly specify which convos "spaces" are private and which are subject to management interference.
Basically industry standard
Teams was okay. Meet was okay once I figured out how to grant it the MacOS access it needs. Chime started in early pandemic as a terrible, terrible joke of a product and then evolved to being a close 4th place.
So tools to spy on your employees?
Same thing with corporate internet, you accept to use the corp proxy DNS and firewall (which all logs infos) to browse the internet instead of using a separate GSM endpoint to circumvent the company's surveillance.
There are many ways to resolve these problems without resorting to spying on messages. In an in-person situation with a conflict, there may be no record. We know methods to resolve these conflicts, so I don't understand why people go immediately to "employers control the data so they can just use it."
It means for example being systematically in cc for mail exchanged and being in every teams discord channel. The new social contract when working remotely is "you (the manager) can't look over my shoulder to see if I'm working correctly so I (the employee) need to show proofs of communication instead".
I've seen too many juniors working remotely that just don't communicate on their day-to-day work, and completely blindside their manager/coworkers which understandably freaks out.
How is that specific to remote work? People in the same building have the same misunderstandings with the same tools. The way to fix it doesn't involve management spying on the communications and attempting to decipher them.
> 1. They have daily check-in meetings with everyone on the team to make up for the lack of impromptu chats in the office
> 2. Collaboration is harder over email than in-person. As an example, they have to produce reports for stakeholders regularly, which requires input from several people. They sync their work by frequently emailing each other changes to the document
> 3. Socializing with coworkers is more difficult, which results in less social capital for people to advance their careers with
For each point, the author pointed out that there are simple technological and management solutions for each:
> 1. Stop doing daily check-ins and trust your reports to do their jobs on their own time table. You didn't do daily check-ins in the office, so don't do them now
> 2. Stop using email. It's the worst format of online communication. Slack, MS Teams, etc. have been around for a while. Use them and the features available to you to collaborate. Additionally, use document editing software like MS Word or Google Docs to edit the same document within a cloud account simultaneously instead of sending files to each other. This tech has existed for sooooo long that it should be considered a bit of an embarrassment if a manager in 2024 doesn't know about it yet
> 3. Work socialization must become intentional, and opportunities for advancement should be based off of merit and output instead of personal relationships
But it seems pretty clear that companies which mandate RTO are simply not equipped, technologically or intellectually, to run such an organization. It's not that remote work is inherently less productive, it's that managers are unable or unwilling to adapt their processes and communication to make it work.
Final note: it seems like another big problem with managers is they find they have little work to do if they are not monitoring people all the time and dragging them into unnecessary meetings. I think they feel threatened by the fact that their jobs are being automated away by software
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[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/01/10/hybrid-wo...
The difficulty with this, is that work can spiral quickly into just spending the whole day responding to chat (slack/teams/etc) and no one ever gets any actual work done.
Email provides a barrier between you and the work -- email isn't a real time form of communication. Chats, meanwhile, imply immediate response. Hell, these apps even show when you're active -- I've gotten passive-aggressive messages like, "I know that you have DND on, but can you confirm you're seeing these messages?" chats outside of working hours.
I get why Slack/Teams/Etc. is a great supplement to email, especially when it's a smaller internal team collaborating. But ditching email is a terrible idea.
I think it may also be generational: at my previous job, I get chewed out by my manager for not responding to some question another coworker had sent me. I was confused because I don't remember getting any questions from them, and I was told that he had emailed it to me. He's in his 40s and I was 26. I told him I get so many useless emails I never check work email. And the best way to reach me is via slack. Still, some on the team continued to use email
I have dozens of filters set up to direct emails to particular folders before I ever see them. This is precisely the way to deal with automated notifications. They're always coming from the same source; in some cases, they're not going to your email directly, but to a group address that you can easily filter on.
If you're getting unnecessary CCs from particular people commonly, you can set up a filter to automatically route that category (from:thisuser@company, cc:me) to a folder of "check this once a day (or whatever timetable) to see if anything real got through".
The answer to "I have trouble with email," in an organization where email is a normal mode of communication, is not "so the whole rest of my team needs to change their workflow to deal with me." It's "so I need to pick up some skills and make checking my email part of my daily workflow."
Slack doesn't require as much configuration as you described. I don't get the point of email when we have slack
Question: do you think this would still be a problem if only 1:1 chat was allowed (no group chat existed).
I've often wondered if the real problem is group chat / channels, and not per se the 1:1 type of chat messages.
by all means, use teams/slack/etc for discussions, but understand that they don't replace email, they enhance it.
1. Lots of random DMs/Group DMs. Everything is messy, and gets lost easily. The 'closed' nature of DMs and small groups then often builds up cliques and creates office politics.
2. Move everything into open channels -> descend into pure chaos with 1,000s of channels that no one can keep up with.
daily checkin, in person can happen in a minute. It’s helpful. Teams succeed together, not at the direction of 1 person coordinating. Removing them is just dumb.
> 2
lol no. That’s a dumb suggestion. It makes people less productive. Trying to replace a 30 second conversation with slack/teams etc is really just dumb.
> 3
Teams that socialise work better together. Period. You remove any socialising factor and you end up with silos, lost knowledge, depression. Etc.
Also, is there an underlying problem with retention, re this comment:
>Developing a rapport with “Bob” could help me anticipate when the lack of promotion opportunity is about to make him jump so we can line up potential replacements.
In the vacuum that is reading the article, this reads like there are problems at the organization with people getting promotions and the person writing in is willing to let them leave and replace them than work out how to keep them.
Something about the write in doesn't sit well with me more generally, but I can't put my finger on it.
General discourse likes to identify the older generation as the ones who lose object permanence. The "if they aren't in a seat, they must not be working" mentality. Well, tomorrow's older generation is here today, learning to follow that same behavioral pattern. We have to begin training the culture today if we want to influence the future.
Some people are just really bad at remote working, on both sides of the manager/report relationship. It's not only bad managers at fault here.
During COVID I onboarded a few grads into my team (for context we managed paid media for a SaaS company). We had a good track record of bringing in grads and training them on the job, but the cohort that came in during COVID had a terrible experience, and despite our efforts I'm not sure we ever really provided a good onboarding experience for them, and I don't think the training they received was nearly as effective as the training we used to provide in person.
I think WFH is often great for experienced professionals, but ever since that experience I have felt really bad for young professionals trying to make a start in their careers.
I always see these arguments and understand it can be hard. It can also not be hard and work well.
It's much, much easier to count butts in seats and glance at badge swipe times and pretend like you're managing your team that way.
This one anecdotally seems to have been the biggest issue for some managers. Unless they are overhearing things (literally), they don't know what is happening.
It's so much easier now that we're remote-first. I'm in all their Slack channels, I can see and search every conversation the team has and I can teleport into all their stand-ups and read the transcript after if I miss it.
With RTO, however, there is A LOT more wasted time. With all that extra time walking to meetings, water cooler conversations, and the busywork of running an office I can definitely see how bad managers and employees can hide more.
I'm thinking things like HBR, Happy@Work[1], or other academic/academic options....
Constantly changing processes does little to improve your team's happiness or productivity...
This is where basically the micromeetings happen, where social rituals and where team culture is made and lived.
There is a point of diminishing returns, but watercooler time is valuable time and what I miss most about the office.
I do agree though, the most important thing is to build a team and hire people that compliment the context the business operates in, instead of trying to mold the business around the people they happen to have working at the given time.
As soon as communication and the flow of information needed to be deliberate, he was more challenged.
In person, anything he wasn't present for never got considered or failed.
I get that a contrarian stance can come up with an example to contradict what the article is trying to convey. However, I think the article more so tries to draw situations in which CEO/Management is failing generally (with WebMD) and is hoping that a forced in office environment would solve their management woes.
I do believe that a majority of organizations are in this bucket rather than the one you claimed.
To use a sports metaphor, if I'm a really good manager of a team in the German Bundesliga, but then I switch to manage a team in the English Premier League and I'm terrible at that, then that's still bad management, even if I'm not a "bad manager" in some universal sense. And it would be weird for the organization to try to fix that problem by moving the team I'm managing to Germany. They would expect me to figure out how to be a good manager in the new setting, or they would find someone to replace me.
can we stop making excuses for people?
management is about people, unless you're literally moving to a different culture (and I don't mean company culture), your failures as a manager are yours.
I can tell you that my current manager is ruthless in that he has no issues getting rid of someone if they're not pulling their weight. I appreciate that about him. He also always has our back.
Put him in an organization in which it's more challenging for him to influence our work and I'm confident I would still enjoy him as a manager. The work might not be as successful but I'm smart enough to recognize the walls my manager runs into as well.
Managing a remote team is much harder than managing an in-person team.
Skills do not automatically transfer. It takes work and guidance to have your skills transfer.
It might even be true that some/most companies are doing it for this reason (I'm sure they wouldn't articulate it to themselves like that), but what the hell did they research exactly that came to such a qualitative conclusion? It smacks of a biased soft sciences approach to this as a means of fighting for the perception someone with money wants.