- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
Return to office is ‘dead,’ Stanford economist says. Here’s why::The share of workers being called back to the office has flatlined, suggesting remote work is an entrenched feature of the U.S. labor market.
I say this as a rare person who prefers to work in office.
Good.
Seriously, would much rather work with productive happy people. the remote work phenomenon has proven that between reduced traffic, the commercial real estate bubble, the fact that we’re literally all connected to each other 24/7 through the series of tubes means it’s about time we restructure the workforce.
I suppose a big part of that will be managers learning how to measure productivity more accurately than your clocked-in hours. That’ll be the most interesting change… the “corporate welfare” program of just getting paid to occupy a desk space will have to be replaced with more sophisticated real performance measurements.
I have no idea how that pans out in software. Every bug is vastly different so they can’t merely count the number of bugs you fix. SLOC is a bit of a sloppy measure too.
I’m a manager of an entirely WFH team, it’s easy. I have weekly one on one catch-ups with everyone in my team, where we discuss the work they are doing any blockers or anything like that that has come up. And a fortnightly team meeting.
And if anything urgent does come up they just call or message me at the time.
You measure the output not some BS KPI or how long they worked that day. I trust my people to be adults and come and go from work as needed, as long as they are still getting their work done idgaf how many hours a day/week they work.
Ultimately as their manager I’m there to try to remove as much of the corporate or political BS from my team’s lives as possible, so they can focus on doing great work (whilst also being accommodating to any personal issues that crop up for them)
It sounds like you are an awesome manager! We need more like you out there.
You remind me of my manager. She is so freaking awesome but we have a great team as well that does not need micromanaging or hand holding. Thanks for all that you do!
Thank you for being such a great manager. For all I know you’re my manager, as that’s basically my experience with my team.
Thanks to Goodhart’s Law, that doesn’t work. Any number used as a performance target ceases to be a useful measure, because people minmax them. You need to be able to look at a feature in a system, and evaluate if they completed it in an amount of time commensurate with their experience.
You need to think of productivity more abstractly, and have a lot of relevant expertise to assess it. Good management is hard, basically.
Sadly, I don’t think so. The pandemic-era cash grab solution was software that’s basically spyware, logging keystrokes, mouse movements, taking screenshots, etc. Some clever individuals just taped vibrators to their mice and walked away for breaks. You’re asking middle management to do real work here, ya silly.
I think the bigger problem is that a lot of middle management was shown to not really do much useful in the pandemic.
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I’m a bit torn. There are pros and cons for sure, at least when “the office” isn’t just a cubicle you report to maybe with a neighbor you don’t mind. The social aspects of the job (if there are any not on a phone/computer already) can be so much easier in person.
Though that’s not a reason what so ever to force people back. That seems like a blatant attempt to keep the value of commercial realestate up.
I miss the office I worked at where I got a corner office (private!!!) and free lunches.
I do not miss the office where I worked in an open plan near the floor kitchenette and could hear people making coffee and chatting all day, or my coworkers on calls at their desks, or the keyboard clacking…