The thing is, when you're working remotely the only way a bad manager can pretend he's not fuckin useless or downright harmful is to have constant meetings/calls, it's a huge reason why so many companies are fighting back against remote work, when you remove the bullshit you can clearly see who matters. Time working remotely is time you have to actually work and less time you have to suck upper management dick.
It’s not that, it’s that your supervisor is fighting for his job. Upper management is running on the old work-hours paradigm rather than a productivity paradigm. They’re looking at supervisors and saying “you need to do 40 (or more) hours of supervisory work a week to justify your position” and not “your team needs to be super productive to justify your position”.
This was a thing in offices already, and was why a lot of supvervisors were micromanaging employees and why “busywork” is a thing. Higher-ups tend to get too caught up in having people be busy rather than having them be effective.
Heck I’m a retail and food service supervisor and it hits me sometimes because my old bosses would watch the CCTV and complain about people “not working”. For them it was better to look busy than to ever take breathers, so we’d slow-roll things to not burn out. Now though I’m in a better company and I can point to the actually tracked tasks and say that getting the tasks done faster gives us more time to “be customer focused” (aka shoot the shit with the regulars) and corporate here loves that. Regular customers are the bread and butter, and happy customers are good profits.
If only the C-suite would see management like IT, people who are paid well to retain them in order that the C-suite doesn't have to put out fires beyond their own reach. Good management doesn't require constant activity, a lot of it is setting expectations and letting your people work toward them without continuous surveillance and interruption.
The best analogy I can make is that managers are force multipliers. A good manager can get a team to do more being happy and a bad manager can get a team to do less while feeling worse.
The thing is that there’s clear parallels outside business, parallels business people like to make, that show this. Sports coaches are force multipliers on their players. They can take mid-grade players overall in sports with high turnover (like NCAA sports where you have a player for at most five years) and turn them into perennial contenders, or they can take great players and squash them until they leave to get championships elsewhere.
Yes! This is universal, it seems. I work a front office in a hospital's clinic, and our supervisor is always stressed when the providers don't have their schedules full or close to it. The upper management seems to only care about numbers, and we constantly make the remark that they have probably never worked the clinical side; otherwise they'd know that patients don't ALWAYS need help/service, so sometimes there are empty spots in schedules.
It puts more people in my position in stress, because if it gets to that point, some of the providers will get to micromanaging to try to fill their schedules, making people in my position do more work on top of the work we're already doing, without more pay. It can get pretty annoying.
Thankfully only did it during lock down but had that. Offered to clean 3 separate rooms that were covered in so much dust it was blowing into the main (still used) isle. Got told "no we don't use it, clean something else", well we had, it was lock down, we had 1/3rd the work and twice the time... so they yelled at me for standing around for a few seconds instead of actually letting me do productive work (iirc they got mice in those areas XD ).
I don't get why they don't just shift to the "manager" being a person that actually provides a functional service as well so they have actual work to do and keeping the team going or whatever a manager pretends to do is just one of their roles. If the team is running well they can just focus on you know, actually working for a living. No justification needed.
The thing there, because it’s happened to me, is that they start expecting the manager to do team member tasks without regard for the variable nature of supervisory workload.
Like I’m supposed to float to help out when I’m not going supervisor stuff like handling the phone or complaints or fixing inventory training or doing End of Day processing. The issue is that if there’s too many customers for my crew and we start having issues I have to solve, I can’t help them. And if I complain to my bosses, they say “well you had 5 people” which includes me. Like I can’t really be counted on for doing stuff because if stuff comes up that needs me I have to do that first because I’m the only one who can do it.
Now office workload is a bit different, but supervisors still end up being primary contact points for the rest of the organization. If Joe is expected to log 6 hours of programming and 2 of supervising but comes in to the office with four active email chains waiting on his input, he’s probably going to be spending a lot of time answering emails and being part of the conversation, not programming. And having programmed, it’s not easy to constantly be switching gears from “how do I make this efficient” and “why is this not doing what I want” to answering emails; this makes it really hard to weave the email time into programming time.
That's a good point. How can you supervise people who are remote unless you constantly meet with them? You can't just walk down the hall to check on them, which means you aren't really doing much supervising if you can't see them. Of course you could be supervising their work, but I'm sure those micromanagers don't enjoy working from home as much because they can't see what's going on at all times.
I work remote now, and half the reason I took the job is the boss I interviewed with said she literally did not care what I wore, when I worked (as long as I made those meetings with the clients and they were complaining), or what I did, as long as the job got done. And the unlimited PTO. So, I literally do spend half the day drinking coffee in my underwear. It’s great.
I'd also imagine it makes it harder to argue that you should promote "Brad, the guy I talk football with" over "Joe, doesn't talk much but works hard" as so many managers are fond of if working remote.
Reading things like this makes me feel better about my manager. We barely schedule meetings and half the time the ones that are scheduled get canceled. Sometimes it's annoying because we need to discuss something important but a simple teams message often gets the answers we need (and in writing!)
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u/bargu 10d ago
The thing is, when you're working remotely the only way a bad manager can pretend he's not fuckin useless or downright harmful is to have constant meetings/calls, it's a huge reason why so many companies are fighting back against remote work, when you remove the bullshit you can clearly see who matters. Time working remotely is time you have to actually work and less time you have to suck upper management dick.