I'm going to want a citation on that. I learn just fine on my own, and I'm sure many others do too. If you're really concerned about giving people "the best chance at success" rather than just forcing them into boxes then you'd be presenting options.
it probably has to do with the quality of "remote training" materials. my company (contract security), I train new hires in a variety of things including CPR/AED/First Aid.... you can definitely tell the difference between people who were given the stupid web-cartoon training vs actual in person training.
hell, the remote training shit had terrible localization issues. (as in, would get our people arrested and charged with felonies... ooops....)
Is requiring all employees to spend multiple unpaid hours in a car during rush hour in order to put them in unattractive cubicals or desks akin to prison cells, where they are only allowed to shit x amounts a day, and where the manager keep looking over the shoulder to see if you are not wasting a minute thinking about anything other than work a punishment?
My company has a management mentorship program for remote employees. The boss actually travels to different employees homes and will stay with them and work with them at their house for the week. This keeps the execs happy enough to know that they’ve got middle management keeping an eye on the employees, while also allowing the remote work with no fuss. It’s an interesting approach for sure.
I work a physical labor job and the supervisors are supposed to help with that. What they do instead is idie away chatting and spending inordinate amounts of time “doing” it work.
Thankfully, in a backwards sort of way, after one of them tried dodging their work when the venue needed to be turned over for a city council meeting, our manager has throughly chewed them out.
Still, I don’t have much faith in them, but we’ll see where that goes.
This would be a massive waste of time if it were with the whole team every day. I don’t need to know what every other employee on the team is doing every single day, and I don’t need to spend time listening to them explain it. I’ve got shit to do.
It wouldn't be explaining it. It would be your teammates telling everyone where they are on the projects you all work on. If you aren't working the same projects, then you aren't on the same team. Or you need sub-teams. If your work is so independent you don't rely on anyone else's work and vice versa, then you probably don't need standups.
We used to have a rigorous schedule. Arrive at the office between 8-830. Make coffee and chat. At 9am we started the daily meeting. We all read what we were going to do today to each other. By then it was 1130 and so we broke for lunch. After lunch, at 1300 we would do the thing we said we would do. At 1530-1630 we would submit out updates to the project management system and produce tomorrow’s report for us to read to each other. 1700 we would go to the bar then head home around 1830.
When I started working for myself I would usually start around 9 to finish at noon, including travel time.
I agree with you. That’s why we make our teams small enough in size that standups are 10min max, usually more like 5.
That said, it can be really beneficial to hear that Joe is working on something similar to a thing I’m going to start today. He may be able to give me some lessons learned or point me to a library.
But I completely agree that big teams a make this an annoyance. I used to be on a 20 person team and standups were completely worthless.
Now, we have 3-5 devs per team and it’s usually really quick.
My husband holds his team meetings at 3/4pm ish on friday on zoom with beers. Afterwards he tells everyone to fuck off home.
THAT is how you do it. It turns into a pile of geeks talking geek and part post-mortem, part decompressing from the week and they’ve actually had some absolutely mint ideas rising out of deformalising the dev pileup.
there you go...forgetting service and manufacturing sectors... and everybody else who simply can't work remote because the nature of the job precludes it.
God, I hear that…plus I usually need to meet with my coworkers in India, so I’m often needing to start meetings at 6 AM. I am nooooot functional that early
I usually had to do that for Europe. Most Indian coworkers I have worked with work a later schedule so there has always been a bit of overlap. Generally the Europeans I have worked with have been German and they generally have a labor rep on the board so they can fight against messed up work schedules.
What I used to do was make notes at the end of the day. Just a couple short bullet points to say at standup and help me get back on track a little faster the next morning.
I'm the same way. If I could start work at 5:00 a.m. and be off by noon or 1:00 p.m. I'd be happy. It's just hard to find people who want to do therapy at 5:00 a.m. 😂
You know, actually I'm in Oregon, so I hadn't thought about the fact that if I did telehealth with people who lived across the country I might be able to start at 5:00.
I’d love it if therapy hours were before and after normal work hours. On Betterhelp they are, but I gave up on it after a couple tries when I couldn’t find a good fit.
I'm allowed to set my own hours, so if it was telehealth I could theoretically do late night or morning appointments if I want to. I just haven't really thought about that. When I eventually have my own practice. I really do want to have weekend hours and evening hours, before I worked with a lot of parents and that was one of the biggest issues was when do you have time for therapy when you're chasing a toddler. Or like I remember when I would have friends who worked as bartenders, they wished that they could do therapy after they got off work but sometimes that would be two or three in the morning.
Ha! Yes.
For the first time, we are trying out a full scrum team in our company, with an external “scrum master” who really seems to know what he’s doing. It’s bloody amazing. Small team, the daily meeting has yet to exceed 10 minutes and is usually <5 minutes, the planning and refinement meeting keeps everyone in the loop. The rest of the time I can just be a happy code monkey :)
My stand-ups are at 10 am (11 am for most of the team), last between 3 and 15 minutes depending on how many of the 7 of us show up and how much everyone has to say, then we all go back to what we’re doing. My project manager and boss both care about the work that gets done rather than monitoring us to make sure we’re working the entire time, and we actually get reasonable (even generous) timelines for most things unless it’s something super important.
eh. i think best practice is smallish teams get everyone together once a week for the stand up. but a supe or somebody makes the rounds daily. five minute check up 'do you need anything? get you some coffee?', kind of conversation before going to the next.
it doesn't impact the team if that one person wants to chat, but also gives people an opportunity to bring up concerns they wouldn't normally bring up in a group.
largish teams need to be broken into smallish teams.
I was doing daily technical meetups in the morning so that my team in India and the more local members could stay in sync and ask each other questions. Usually 10 minutes, but occasionally an hour or more when we had to go way out into the weeds.
Do you mean standups where you are actually standing up? Many places I’ve worked have called a daily meeting a “stand-up” but it has been an hour-long sit-down meeting.
Then there are the actual “stand-ups” where the tall guys tower over the group, and the shorter people (typically women) are either talking into the chests of those guys, or they’re craning their necks up at painful angles.
Thats the thing… boses are basically saying that they cant do that. They cant actually measure how productive people are so they fall back on watching them like a hawk
You’re overlooking that most managers don’t actually do anything, so they need desperately to justify their positions. I have a manager who has seven hours of meetings every day, five days a week. We make a fucking app. It barely changes month to month. What on earth are you spending 35 hours a week talking about?
The manager has so little to do they just micromanage everyone, and cause a massive backlog of work that doesn’t have to exist.
I always thought that Office Space was satire, but it really is like that in a lot of companies. I spent more time updating managers than doing actual work since I started this position.
It’s this thinking that allows the business bro to think that they contribute to the world while they are really no better than you average insurance company.
“In probably unrelated news, remote workers love how they can’t be micromanaged or watched over their shoulders and are frustrated and disoriented by return-to-office plans.”
The kinds of bosses that don’t want me working from home are the exact ones I want to hide at home from. The ones who already aren’t a micromanager I’m actually quite happy to come into the office and work with and around.
Been on both sides and Oof. Luckily now with a boss that’s happy to have me wfh but I don’t take him up on it too much cause I just genuinely like being in the office!
The kinds of bosses that don’t want me working from home are the exact ones I want to hide at home from. The ones who already aren’t a micromanager I’m actually quite happy to come into the office and work with and around.
Been on both sides and Oof. Luckily now with a boss that’s happy to have me wfh but I don’t take him up on it too much cause I just genuinely like being in the office!
The kinds of bosses that don’t want me working from home are the exact ones I want to hide at home from. The ones who already aren’t a micromanager I’m actually quite happy to come into the office and work with and around.
Been on both sides and Oof. Luckily now with a boss that’s happy to have me wfh but I don’t take him up on it too much cause I just genuinely like being in the office!
The kinds of bosses that don’t want me working from home are the exact ones I want to hide at home from. The ones who already aren’t a micromanager I’m actually quite happy to come into the office and work with and around.
Been on both sides and Oof. Luckily now with a boss that’s happy to have me wfh but I don’t take him up on it too much cause I just genuinely like being in the office!
The kinds of bosses that don’t want me working from home are the exact ones I want to hide at home from. The ones who already aren’t a micromanager I’m actually quite happy to come into the office and work with and around.
Been on both sides and Oof. Luckily now with a boss that’s happy to have me wfh but I don’t take him up on it too much cause I just genuinely like being in the office!
The kinds of bosses that don’t want me working from home are the exact ones I want to hide at home from. The ones who already aren’t a micromanager I’m actually quite happy to come into the office and work with and around.
Been on both sides and Oof. Luckily now with a boss that’s happy to have me wfh but I don’t take him up on it too much cause I just genuinely like being in the office!
The kinds of bosses that don’t want me working from home are the exact ones I want to hide at home from. The ones who already aren’t a micromanager I’m actually quite happy to come into the office and work with and around.
Been on both sides and Oof. Luckily now with a boss that’s happy to have me wfh but I don’t take him up on it too much cause I just genuinely like being in the office!
The kinds of bosses that don’t want me working from home are the exact ones I want to hide at home from. The ones who already aren’t a micromanager I’m actually quite happy to come into the office and work with and around.
Been on both sides and Oof. Luckily now with a boss that’s happy to have me wfh but I don’t take him up on it too much cause I just genuinely like being in the office!
The kinds of bosses that don’t want me working from home are the exact ones I want to hide at home from. The ones who already aren’t a micromanager I’m actually quite happy to come into the office and work with and around.
Been on both sides and Oof. Luckily now with a boss that’s happy to have me wfh but I don’t take him up on it too much cause I just genuinely like being in the office!
The kinds of bosses that don’t want me working from home are the exact ones I want to hide at home from. The ones who already aren’t a micromanager I’m actually quite happy to come into the office and work with and around.
Been on both sides and Oof. Luckily now with a boss that’s happy to have me wfh but I don’t take him up on it too much cause I just genuinely like being in the office!
Managers who don’t know how to manage are confused by being asked to manage.
Fucking idiot assholes. Even my most type-a micromanager boss in decades managed to keep tabs on me remotely.
Sure there are spyware tools that monitor everything you do on the computer. But it sure seems like a better use of time and money to just hire good people, trust them, and evaluate the quality and timeliness of work.
These idiot companies should spend some time training managers how to do their goddamn jobs effectively.
I’m just glad that so far my job has held at 2 days in office. It still sucks and I’m way less productive in office than I was when I was WFH full time, but it could be worse.
I think this issue does reflect on bad management. They don’t know how to monitor their team’s output, justify their existence or curb bad employees without being in the same room. That’s on them, not WFH.
This is how you realize that management spent a good chunk of their day just checking on employees while not actually doing anything, and now they’re being exposed for having to find ways to fill their day while employees are still being as productive as they were previously.
If they can’t squeeze every last ounce of life out of you, they aren’t getting what they pay for.
I’m a manager now, probably not a very good one. We have more work than there is time for. It’s obvious who is producing what. For us, there are some things you have to be in the office for, but there is PLENTY that can be done from home.
I’m pretty sure nearly everyone who was WFH in my area had to return to the office because my morning commute went from 25-30m to 35-40m. Doesn’t sound like much but the traffic has gotten so busy the long way is faster most mornings.
But The Boss ™ wants to monitor you. They need it to justify their existence. That became abundantly clear when studies showed that productivity did not decrease when working from home. Bosses/managers still opposed to the idea.
Ever since TV remote was invented, you don’t even walk up to the TV to change the channel - why the fuck you need to call us back to the office and breath over our necks? Unless you are a pervert (a lot of you indeed are) - you don’t need to stare at our faces (or our asses) to assess our work, learn to embrace the zoom age !
You reportee (who is still hanging around because the pay is okay, I can work from home, and don’t have to bear your shitface every morning)
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