What happens if people think/say they are more productive but the data says otherwise?
Likewise. What if we think that peoples mental health is better if they sometimes come and see their team?
Edit. Just caught up with the rest of the thread so ill add. This is specific people only, and its based on actual metrics from the call centre.
The other data we have shows that people are on average about the same at home in the office, although maybe a little better at sales in office.
I donāt think you should be telling people what is best for their mental health
Thats a fair position. But seems to opt out of the responsibility as an employer.
This is a hypothetical, but if we had evidence, supported by external experts, that isolation away from people and the team made stress worse, etc, wouldnāt we have an obligation to act?
Even if its less clear cut, im not convinced employers shouldnt excersise some judgement here as to what work environment is better for peoples health.
Lots of health and safety activities involve employers overriding choices/behaviours of employees because it makes them safer. Is this fundamentally different?
Worth noting that im in Australia, not quite yet the hypercapitalist dystopia most of the forum is posting from.
You would have to show thats less detrimental to mental health or stress stats than hours spent in traffic and away from family
You would. But thats very different from saying an employer shouldnt be involved in peoples mental health at all.
To be clear. Im talking about making it one day or two days per week in the office, not a full time return.
This is very similar to what my ideal schedule has been in the past.
I really need to focus the bulk of my productivity in one contiguous chunk.
Problem is I think wfh raises the question if a lot of middle managers actually do anything useful.
In person they can at least put on a play like they are doing something. Many businesses have way too many managers and I think a lot of them are scared for their livelihoods.
I wonder about this dynamic on certain people, say introverts. An office environment might be capping some peopleās productivity as they exert energy socializing. Meanwhile some extroverts might be more efficient at an office.
Honestly kids these days do all their real communications online so we are likely running out the clock on this face to face requirements, unless task required.
Right. Anyone who has spent more than 5 minutes in a large organization is acutely aware that most managers add zero to negative value to the bottom line. The inefficiency of large companies is just staggering.
I think this is definitely true. Which is why 8t clearly needs to be led by individual choice and circumstance. The question is whether that is 100% or 95%
Paradoxically the managers that actually are adding value usually look lazy because they donāt seem to be doing anything. It is hilarious to me that the managers demanding a return to in person are doing so because they want to be able to look busy, when to me thatās a huge red flag for a bad manager.
A good manager is running a well oiled machine and watching like a hawk for problems coming down the pike. Bad managers are constantly busy interrupting their subordinates, putting out fires (that probably shouldnāt have been fires if they were good at their job), and generally being a nuisance.
Mark Cuban is not my idea of a role model, but his mantra about meetings (probably stolen from someone else lol) is useful: I donāt go to meetings unless its so someone can hand me a check. I obviously donāt take this literally but I use it alot. If someone invites me to a meeting I press them on what theyāre going to āgiveā me in the meeting. Put the impetus on person calling for a meeting to produce something of value, not just call a meeting to ask for something from attendees. This creates fewer, higher value meetings.
I could write a longer post on it later (canāt now since Iām listening in on a meetingā¦) but I think the meeting hate is overdone. I spend most of my day in meetings and only a handful are ever a waste of time. I think theyāve expanded post-COVID because the casual checkins and interactions that used to occur when you bump into someone in the office are no longer happening, so they become more formal and get calendar invites now, but they still serve a valuable purpose.
I also acknowledge that this may be industry-specific. I will say that I work with a lot of engineers, both as colleagues and as clients, and for some reason it always seems like engineers complain about meetings more than any other discipline.
The conflicts around meetings is largely a conflict between ādoersā and āmanagersā. This is not a new conflict. The ādoersā just want to focus in on their assigned tasks and execute. The raison dāetre of the ādoersā is crystal clear - thereās a list of tasks and they need to be completed correctly, and thatās what ādoersā do.
Managers value, if any, is highly theoretical. Even the best managers are going to have very abstract explanation for what their purpose is. Stuff like culture, conflict management, strategy, etc. are very real but they are also the natural home in an organization for bullshitters. Itās a constant bane on the administrator class that lots of the complaints about managers are 100% valid. The worst people in your organization are probably managers, but that doesnāt mean that all managers are terrible. It has ever been thus, but good luck building an objective way to measure management quality. As noted by @Riverman up above, the level of inefficiency in large organizations is shocking. But it may not be suboptimal - it is possible that the only way to get the, say, 100 good managers a large company needs is to have 1000 managers with 900 of them being disasters.
Hereās where my experience may be too specific to contribute to a broader conversation. I eventually got promoted to management after spending years as a doer, so Iām pretty familiar with that conflict and have had times where I felt that management was getting in the way of my doing, but I still think itās a net positive by quite a bit. If you were to ask the staff on my teams what I do, youād probably hear stuff like āhelps strategize approaches to problems or deliverablesā and āhelps connect us with subject matter expertsā and āhelps keep us organizedāānothing crazy, just basic stuff. But beyond their visibility, thereās also behind-the-scenes stuff like āidentify additional sales opportunitiesā and āmanage engagement financialsā and ādocument approaches and results to support potential future engagementsā and āmanage client relationshipsā and things like that, which have no direct value from a doerās perspective but are necessary for the functioning the organization as a whole. (And thatās just the regular management functions, not even getting into one-off stuff like āfiguring out what to do with an underperformerā or āmanaging conflictā that will pop up occasionally.)
FWIW my degree is in mechanical engineering and I am somewhat describing myself with thisāthe comment about engineers complaining about meeting more than others is, I think, more of a statement on the types of people drawn to engineering (and Iāll lump development work into that as well), generally intelligent self-motivated people who want to solve problems by themselves rather than in a group. These people will be resistant to meetings by nature and preference, but this doesnāt mean that meetings donāt have value.
I am an engineer and paid to make stuff and meetings in general are useless. If Iām in a meeting its a waste of my and your time.
How do you hurt an engineers feelings?
You canāt. The donāt have any. i kid, many of my good friends are chemEās.
Really? Iāve always thought the role of a good manager is clear: to train new doers, to help them prioritize their tasks as they ramp up, to supply them new tasks as theirs get completed, and then to act as an advocate for the doers so that they can get what they need. That last one is the most important.
Most of this job description I would call a supervisor more than a manager. Iām not talking about the people that are running teams of doers, Iām talking about the people that make Power Point presentations to Boards and are several degrees of separation from the actual execution of work. I think this is where most of the bullshitters land.
In my industry there are 2 basic rules.
As for going back to work, my company (small NYC based) has been strangely silent. The owner definitely wanted people back as he from the school of thought that says if you are not in the office you are goofing off up until a few months back when he was actively pushing for it. Now NYC seems to have opened up a lot we have had no mention. We did all take a 20% cut, work has suffered a little during Covid although not massively so (and not 20% so) so maybe the bottom line is looking healthier and his suspicion that all workers are crafty layabouts who are trying to rob him blind is taking backseat as heāll be under immense pressure to give that 20% back if he insists we all go back.
One guy is relocating to FL (yeah lol him) and has worked out an agreement with them about WFH. Most of the rest donāt want to go back either so weāll see how all that pans out. In general there are certain aspects where itās helpful for some to be in the office. Problem is going to be that itās quite fluid who those people can be. I commute (or did I should say) back and forth 4+ hrs a day. I aināt going back to that. Weāll see how it pans out but Iām lucky enough to be in a position where i can walk away if I need to make that ultimatum.