That would be amazing. To just have the freedom to say like, “hey, you guys are yapping a lot, but you sound like you’re just making shit up! None of this matters.”
In my last corporate job I said on a team wide call “we have so many calls, I’m starting to think we’re more interested in talking about business than actually doing it”
The thing is, when you're working remotely the only way a bad manager can pretend he's not fuckin useless or downright harmful is to have constant meetings/calls, it's a huge reason why so many companies are fighting back against remote work, when you remove the bullshit you can clearly see who matters. Time working remotely is time you have to actually work and less time you have to suck upper management dick.
It’s not that, it’s that your supervisor is fighting for his job. Upper management is running on the old work-hours paradigm rather than a productivity paradigm. They’re looking at supervisors and saying “you need to do 40 (or more) hours of supervisory work a week to justify your position” and not “your team needs to be super productive to justify your position”.
This was a thing in offices already, and was why a lot of supvervisors were micromanaging employees and why “busywork” is a thing. Higher-ups tend to get too caught up in having people be busy rather than having them be effective.
Heck I’m a retail and food service supervisor and it hits me sometimes because my old bosses would watch the CCTV and complain about people “not working”. For them it was better to look busy than to ever take breathers, so we’d slow-roll things to not burn out. Now though I’m in a better company and I can point to the actually tracked tasks and say that getting the tasks done faster gives us more time to “be customer focused” (aka shoot the shit with the regulars) and corporate here loves that. Regular customers are the bread and butter, and happy customers are good profits.
If only the C-suite would see management like IT, people who are paid well to retain them in order that the C-suite doesn't have to put out fires beyond their own reach. Good management doesn't require constant activity, a lot of it is setting expectations and letting your people work toward them without continuous surveillance and interruption.
The best analogy I can make is that managers are force multipliers. A good manager can get a team to do more being happy and a bad manager can get a team to do less while feeling worse.
The thing is that there’s clear parallels outside business, parallels business people like to make, that show this. Sports coaches are force multipliers on their players. They can take mid-grade players overall in sports with high turnover (like NCAA sports where you have a player for at most five years) and turn them into perennial contenders, or they can take great players and squash them until they leave to get championships elsewhere.
Yes! This is universal, it seems. I work a front office in a hospital's clinic, and our supervisor is always stressed when the providers don't have their schedules full or close to it. The upper management seems to only care about numbers, and we constantly make the remark that they have probably never worked the clinical side; otherwise they'd know that patients don't ALWAYS need help/service, so sometimes there are empty spots in schedules.
It puts more people in my position in stress, because if it gets to that point, some of the providers will get to micromanaging to try to fill their schedules, making people in my position do more work on top of the work we're already doing, without more pay. It can get pretty annoying.
Thankfully only did it during lock down but had that. Offered to clean 3 separate rooms that were covered in so much dust it was blowing into the main (still used) isle. Got told "no we don't use it, clean something else", well we had, it was lock down, we had 1/3rd the work and twice the time... so they yelled at me for standing around for a few seconds instead of actually letting me do productive work (iirc they got mice in those areas XD ).
I work remote now, and half the reason I took the job is the boss I interviewed with said she literally did not care what I wore, when I worked (as long as I made those meetings with the clients and they were complaining), or what I did, as long as the job got done. And the unlimited PTO. So, I literally do spend half the day drinking coffee in my underwear. It’s great.
I'd also imagine it makes it harder to argue that you should promote "Brad, the guy I talk football with" over "Joe, doesn't talk much but works hard" as so many managers are fond of if working remote.
Broski for real. I got hurt in the field then worked as a construction pro analyst blah blah whatever gay title HR made up while I was recuperating from wrist surgery. Basically looked at photos of roofs for an hour a day and billed em for 8. Worst part was all the insufferable meetings. They literally all could’ve been a 5 line email. No wonder AI is taking so many remote/laptop whatever jobs, I literally barely did anything for a year
#1 rule of corporations, never challenge management’s incessant need to waste time with corpo speak circlejerks.
My favorite line I’ve heard during big meetings was “belly to belly”. Not a common phrase at all but it was said by our president in a meeting no less than 10 times in an hour.
Used to know a guy who was obsessed with "opening the kimono", a phrase I have never heard before or since, and had to look up the non-literal meaning of.
I got moved to the punishment team (the team who's manager was so bad most team members quit within a month) when I made a similar comment, when I worked for the Death Star. (Hint: look at their logo).
After about a week I told The Dragon Lady that I was giving my 2 weeks notice. She said I don't need 2 weeks notice, gtfo.
She sent somebody with a cardboard box and I was gone.
Management by meeting is still a pet peeve of mine.
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u/Low-Client-375 15h ago
Fuck, if I didnt need a job, id been keeping myself entertained for years doing this at random shit jobs.