7 ms·

The pandemic is never going to "end" so why oscillate between exclusively on-site and exclusively WFH? and why, as an manager, take on that kind of liability u

The pandemic is never going to "end" so why oscillate between exclusively on-site and exclusively WFH? and why, as an manager, take on that kind of liability unless you absolutely need people to be on-site? Reminds me of an anecdote where a guy was working at a UPS near 9/11 ground zero and the manager tried to stop them from leaving work. Is it just the Will to Power? or am I missing some convincing opinion pieces in The Economist or FT? I'm so genuinely curious about why a manager would be compelled to insist on on-site. Cynically, I know it's easier to switch jobs if both are WFH... Would hate to think that Big Tech companies conspire to jointly enforce on-site (as an addendum to that infamous no-poaching agreement).

tessierashpool 5y ago
many managers don't know how to do remote. and even experienced people get blindsided by it sometimes. but change and learning are inherent to this field of work, so there must be something else. for large companies, it's real estate. nobody wants to sell a huge corporate campus at a loss.
drewcoo 5y ago
On the managerial front (and PMs, to a lesser extent), I think the perma-demic calls for a different kind of work. Most devs love to be heads-down alone and cranking. Managers, not so much. - Communications are different. I think we're all trying to figure out the "right" protocols[1] for video meetings, as an example. That kind of thing hits managers especially hard. Managers (and PMs) are there not to wrangle code, but to wrangle meetings so the devs can be more productive! - Control changed. Micromanagement in any form (except via malware stalking) just got a lot harder. Even the softer "managing by walking around" doesn't work now. Delegation is more important than ever. And most managers were promoted into position because they did things well, not because they loosely lead things into happening. So it takes some manager (re-?)training. - Leading vs Managing is a more important divide than before. When people are left to themselves more, they'll find ways to solve their own problems. Partly because people have to solve more of their own problems and partly because managers haven't caught up to how to manage in a perma-demic, that means workers are more likely to self-organize.[2] - With the lack of human physical contact, we have to focus more on how to measure productivity than on the way it was perceived in the past. This is likely to shock many people, managers or not, who focused more on social aspects. Lots of "soft" measures like "happiness" or "asshole-free-ness" change when the social conditions change. We still don't want to work with assholes, but what that means is shifting. - Other - Profit? Manager Hint: delegate until it hurts. Hurts you and the person you delegated to. Set up checkpoints. And be available to help. Especially with firefighting and scutwork. That helps your team grow and act independently. Even if we ever get back to the office, that habit will pay off. [1] Pro- or anti-occupy, politically, they addressed comms problems with large open-air meetings meant to include everyone. We need to think along those lines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_movement_hand_signals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_movement_hand_signals [2] Yes, "organize" was an intentional pun. Unionization in lots of fields, lots of shops is on the rise. And a shocking number of strikes goes unreported in the mainstream media (I can't find my original source, so Bloomberg will do). https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-10-20/the-real-scope-of-u-s-worker-strikes-mapped https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-10-20/the-re...
qbasic_forever 5y ago
A lot of companies have a huge investment in commercial real estate and likely don't want to see those values drop. But I'm with you--this makes no sense to keep oscillating between "yay! cases are dropping, the pandemic is over!" and "uh oh, everyone WFH for now". IMHO companies where possible should scale back to the bare minimum on site and build a strong remote-first culture. Sell offices and move to smaller locations if it makes sense to reduce that footprint. This doesn't mean no one can work on site, or that no one can work remote.
- windex 5y ago
  Indian IT companies famously use all sorts of arrangements to claim large chunks of premium land in big cities. A large portion of their profits are banked in land and commercial real estate yielding them tax benefits and holidays for "infrastructure investments."
criddell 5y ago
It might be as simple as they don’t know if you are working or not when your butt isn’t in your seat. Or, to put it another way, lack of trust.
- qbasic_forever 5y ago
  We've had two years now--that's plenty of time for management and HR to figure out how to measure and validate remote work is getting done. If a tech company still needs a manager to see a physical person in a seat then the company has far, far bigger problems.
- mumblemumble 5y ago
  If they can't tell if you are working or not without physically watching you come into an office and sit at the desk for 40 hours every week, then WTF is your actual job? It certainly can't be something consequential that the business actually needs to have done. If it were, they would quickly notice if you aren't doing it. (Edit: As a concrete example, I once worked on an all distributed team where it was abundantly obvious to the whole team that a new hire was goofing off. If they were simply having issues meeting productivity expectations, that would have been one thing, the kind of thing we could hopefully resolve with closer mentoring. But they were also really difficult to get a hold of during the day, and frequently made lame excuses - or obvious lies - for why they couldn't be available for meetings on short notice. Things like that.)
  - VonGallifrey 5y ago
    I think there are plenty of jobs that would be overlooked or mistrusted (by bad managers) if people can't see you physically sitting there 40 hours every week and some might even be questioned then. When I was doing IT Support for employees of this one company I certainly got questioned why they pay me and what I do all day when everything worked. They would certainly notice very quickly when I wasn't doing it and they did notice quickly that things where not working anymore when I left and wasn't keeping these things running anymore. This was when I was going into the office every day and I think this would be even worse if I was doing this from Home. No one had a clue about what I do all day. The same way that I have no clue who does payroll at my current employer or what they do all day, but I would very quickly notice if they decided to slack off. The problem is that there wasn't really any way to track my performance or any way for me to show that I did actually work. The systems for that just where not there. So the only way my manager evaluated me was by me clocking in and clocking out every day at the front desk.
ouid 5y ago
>Cynically, I know it's easier to switch jobs if both are WFH... Somehow I had not considered this, but it seems like the dominant factor.
- fartcannon 5y ago
  Depending on your workload, you might even be able to try a couple on for size before you quit. If you quit.
- karaterobot 5y ago
  Personal anecdote: When I moved from an office job to a WFH job, there was this absurd period when I had to do a series of interviews with the remote company. It was like 8 different interviews on 8 different days, and they were all video calls. So, I had to figure out 8 different excuses to be gone for two hours to commute home, do an interview, and come back to work, all within a couple weeks: dentist appointment, doctor's appointment, optometry appointment, picking a friend up from the airport, followup appointments, etc. I'm pretty sure that's a huge tipoff to HR.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    We used to call them "going to the eye doctor" to our colleagues. "Yeah, I have a follow-up eye exam tomorrow." "They gave me a much stronger prescription (salary). You should go get your eyes checked!” Side note: If anyone is working for me and is/wants to be interviewing, I welcome them to talk about it and/or to just to book a conference room and take the interview from there. Taking 2 hours and hassle is worse than taking 1 hour and feeling like we’re all adults.
    - throwaway1777 5y ago
      lol. Has any employee actually taken you up on that? I would never do this in a million years personally.
      - sokoloff 5y ago
sokoloff 5y ago
The pandemic will (by definition) end when SARS-CoV2 becomes endemic, which seems like the overwhelmingly most likely trajectory that we're on. We're not quite there yet, but I'm encouraged rather than discouraged by the totality of what I see and think we’re way past the halfway point in the time dimension of the pandemic phase of the virus, that we’re headed for a future where SARS-CoV2 is about as disruptive to society as H1N1 influenza, and that, except for a lot more tech WFH, that February 2023 will look a lot more like February 2020 than Feb 2021 or Feb 2022.
opportune 5y ago
The pandemic is never going to end? Bold assumption, COVID may always exist but it will become endemic as have many other pandemics such as the Spanish Flu. Despite many people's wishes, yes the world will eventually go back to normal. To suggest otherwise is very myopic. If you take the pandemic having an end for granted, then yes some companies that wish to return on site will do so before others
jokethrowaway 5y ago
The number of deaths is so low it's hard to call it a pandemic. But by all means, if we can convince companies to go remote with this bs, go ahead. At the same time, I'm tired of restrictions to my personal freedoms to save literally 5 people (living in nazi Europe, restrictions are bad here, unlike USA / UK / northern europe)
NullPrefix 5y ago
>why, as an manager, take on that kind of liability lolwhut? No one is liable if you die from covid at work.

tessierashpool 5y ago

many managers don't know how to do remote. and even experienced people get blindsided by it sometimes. but change and learning are inherent to this field of work, so there must be something else. for large companies, it's real estate. nobody wants to sell a huge corporate campus at a loss.

drewcoo 5y ago

On the managerial front (and PMs, to a lesser extent), I think the perma-demic calls for a different kind of work. Most devs love to be heads-down alone and cranking. Managers, not so much. - Communications are different. I think we're all trying to figure out the "right" protocols[1] for video meetings, as an example. That kind of thing hits managers especially hard. Managers (and PMs) are there not to wrangle code, but to wrangle meetings so the devs can be more productive! - Control changed. Micromanagement in any form (except via malware stalking) just got a lot harder. Even the softer "managing by walking around" doesn't work now. Delegation is more important than ever. And most managers were promoted into position because they did things well, not because they loosely lead things into happening. So it takes some manager (re-?)training. - Leading vs Managing is a more important divide than before. When people are left to themselves more, they'll find ways to solve their own problems. Partly because people have to solve more of their own problems and partly because managers haven't caught up to how to manage in a perma-demic, that means workers are more likely to self-organize.[2] - With the lack of human physical contact, we have to focus more on how to measure productivity than on the way it was perceived in the past. This is likely to shock many people, managers or not, who focused more on social aspects. Lots of "soft" measures like "happiness" or "asshole-free-ness" change when the social conditions change. We still don't want to work with assholes, but what that means is shifting. - Other - Profit? Manager Hint: delegate until it hurts. Hurts you and the person you delegated to. Set up checkpoints. And be available to help. Especially with firefighting and scutwork. That helps your team grow and act independently. Even if we ever get back to the office, that habit will pay off. [1] Pro- or anti-occupy, politically, they addressed comms problems with large open-air meetings meant to include everyone. We need to think along those lines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_movement_hand_signals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_movement_hand_signals [2] Yes, "organize" was an intentional pun. Unionization in lots of fields, lots of shops is on the rise. And a shocking number of strikes goes unreported in the mainstream media (I can't find my original source, so Bloomberg will do). https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-10-20/the-real-scope-of-u-s-worker-strikes-mapped https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-10-20/the-re...

qbasic_forever 5y ago

A lot of companies have a huge investment in commercial real estate and likely don't want to see those values drop. But I'm with you--this makes no sense to keep oscillating between "yay! cases are dropping, the pandemic is over!" and "uh oh, everyone WFH for now". IMHO companies where possible should scale back to the bare minimum on site and build a strong remote-first culture. Sell offices and move to smaller locations if it makes sense to reduce that footprint. This doesn't mean no one can work on site, or that no one can work remote.

windex 5y ago
Indian IT companies famously use all sorts of arrangements to claim large chunks of premium land in big cities. A large portion of their profits are banked in land and commercial real estate yielding them tax benefits and holidays for "infrastructure investments."

criddell 5y ago

It might be as simple as they don’t know if you are working or not when your butt isn’t in your seat. Or, to put it another way, lack of trust.

qbasic_forever 5y ago
We've had two years now--that's plenty of time for management and HR to figure out how to measure and validate remote work is getting done. If a tech company still needs a manager to see a physical person in a seat then the company has far, far bigger problems.
mumblemumble 5y ago
If they can't tell if you are working or not without physically watching you come into an office and sit at the desk for 40 hours every week, then WTF is your actual job? It certainly can't be something consequential that the business actually needs to have done. If it were, they would quickly notice if you aren't doing it. (Edit: As a concrete example, I once worked on an all distributed team where it was abundantly obvious to the whole team that a new hire was goofing off. If they were simply having issues meeting productivity expectations, that would have been one thing, the kind of thing we could hopefully resolve with closer mentoring. But they were also really difficult to get a hold of during the day, and frequently made lame excuses - or obvious lies - for why they couldn't be available for meetings on short notice. Things like that.)
- VonGallifrey 5y ago
  I think there are plenty of jobs that would be overlooked or mistrusted (by bad managers) if people can't see you physically sitting there 40 hours every week and some might even be questioned then. When I was doing IT Support for employees of this one company I certainly got questioned why they pay me and what I do all day when everything worked. They would certainly notice very quickly when I wasn't doing it and they did notice quickly that things where not working anymore when I left and wasn't keeping these things running anymore. This was when I was going into the office every day and I think this would be even worse if I was doing this from Home. No one had a clue about what I do all day. The same way that I have no clue who does payroll at my current employer or what they do all day, but I would very quickly notice if they decided to slack off. The problem is that there wasn't really any way to track my performance or any way for me to show that I did actually work. The systems for that just where not there. So the only way my manager evaluated me was by me clocking in and clocking out every day at the front desk.

ouid 5y ago

>Cynically, I know it's easier to switch jobs if both are WFH... Somehow I had not considered this, but it seems like the dominant factor.

fartcannon 5y ago
Depending on your workload, you might even be able to try a couple on for size before you quit. If you quit.
karaterobot 5y ago
Personal anecdote: When I moved from an office job to a WFH job, there was this absurd period when I had to do a series of interviews with the remote company. It was like 8 different interviews on 8 different days, and they were all video calls. So, I had to figure out 8 different excuses to be gone for two hours to commute home, do an interview, and come back to work, all within a couple weeks: dentist appointment, doctor's appointment, optometry appointment, picking a friend up from the airport, followup appointments, etc. I'm pretty sure that's a huge tipoff to HR.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  We used to call them "going to the eye doctor" to our colleagues. "Yeah, I have a follow-up eye exam tomorrow." "They gave me a much stronger prescription (salary). You should go get your eyes checked!” Side note: If anyone is working for me and is/wants to be interviewing, I welcome them to talk about it and/or to just to book a conference room and take the interview from there. Taking 2 hours and hassle is worse than taking 1 hour and feeling like we’re all adults.
  - throwaway1777 5y ago
    lol. Has any employee actually taken you up on that? I would never do this in a million years personally.
    - sokoloff 5y ago

sokoloff 5y ago

The pandemic will (by definition) end when SARS-CoV2 becomes endemic, which seems like the overwhelmingly most likely trajectory that we're on. We're not quite there yet, but I'm encouraged rather than discouraged by the totality of what I see and think we’re way past the halfway point in the time dimension of the pandemic phase of the virus, that we’re headed for a future where SARS-CoV2 is about as disruptive to society as H1N1 influenza, and that, except for a lot more tech WFH, that February 2023 will look a lot more like February 2020 than Feb 2021 or Feb 2022.

opportune 5y ago

The pandemic is never going to end? Bold assumption, COVID may always exist but it will become endemic as have many other pandemics such as the Spanish Flu. Despite many people's wishes, yes the world will eventually go back to normal. To suggest otherwise is very myopic. If you take the pandemic having an end for granted, then yes some companies that wish to return on site will do so before others

jokethrowaway 5y ago

The number of deaths is so low it's hard to call it a pandemic. But by all means, if we can convince companies to go remote with this bs, go ahead. At the same time, I'm tired of restrictions to my personal freedoms to save literally 5 people (living in nazi Europe, restrictions are bad here, unlike USA / UK / northern europe)

NullPrefix 5y ago

>why, as an manager, take on that kind of liability lolwhut? No one is liable if you die from covid at work.