Remote work is still 'frustrating and disorienting' for bosses, economist says—their No. 1 problem with it
cnbc.com
Remote work is still 'frustrating and disorienting' for bosses, economist says—their No. 1 problem with it::Although some bosses have recognized the benefits of workplace flexibility, many are still hesitant to adopt remote work permanently.
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I recently left a WFH only company. The environment was toxic and there was definitely some insecurity on the part of management regarding worker productivity. There was a much larger emphasis on constantly showing to management what you were working on and proving you were using your work day productively.
It was a culture shift I didn't adapt well to and left.
If it's salaried and your work is done and you aren't missing meetings and calls and whatnot then who cares if you're using your day 'productively'? You must be if your work was done with no major issues. Who cares if it took you 6 hours or 8?
Anyone wanting to get the most out of the departement/team. If you only need 75% of your expected working hours to complete your assigned workload, its completely reasonable that they know so they can give you 25% more work to fill out the rest of your work day.
And if someone else takes 8 hours to do the same work that I did in 6, so they assign me 25% more, it's reasonable for me to expect to be paid 25% more too.
Of course not, silly. They'll just promote the 8 hour person to something they're more suited for.
Yes of course you should be compensated based on ability and performance.
lol such a chud comment
"The juice bag has a quarter left."
That's an incredibly flawed analogy...
Why throw away a juice bag, that you bought and paid for with the agreed sum for the full amount, without drinking all the contents?
Were not talking employers draining your life for more time than you agreed to give them. If X amount of money for Y hours is what you agreed on, why do you feel entitled to not pay your part of the deal in full?
Well, are they being paid for their time, or for their output? If they're being paid for their time, then if their work for the day takes 10 hours do they get paid more? That just seems like incentive to work slower.
Your contract probably specifies time, not output, so you're being pair for your time.
And yes, many who finish early with assignments just use the extra time to either work less or generally slower. That's quite normal and completely understandable, I do that too. Nevertheless, you/we probably should inform our employers that they're not getting full bang for their buck with your current effort, if you're consistently underloaded.
SQUEEZE THE JUICE BAG, FLESHY!
If I had a boss like that, you bet your ass I would purposely wait to turn things in later and look busy until then.
I can see this being an issue in an agile development environment.
Work gets assigned points based on various factors. You learn how many points a team can do every X weeks (all teams will be different, each team tries to hone in on what they can do and how they number it)
If you complete all your work on time, great! If you don't, that's okay too, but if you complete early, you're still supposed to take more work. Maybe it's something that QA doesn't need to test so it doesn't mess up everyone else. Documentation, experimenting on something, or maybe QA does have bandwidth to test it too. Either way, you do something.
If you can never finish it all, you figure out why and adjust the total points you can take each period. If you always have left over time, you figure out why and increase the points you can take. If it's a one off reason, don't change anything.
But if "I did all my assigned work" is the answer to then slacking off, that's not what it's supposed to be. All tickets done doesn't mean don't do more.
It sounds like the company was being proactive in making sure that people did their jobs and were being productive. Not everything is daily production; some projects can take weeks or months.
Thats what project management is for, especially tools like Agile.
But project management isn't just a one way system, a project manager needs input from those working under them.
It sounds like there is an issue with having that discussion.
Yeah. I feel like a lot of the people here like the idea of WFH, but don't understand that it is really easy to become a cog in a manager's Gantt chart and "doing your job" can mean wildly different things to your manager.
That's not exclusive to WFH.
But it can become a lot worse with WFH, especially as the level of communication goes down. And if you hear the complaints from a lot of people here, they are apparently working with managers that don't do that.
I don't see any evidence for this.