Working From Home Megathread

The work is not as good as it was pre COVID is my experience. As a manager, I find you have fewer tools to address this and end up having to do more work.

What does this mean?

I've found Covid and the move to remote working was an absolute game-changer. I went from (in my last employment):

• 5 days in the office,
• car parking based on seniority,
• no possibility of remote work,
• things had to be done a certain way because things have always been done this way and there shall be no change

to

• remote work several days a week,
• staff expected to use an app to request parking, and it was allocated based on necessity
• several days remote work (leading to an increase in productivity!)
• massive transformation in how things were done - with changes often being proposed by staff and mid-ranking management, not senior management.

That last one included stuff some of us had been trying to bring in for years and had gotten nowhere with. Just one tiny example - suddenly it was no longer actually necessary to print out X thing, sign it, have it countersigned by someone more senior, then file it away, even though you'd been told only a couple of months before that this was the system and it had always worked, so why change it, the auditors wouldn't like it?

Now, though? You could miraculously do this all by email! And the sky didn't fall in!

I am in a leadership position in my job. I wear both hats of day to day duties mixed with team management.

Bad managers are the ones that cannot run the show remotely and try to attribute loss of productivity to an easy scapegoat (remote working) as opposed to taking a macro look at other variables. Also don't think I'm attacking first line team managers, who generally have their teams backs and are flexible. In my experience it's the group managers and higher who generally have their heads up their asses.

A bad remote worker will be a bad in person worker also. By enforcing return to office mandates you don't achieve what you think you are achieving and only alienate good team members. They will remember that the next time they are asked to cover out of hours issues of go the extra mile to meet a deadline.

Companies are destroying good will with these braindead moves.

You mean the way they dictate

planning between residential and commercial
Employment rights and conditions
Hours of work, Leave and holidays
Health and safety

https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/employment/employment-rights-and-conditions/

Dunno what any of that has to do with WFH...

I think a lot of tech area having staff cuts because they want to reposition the business a variety of ways. They don't want the overhead of retraining staff or cultivating new skill sets.

The only issue with that is if you keep doing that, people will leave the industry and not come back and you'll be left with a skills shortage.

I guess an obvious dynamic is someone who doesn't manage is, imo, never going to entertain the idea that there are issues.

Similarly, if a manager does, the accusations are of wanting to micromanage etc.

I think the next dip in the Labour Market will be interesting.

Very few posters here understand nuiance in any shape or form. Makes me think that there's a certain personality type which really like WFH.

I'm a manager. It's not hard to know who pulls their weight, who goes above and beyond, and who is just coasting. It is, in fact, part of my job (not a huge part, I'm at a level where I've people to do that for me.)

Newsflash: The behaviour doesn't change depending on whether or not they're in the office.

Quite the leap to imply you have to have personality disorder to have the ability to work both remotely and in the office. If that's what you mean.

For me micromanaging has nothing to do with objectives or timelines. In fact definition it's the antithesis of that.

".…excessive focus on details at the expense of the "big picture" and larger goals...."

I was at lunch with a manager who is complaining about people working from home.

The main reason was people talking about school runs, walking the dog, making the dinner etc.

I explained that when he is going for coffee breaks or a 15 minute chat at someone's desk, those people are doing those things instead.

Seemed to blow his mind.

I thought it was the fact there's people in your situation in a grubby little bed flat that prevented them from WFH.

Now it's personality disorders.

You never cease to amaze.

What you're saying is the organisation didn't (and doesn't) have performance metrics or output metrics. Instead they pretended they did by doing a roll call like primary school, by ad hoc observation of people sitting at their desk in the office.

They are trying to virtualise that daft approach by trying to do the same via team meetings and emails. Measuring someone's productivity by the number of emails they send and or number of meeting they attend.

I don't think the "poor performer" is who you think it is in your scenario.

And you're still using micromanagement incorrectly. Imo.

What tools do you normally have at your disposal to deal with someone who consistently misses metrics?

I've just realised why someone I know who does very little, sends so many emails and is in so many meetings.

Low levels of reading comprehension are also an issue for some people.

Absolutely right on the retirements. Is it a way of getting out of paying redundancies?! Just get a cohort of the staff to quit?

speaking from my own place, an awful lot of people in their 60’s wfh 4 days a week.

I am convinced if they were told it was 5 days a week in the office you’d see people retiring.

And this would be improved in the office, would it?