Remote work is still 'frustrating and disorienting' for bosses, economist says—their No. 1 problem with it is how difficult it is to observe and monitor employees
Remote work is still 'frustrating and disorienting' for bosses, economist says—their No. 1 problem with it is how difficult it is to observe and monitor employees
Although some bosses have recognized the benefits of workplace flexibility, many are still hesitant to adopt remote work permanently.
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There is a great way to monitor employee’s performance. This one weird trick will save you losing your best employees!
Are their tasks getting done on time and with quality work?
Congrats! You just learned how to treat your employees like adults.
Now kindly fuck off and let me continue to work in my underwear.
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I actually like daily standups. I know many don’t, but they can be really useful.
What did you do yesterday. What are you doing today. Any issues for the group?
Then get back to work!
Daily standups are fine, but they need to be like 10-15 minutes tops. And between 10am-1pm. Putting them at 9am sharp is just rude.
A few jobs back the director was having daily standups with the whole dev team for 60-90 minutes and sometimes longer.
The goal was to figure out why the project was behind schedule... yeah.
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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.
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Honestly I like your way better. Makes the ticket easier to hand off. Pocketing that for later.
Ugh. I hate being on the west coast of the US. Most office jobs start at 7 or 8 AM here.
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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.
Heh. Not enough coffee for mondays as it is....
Yeah, check your email, get a bit of a plan, “hey what’s your plan, what’d you do yesterday”
Keeping the meeting short was the whole point of them being "standups" (as opposed to "sit-downs") in the first place!
Frankly, even 10 minutes is excessive: it means either people are talking too much or your team is too big.
I'm fucking sick and tired of cargo-cult managers adopting the trappings of agile without understanding WTF they're for.
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.
I love my job.
Ha, I could not be more the opposite. I want to be 75% done with my day by 1pm. I’d rather them be at 8am
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. 😂
They are out there, in other time zones.
Indeed, move to Alaska then do therapy exclusively for east coasters.
Or Hawaii and you can do the entire US.
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.
Is there some kind of rule that you can't do any work until the stand-up?
No of course not. It’s just structurally kinda weird. Not the end of the world obviously
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.
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.
Late on a Friday? Yeah, no.
nah yeah, mate. You spend the arse end of your friday workday drinking beer and talking shit in an informal setting and then fuck off early
the problem is, then i a can't leave at lunch if my shit's done. And lets be honest, nobody was doing shit on friday anyhow...
Zoom meeting. Everyone works remote
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.
....I'm literally talking about a developer meeting here. I was very clear from the outset on that. Go find an actual valid target.
I'd rather be doing that on my own time, or something more productive with friends, thanks.
They are getting paid for it since it is during work hours, and the beer would probably be on the company as well.
Ok, so you go hold your own weekly dev meetings
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.
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.
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.
So what if it's a waste of time. Gotta make the 40 hours anyway.
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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.
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.
if i stood up on a video-conference everyone will see my underpants.
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.
But... but... but...
It's proving that my 25 years of being paid 3 times as much as the people I "manage" has been a complete scam the entire time!
Hey, if they're getting all their work done on time, they're probably not getting enough work /s
And the 9 floating around managers will figure out to send THAT email, right?
Oh. Wait. No. You right.
Dem 9 gonna have 7 pointless meetings.
So frustrating how a remote world is exposing that...
Edit: not sarcastic. Satiracle.
Call me Candide.
My supervisors are the worst with this.
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.
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
pssshhh underwear.
Is it underwear if it isn't under anything?
It's under my ass all day, does that count?
Under where?
Under there.
I like to save that for Casual Friday. It helps the weekend feel special.
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.
So what do you do when it isn't on time or quality work?
The same thing you’d do if they were working in an office. How does being remote change this?
Are you suggesting that physical punishment is necessary?
The beatings will continue until morale improves
Paddlin' is only for A+ work. It's a reward.
No. Is working in an office physical punishment?
Yes. Yes it is.
Why do you need physical access to employees that don't do their work on time or up to quality?
Training and education have been found to occur better in person than online.
If someone needs help, shouldn't they be given the best chance at success?
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?
What do you think?
I don't tell employees where to live.
Make them a manager, obviously
People rarely get a job with no intention of doing the work. If work is falling behind there's usually a reason for it that can be fixed.
In the rare case that the person is just taking the mick, warn, punish, fire. In that order.
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.
Is that real? No way in hell I would be hosting my boss for a week. I'm not even sure where they would fit.
No lol. I’m just being dumb
Sounds like a solution for when management can't even pay rent.
That sounds interesting, but I really wouldn't want my boss at my home.