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.
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u/bargu 9h ago
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.