Bosses Think Workers Do Less From Home, Says Microsoft (bbc.com) 143
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: A major new survey from Microsoft shows that bosses and workers fundamentally disagree about productivity when working from home. Bosses worry about whether working from home is as productive as being in the office. While 87% of workers felt they worked as, or more, efficiently from home, 80% of managers disagreed. The survey questioned more than 20,000 staff across 11 countries. Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella told the BBC this tension needed to be resolved as workplaces were unlikely to ever return to pre-pandemic work habits. "We have to get past what we describe as 'productivity paranoia,' because all of the data we have that shows that 80% plus of the individual people feel they're very productive -- except their management thinks that they're not productive. That means there is a real disconnect in terms of the expectations and what they feel."
Both Mr Nadella and Ryan Roslansky, the boss of Microsoft-owned LinkedIn, said employers were grappling with perhaps the biggest shift in working patterns in history. The number of fully-remote jobs advertised on LinkedIn soared during the pandemic but Mr Roslansky said data suggested that type of role might have peaked. He told the BBC that of some 14 or 15 million job listings that are typically live on LinkedIn, about 2% of those involved remote working before the pandemic. Some months ago, that stood at 20%, and it has since come down to 15% this month. At a time of acute labour shortages, employers are having to work harder to recruit, enthuse and retain staff. That even includes Microsoft itself, according to Mr Nadella. "We had 70,000 people who joined Microsoft during the pandemic, they sort of saw Microsoft through the lens of the pandemic. And now when we think about the next phase, you need to re-energize them, re-recruit them, help them form social connections."
An unprecedented number of people have also changed jobs since the start of the pandemic. A phenomenon Microsoft has dubbed "the great reshuffle", sees workers born after 1997 (so-called Generation Z) nearly twice as likely to switch jobs. "At the peak of our 'great reshuffle' we saw a year-on-year increase of 50% of LinkedIn members changing jobs. Gen Z was at 90%," the report said. By 2030, Generation Z will make up about 30% of the entire workforce so managers need to understand them, according to LinkedIn's boss.
Both Mr Nadella and Ryan Roslansky, the boss of Microsoft-owned LinkedIn, said employers were grappling with perhaps the biggest shift in working patterns in history. The number of fully-remote jobs advertised on LinkedIn soared during the pandemic but Mr Roslansky said data suggested that type of role might have peaked. He told the BBC that of some 14 or 15 million job listings that are typically live on LinkedIn, about 2% of those involved remote working before the pandemic. Some months ago, that stood at 20%, and it has since come down to 15% this month. At a time of acute labour shortages, employers are having to work harder to recruit, enthuse and retain staff. That even includes Microsoft itself, according to Mr Nadella. "We had 70,000 people who joined Microsoft during the pandemic, they sort of saw Microsoft through the lens of the pandemic. And now when we think about the next phase, you need to re-energize them, re-recruit them, help them form social connections."
An unprecedented number of people have also changed jobs since the start of the pandemic. A phenomenon Microsoft has dubbed "the great reshuffle", sees workers born after 1997 (so-called Generation Z) nearly twice as likely to switch jobs. "At the peak of our 'great reshuffle' we saw a year-on-year increase of 50% of LinkedIn members changing jobs. Gen Z was at 90%," the report said. By 2030, Generation Z will make up about 30% of the entire workforce so managers need to understand them, according to LinkedIn's boss.
boss are biased - jobs are threatened (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:boss are biased - jobs are threatened (Score:5, Insightful)
Control. You mean control.
When you can't hover above an employee and talk at them, distracting them, you no longer have the ability to put fear in the mind of the employee.
That said, the only people who are "less productive" away from the office, are people who were "faking it" in the office in the first place. Such as supervisors, managers, and various staff who were effectively "doing their coworkers job / people they micro-manages the of job as well"
Remove that control from them, and suddenly "less productive" employees are left to flounder, while everyone else is more productive from not having the overbearing employee/supervisor/manager breathing down their neck/distracting them.
Here's my proposed compromise. If you bring someone into the office, it must be under two of the following three reasons:
1) They don't work well without peers (in which cause you might bring all the staff who "needs the office" in to work, regardless of what department they are part of)
2A) It's the summer and need air conditioning or B) It's the winter and need heat.
3) Their home life is too distracting (spouse, kids, pets) and are unwilling to resolve those issues.
During the summer, if the office is air conditioned, that might be a good reason to work at the office. Many people at the place I was doing office work, in a city where most homes do not have air conditioning, came into the office during the hottest days. They however were not as willing to come to the office during the winter because of the potential for accidents in getting to the office, or the risk of being exposed to covid from taking transit in the winter.
Hell, I would suggest, point blank, October 1st to March 31st (northern hemisphere,) no office should be permitted to have any kind of "back to the office" policy. If they are asking employees to come to the office, they must be:
- Full time salaried employees with full health benefits
- Have their own, office (no cubicles, no "open concept" layouts), with a door that closes
- Building is heated and humidity controlled
- Have underground/building-adjacent parking (eg not parking half a mile down the street)
April 1st to September 30th (northern hemisphere), an office may only request staff come to the office if
- Employees have their own offices, with a door that closes.
- Building is air conditioned and humidity controlled
- Have a good reason. (eg 100% of the staff under that manager agree to come to the office, blind vote)
The "open concept" and cubicle farm, does nothing but spread disease, and make employees miserable from noise. Both office layouts must die a quick death. This is why people are more productive at home, because at most, they are distracted by a spouse, two kids and a dog, where as in an office they might be distracted by a manager, 8 co-workers and maybe 20 other people in the same corner of the building's floor.
Re:boss are biased - jobs are threatened (Score:4, Interesting)
To play the bargaining game, you do not start with a reasonable demand. You start with the most extreme demand and keep it.
What you're doing is proposing something reasonable. They will always, ALWAYS make you lose something in the bargain process. If you start with your proposal, what you'll get is "casual fridays and free fruit day". You'll be lucky to see "remote 1 day a week".
Do not give in to these assholes.
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Sold,,, you had me at free fruit day.
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This is a work contract, not a Turkish bazaar. I told you what the conditions are I'll work in, take it or leave it, I don't have time for that bullshit.
Re:boss are biased - jobs are threatened (Score:5, Informative)
The control that you describe, that these managers want--it's an illusion.
I currently manage a team of remote developers, and I myself work remotely. I have absolutely NO problem understanding what the team is doing, and how well they are performing. They do their jobs well, and in my opinion, are more productive than they would be in the office. Control is not an issue, these people exercise self-control. They drive themselves harder than I would. This is a pattern throughout my company of 1,000 employees who are nearly all remote.
A tech manager who must be physically present to "control" his team, isn't much of a manager.
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The traditional workplace was more hierarchical, whereas a sane modern environment is much more about self management. The worker has moved up, in a sense. But that doesn't mean managers aren't needed, they just need to evolve as well (and it's great when they do as your example shows!) And maybe the more evolved version is about coordinating in a more flexible and complex problem space? or something else? I'm curious what your thoughts are?
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I think you're right about the coordinating role being important, but I don't think this is a new concept or that it applies only to complex problem spaces.
For example, I've spent a number of years working in Boy Scouts. Despite the bad rep they've gotten in the news, Boy Scouts are, by and large, a fantastic youth training organization. They teach boys to make decisions for themselves. The boys run their own meetings, they plan their own campouts, they cook their own food, they direct their own advancement
Re:boss are biased - jobs are threatened (Score:4, Insightful)
A tech manager who must be physically present to "control" his team, isn't much of a manager.
More to the point, they don't actually understand the tech. If they did, they could gauge employee productivity by their work, not by looming.
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This is very insightful.
About 10 years ago, I spent so much of my time managing, that I started to get rusty as a programmer. When I moved on to my next job, I had a more hands-on role, and I had to retrain myself and catch up with technology, which had passed me by. I decided then and there that I would never let myself get rusty again. To make that happen, I continue development of a hobby project.
It really is important for a manager to be able to do the job their team members do. Maybe not as fast or wel
Re:boss are biased - jobs are threatened (Score:4)
Bosses universally think their people are under productive. It is in the nature of their job to think this. Returning to the office won't suddenly make bosses think their people are productive now. It will just give those same bosses more opportunities to interrupt, annoy, interfere-with, and reduce the productivity of, their employees.
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Sure, just like the old German saying, the knave thinks (others are) the way he is.
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Sure, just like the old German saying, the knave thinks (others are) the way he is.
This.
The pandemic has show how unproductive a lot of middle managers are. Well they always were but they need you to come back into the office so they can hide it better.
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Managing work from home employees encourages usage of a lot more automation of the jobs of boss's. They are desperate to get workers back to the office because they have lost a lot of relevancy.
You know, I'm thinking that the words "boss" and "manager" have revelatory baggage.
I don't need a boss. Or a manager. And employer, sure. An enabler, absolutely.
But I don't need to be bossed around or managed. Just assign tasks, provide tools, assist with eliminating issues that prevent me from doing my job, and get the hell out of the way.
That said, a certain percentage of employees are... not very good. Once an employer/enabler finds such an employee can't do their job well despite a lack of ob
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We act like everyone is capable when we don't pay competitively. Leadership thinks they save money buy paying below market rates but it is very likely they pay more in lost productivity.
There are (at least) two kinds of leaders. Leaders that hire people that they see as their equals or greater, and leaders that hire people they see as lesser than them. The latter types are the ones demanding workers return to the office.
If you track proper metrics for your org, departments, and workers then you should kn
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Most of the research seems to suggest that workers have been more productive at home. So the bosses are wrong, either on purpose or not.
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I don't know about that. I feel less productive mostly due to Microsoft. Instead of in person meetings, we all lose a ton of time thanks to trying to have meetings via MS Teams screen share thanks to the huge number of glitches..
Maybe Microsoft should quit whining about the state of things and fix their buggy crap
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Most of the research seems to suggest that workers have been more productive at home. So the bosses are wrong
Or the research is wrong.
Or, perhaps, some jobs can be done well remotely and some can't.
Re:boss are biased - jobs are threatened (Score:5, Interesting)
It's also about prestige. Think about it - the boss wants people to know he has "the corner office". You, the serf working in the cube farm, need to kowtow to all the people in the offices.
With everyone working from home, who's the boss able to gloat to?
Especially those companies that invested in high end offices in premium locations. It's hard to gloat from the penthouse office if there's no one to gloat to.
And yes, productivity increases at home - it's well known open plan offices suffer from a 10=20% productivity drop compared to proper offices for many reasons - including just distraction. The productivity increase is simply the result of the elimination of the productivity loss caused by the office.
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Managers should spend 40% of their time doing practical work. The managers who spend all their times in meetings tend to be unaware of what is going on and like a babysitter who spends the whole time watching TV.
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disagree. been in the working world for over 40 years now. the managers that try to do both, tech and manage people, they suck at both, usually. not a good idea; but its that way since we force managers to also be hands-on. it means they have less time and interest in actually planning for the group's needs (budget, staffing, events).
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ok, I've seen plenty of managers do both, and not suck at either. In fact, the managers who do both suck less. So I'm not sure what your problem is, but I am certain the problem is yours.
it means they have less time and interest in actually planning for the group's needs (budget, staffing, events).
You are vastly overestimating how much time this takes.
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Re: boss are biased - jobs are threatened (Score:2)
I'm sure that's a big part of it, the lower to middle management just can't admit the work they do doesn't justify a full time job. They are sitting at home bored and assume everyone else is doing the same.
Also I suspect bosses just don't know what productivity looks like. They think it's doing assigned tasks. They never see technical debt reduction or any kind of housekeeping because workers don't want to mention this to the boss, for fear it will be obstructed.
Peekaboo! (Score:5, Insightful)
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As a 100% remote boss since 2017 (Score:2)
Re:As a 100% remote boss since 2017 (Score:4, Insightful)
2 hours? At least 4.
People who work from home tend to forget about time. At the office, they grow hungry at around 4, add another hour and go home to eat. At home, they grow hungry at 4, have a snack and continue past 6 before they notice it.
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At home, they grow hungry at 4, have a snack and continue past 6 before they notice it.
If that happens, you know you have a good job.
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I do. I like my job. If you don't, you might want to review your options.
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Yes I forget about time too.
I only remember to turn on the computer at around 10 am, then forget to end my lunch break until the next meeting reminder pops up.
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Why do I have a hunch your next performance review will not be too stellar?
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I don't know why, but you'd be wrong.
I do less (Score:3, Funny)
I did (Score:4, Informative)
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2 shots and a booster ... went on my first vacation in 3 years. We went to the Isle of Man for the races ... I was infected before we reached the god damn island. I spent a week in a very expensive rental apt. laying on the couch sick as fuck.
Stop saying just get the vaccine .. just lessens the symptoms and you don't die (hopefully).
I chance going into the office once a week to get out of the house but it's a small isolated office with just our company. If wasn't, nope.
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Stop keeping us in suspense and tell us already.
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Interesting. I do less when being cooped up with humans distracts me from working. I guess people are different and not fungible after all, what manager would have thought?
Of course they do (Score:5, Insightful)
THEY do a lot less work (for sufficiently loose definitions of "work") when they're working from home, so they project that onto the actual productive people on payroll.
Honestly, I think it says more about how little actual work bosses do than anything else.
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More exactly, the boss' perception is, correctly, that the employees do less of the visible make-work that they used to do in the office. But I am quietly confident that actual core work gets done better, and probably in fewer hours. I was once asked to come up with a way of measuring (real) engineers productivity by a weasel of a boss. I ignored it. The fact is, they can't tell if we are faffing about or actually being extremely effective.
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Yup, my job has a grand total of about 3 minutes of make work per day.
Strangely, when we came back to the office the boss called me in about 3 months later and asked if I was ok, he had noticed my productivity had dropped off....
A year after that, we are finally getting a WFH policy. Of course, I'm undergoing house reno at the moment so I have no real suitable place... but two more weeks.... then I'll ask for 2 or 3 days per week remote.
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It's easy to measure an engineer's actual work. Take his working hours, then subtract those hours a manager is somewhere within 10 feet.
Re: Of course they do (Score:2)
Yet "the system" forced a lot of good contributers into that position. They are really victims too, although well paid ones.
Sociopaths want control back, news at 11 (Score:3, Insightful)
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And deny the workers of the tools they need - if a worker wants something, just say no. So at the end of the year you can prove you saved money.
And problem solving? Escalation? LOL. The best you get from a micromanager like that is "well maybe you're the problem because no one else is complaining/undeperforming/demanding raises. only you... so you need to work on that, bud".
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"I am. I'm going over your head to someone who might actually want to do his job".
Numbers. TPS Reports. (Score:2)
Aren't managers supposed to have all sorts of numbers to measure their peons? So show them. If you think less work is getting done, the 'boss' should have the numbers to show that this is true. Or not.
Of course, they don't want 'not', because that would imply that a lot of what they believe in, isn't true.
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Do you really want some kind of monitoring software installed on your company provided and managed computer? They are going to get the data for their reports from somewhere. It comes down to how you can measure productivity, and its possible that there are no good general answers to that which depends on the job.
Re: Numbers. TPS Reports. (Score:2)
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Other than the fact that this already happens for a LOT of people that work from home, you really don't need that kind of fine-grained detail to prove whether it's good or bad for productivity.
Things like deadlines, bug solving, etc are all measurable.
The kind of micro management that seems to be all the rage, is of very little use, and often counter-productive.
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Monitoring software is a farce. The correct way to measure productivity is measuring OUTPUT. That is, results. If the boss wants monitoring software, he has already failed.
An author's output is measured by the submitted manuscript, not by the metronome like precision with which he strikes the keys.
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I don't understand what all this talk about "feelings" is. Most companies worth their salt should have actual hard data metrics to gauge whether output of work is more or less than what it was before. It i
Actually, they do a lot less (Score:2, Informative)
https://www.wsj.com/articles/u... [wsj.com]
We can get off our fat asses and get back to work or we all become poor.
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Hahahaha
Fuck you.
Re:Actually, they do a lot less (Score:4, Interesting)
If my customers order less of my product then my workers have less to do and are thus less productive. It is not about the workers being lazy, it is about business slowing down.
Re: Actually, they do a lot less (Score:2)
Are you thinking of hunter-gatherers? If you are a hunter-gatherer, then putting more effort in stands to benefit you.
If you are a worker, then working hard is not going to bring you a higher income. That is the whole point of the system.
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You mean to say that now that we are constantly hearing about return to the office initiatives, productivity is down? We better cut that crap out and get back to working at home pronto!
Hmm... (Score:2)
Bosses Think Workers Do Less From Home
I wonder if the bosses think they, themselves, also do less work from home too. ...
I mean, they're someone else's (the bosses bosses) "workers"
I'm betting they apply different standards and metrics to themselves.
I have to agree. (Score:5, Insightful)
I work for a government agency. When Covid hit, we all went on a 50% telework schedule. We all use service now for our metrics and ticketing. I was the only person to not have their metrics go into the gutter. With a 30 person team, I was closing close to 40% of the tickets. Meanwhile, I had co-workers that bragged they treated the telework days like half days, and their metrics showed it.
Eventually I had to go 100% TW due to some medical issues. My score hit 43%. When management started to bring everyone back into the office, I stayed home. When management told me I'd have to come back too to be fair, I told them, "It's not fair that I closed 43% of all tickets for this year, what is everyone else doing? Each of them only does 2% of the work" So they let me stay home. As long as I respond in a few minutes on teams, take all my calls, and customers don't complain about the quality of my work everyone is happy.
Now that everyone is back in the office, I'm hovering around 11-12% of total tickets closed. Still in the top 5 closers. I have extra time to help out other departments, process improvement, scripting. I won't lie and say I don't have my off days. An hour before my TOD ended, I was tired, took a 30 minute nap, but when I got up refreshed I logged back on, and did another 45 minutes of work. Point being, some people can manage themselves and their day, others are terrible at it. What Microsoft needs to do is sort out who does, and who does not need an in person manager.
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Is there something about your work that makes it inherently harder to do remotely?
I'm a game developer. I've been working remotely for a long time. Most of the best people I've worked with have been remote workers too. It's always been the lower level people on the team that benefited from the office environment. The people who struggled with the switch to remote were the people who were already struggling while in the office.
I will say though that the QA team took a hit. Their workflow was based around hav
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I've been working remotely for a long time
Likewise. Haven't been at an employers site since 2015.
I do more work from home. Just not during business hours. I'm around business hours, but indulge distractions. Then, late in the evening or early morning, I do amazing work. Stuff that would have never happened 9-5 in an office.
If you like what you do (or at least some of what you do) then working from home can be very productive.
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I do more work from home. Just not during business hours. I'm around business hours, but indulge distractions. Then, late in the evening or early morning, I do amazing work. Stuff that would have never happened 9-5 in an office.
If you like what you do (or at least some of what you do) then working from home can be very productive.
I work on large games. If I change one line of code, it's a 10+ minute build before I can test it. Pull some big asset updates from the repository? Can take an hour to build. If I'm in an office, I have to sit and stare at a progress bar for all of that. If I'm home, I can go do something else and come back later. And it's no big deal if I have to make a tweak and kick off another build in the evening. I can get sooooo much more done from home than if I'm in the office. And I keep my sanity way better.
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I will say though that the QA team took a hit. Their workflow was based around having a lot of game console test systems in a shared area. They could bounce around between different systems as needed, and easily pull in another person to test multiplayer. Their work got harder when each person needed to have a bunch of hardware at home, and giving everyone a full set of hardware wasn't cost effective.
Could the studio have gone PC-first during extended outbreaks, with console ports to be released months later? Or do the console makers demand day-and-date releases?
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I will say though that the QA team took a hit. Their workflow was based around having a lot of game console test systems in a shared area. They could bounce around between different systems as needed, and easily pull in another person to test multiplayer. Their work got harder when each person needed to have a bunch of hardware at home, and giving everyone a full set of hardware wasn't cost effective.
Could the studio have gone PC-first during extended outbreaks, with console ports to be released months later? Or do the console makers demand day-and-date releases?
It was a sports game, so we kinda had to have all platforms launch at the start of the season. There wasn't really room for the release plans to change. It didn't matter what the console makers wanted, our business needs were more strict.
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>Is there something about your work that makes it inherently harder to do remotely?
Nope, nothing at all. I guess a lot of it is my approach as well. I use a ton of powershell now (We're the Federal government, we're mostly windows based) Once you stop using RDP to troubleshoot things, and go almost 100% posh it's just like working from an SSH session. I think a lot of my co-workers are still stuck pushing buttons and GUI's, which slows them down. Which leads into another answer, I can do a lot of my w
Re: I have to agree. (Score:3)
Do More (Score:4, Interesting)
Productive for who? (Score:2, Troll)
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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A competent manager would be able to detect employees who do this, and fire them.
Where I work, everyone works as part of a team. If one team member is just screwing around, it is outright obvious to everyone else on the team, because they wind up shouldering that load. Naturally, they rat the lazy bastard out.
Problem solved.
Microsoft should know (Score:2)
Microsoft has experimented with remote work multiple times over 20 years now and should know something. This is a tech company that could try it with employees more equipped for trying this and it didn't go well. They could have found a productive solution decades ago and if they had it would have been online before the pandemic began and then they were forced into another attempt and still haven't found that it works out.
This is a big company. It's not everybody but it's not a small anecdote either.
If y
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Microsoft has experimented with remote work multiple times over 20 years now and should know something. This is a tech company that could try it with employees more equipped for trying this and it didn't go well. They could have found a productive solution decades ago and if they had it would have been online before the pandemic began and then they were forced into another attempt and still haven't found that it works out.
Microsoft did do that study:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-u... [microsoft.com]
Though it doesn't talk about productivity directly, this one does:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse... [linkedin.com]
Some highlights:
I do want to point this out from linkedin:
By not making the daily commute and not having the number of lengthy in-person meetings, employees will be able to accomplish more tasks. However, the biggest impact on remote work productivity came from the same factors that influence individual productivity: organizational culture and leadership.
In times of uncertainty, strong leadership is key to maintaining employee productivity and well-being.
Namely, if a remote work force means lower productivity, maybe it's because you have weak leaders and managers.
This is a big company. It's not everybody but it's not a small anecdote either.
If you are honest about it, you should have noticed many things are not so great when working remote even if it works well for you. Group situations are significantly different and not in a good way for the vast majority. When you are in a group you can't have side conversations or read the room anything close to reality.
I actual
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And that's different in office in what way, exactly?
You can lead a donkey to the well but you can't force it to drink. If someone wants to be a Wally, they will find a way, in office or at home.
Re: Productive for who? (Score:2)
It's not a one size fits all approach (Score:3)
if you're doing customer support, you are needed during a time span. It probably even makes sense to have you in an office to avoid distractions. Some planning jobs benefit greatly from everyone in the same room.
Mine doesn't that much. However, it's dumb as shit to say every Microsoft job is better in the office or at home. Some people or roles will be better at home, some better in the office, depending on the role. Some are more productive 4 days a week, some need 5.
Even with certain employees in the same roles. Some of my peers thrive in the office and suck at home and others thrive much better at home. I personally like working from home because I don't have to "look busy" when I am waiting on someone or blocked. I can manage my time precisely. The downside is my day stretches out and I find myself responding to e-mails between 7AM and 7PM. Pre-pandemic, I never opened my laptop from home unless my boss called and declared an emergency.
Back in the office a year. All meetings are zoom. (Score:5, Funny)
There is so much irrational hatred of remote work from management. My current employer has managed to make the worst of both worlds. The only one allowed to work remotely is the boss. As a result, all meetings are via zoom with most coming from the same room. Physical interaction with other members of my team in the last year has been negligible.
I interviewed with a startup last week. The CEO boasted that they were always onsite, even during the height of the pandemic. He also said that if he allowed work from home, employees would take advantage and work two jobs. I declined the offer.
Was the survey anonymous? (Score:2)
"Bosses Think Workers Do Less From Home" (Score:2)
While Shareholders Think CEOs Do Even Less In The Office
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That's not fair. CEOs do jack shit, whether in office or outside.
And you better be happy about it, because as soon as they have "visions", usually of the kind that should recommend getting professional help, your productivity goes down the gutter because what follows "visions" is "reorganization".
This says a lot about Microsoft employees (Score:3)
Apparently, Microsoft has a bias for hiring people who think remote work doesn't work. I'm a manager of an all-remote team of programmers. I myself work remotely, as does my boss, the CIO. Our entire company of 1,000 employees is almost entirely remote. The company was on-site before the pandemic. After everyone was forced remote, it worked so well that there is no plan to ever call everyone back. I think this is a company I want to stick with!
Can you do my job for me? (Score:3)
I worked for a very large computer company. We had a couple of hardware engineers that would call us and ask us to do their work for them in the plant "because it was their working from home day".
We also had some "working from home" folks that we couldn't reach for days on email or the phone. They were simply unresponsive.
Collaboration works better in person. There's a lot that can be lost in a video conference and without the benefit of collaboration in the office.
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There is also a lot of productivity boosting due to video conferencing. Instead of having to sit there and pretend to listen to the narcissist, who loves to hear himself talk, drone on while mentally undressing the intern to not die of boredom, you can now actually continue working while the droning goes on in the background.
3% raises in a time of 10%+ inflation (Score:2)
When the same bosses were asked if 3% raises in a time of 10%+ inflation was a factor in worker productivityâ¦
ânah, donâ(TM)t be silly!â(TM)
Worker wages have been disproportionately suppressed for years. People are tired of being exploited by employers.
Unfortunately after the economy tanks people will cave to employer pressure again to keep their jobs. Employers know this, and itâ(TM)s basically a short-term standoff.
Measure it then, Microsoft ! (Score:2)
Surely a big corporation like Microsoft can arrange an experiment where a few teams work on the same code with each team doing a varying %age of WFH, and then compare the productivity of the teams ?
Instead of simply having their lame boss complain about perceptions to the lame BBC ?
( And, ahem, instead of helping make a new Start button those teams in
Less can be more (Score:3)
Putting in less hours? Possibly. Putting in less productivity? Probably not, likely the other way around. Employers should care about your output, not the hours you put in.
When working from home, to the extent you have some flexibility in how you prioritize and spend your time, you get to focus more on the important stuff, and less time pretending you care about the less important stuff. Doing things you think are important, makes you more motivated. And at least for me, that motivation combined with fewer distractions, can put me in "the zone", in which I can be super productive.
As long as there is a company culture in which the employer and employees share a common understanding of what it is that at the end of the day is "important" to the company, employees will typically be able to make good decisions about how to spend their time.
Yes, pointy haired bosses don't get to boss you around as much micromanaging your time. Often that is probably a good thing.
At the end of the day, if you don't perform and pull your weight, it will be noticed - whether you work from home or not. People understand they have to do the work.
Easy solution (Score:2)
Ask your managers to do actual productive work with 40% of their time (at least). If they are actually working with the people they manage, then they will know what their coworkers are doing. It's only when they spend all their time in meetings and isolate themselves from the team that they feel unsure.
Microsoft discover bosses think! (Score:2)
Covid was a lottery win (Score:4, Interesting)
I believe a lot of the resistance from managers is based on managers being extroverts. It has been an extroverts' world for so long that they fundamentally do not understand introverts.
A small anecdote: I was in a hotel yesterday. Got up, wandered to the breakfast buffet, and groggily grabbed my first cup of coffee. In came a woman, who made some comment about how it would obviously be so nice to share a table. So she sat down at my table and started talking. I grunted occasionally, answered a couple of questions, but clearly was not into the conversation. She was completely oblivious. Nowhere in her world do people exist who don't want a lively conversation with a stranger first thing in the morning.
I see much the same thing with our top management. They love mandatory all-hands meetings, which the rest of us look for reasons to not be able to attend. They spend big bucks on an annual black-tie social bash, and can't understand why attendance is poor. The concept that many of us don't value the opportunity to blow off work in order to interact with dozens or even hundreds of people is apparently inconceivable.
These are exactly the managers who object to WFH. They cannot stand the idea of being alone in a room, with no one to interact with. Obviously, everyone else must feel the same way – either that, or we aren’t actually working.
Covid, by causing WFH, has been a huge lottery win for introverts. We have to keep the pressure on, and not let the world go back to the way it was.
"..bosses THINK.." (Score:3)
Do they not track performance? (Score:2)
Because They Do (Score:2)
Anyone who thinks employees who "work from home" don't goof off is delusional. That said, any manager who can't monitor the employees work with goals/milestones shouldn't be in management. Give your employees a task, and deadline, if they're on or ahead of target, who gives a shit if they're goofing off. If not, then you can bitch about it, and hold them accountable.
FWIW, before retiring several years ago, I'd been on both sides of that equation since the early 90s.
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I don't see the compelling reason that this has to be either-or.
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Can't exactly agree. Quite the opposite, since we now have teams and easy desk sharing capability, there is less of a barrier now to go over to one of the more experienced team members and show them your problem. Before, they had to pick up their laptop or ask me to come over to their desk to show&ask, now they just prod me on Teams and paste their screen across mine.
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a) If they don't know they need help, that wouldn't change much since I don't have time to wander aimlessly between desks. I do my work while I'm not being asked to lend a hand.
b) If you don't know you need help and/or are too proud/shy/stupid to ask for it, you are wrong here. You get told time and time again here as a junior that you're NOT expected to know everything but you ARE expected to ask for aid if you could use some. Security isn't something you get hired and are expected to be an expert in from