Bosses self reporting as dumbasses, as usual
It really makes the argument that CEOs and managers couldn’t be elected really weak. They’d probably be far more competent if they were chosen by workers once a year or so.
They’d be more competent if they were randomly selected
Recent anecdotal evidence shows that elections are not particularly effective at selecting against incompetence.
CEOs and managers are being elected, by the board. Which in turn, is being elected, by the owners. Which in turn… more often than not, can’t be bothered to actually think through the consequences; either they’re power tripping themselves, or anonymous “public” owners, or workers who can’t tell their taxes from their compensation plan.
They had the data, they just repeatedly ignored it since it didn’t tell them what they wanted to hear.
I’m not sure that they ever had any data because the data would probably suggest that management had the lowest productivity out of any employee. Middle management is filled with too many meetings, they’re all promoted to a level of incompetency, and have delusions that they contribute more towards the success of the business than the skilled people below them.
That would just require them to admit that, as managers, their jobs are to sit in meetings and delegate work. Currently, most of them don’t want to admit that - especially upper management about middle management - but as soon as they needed some kind of quantitative measure to highlight their productivity, it would be normalized and accepted.
Do bad thing, say you handled bad thing wrongly, hope people forget bad thing.
Maybe they shouldn’t be leaders with all the mistakes they make. It isn’t like they promote people for making mistakes.
But many bosses are getting impatient, and many are using the approaching Labor Day holiday as an occasion to officially put “work from anywhere” policies to bed, whether workers like it or not.
Oh the irony.
not having the data of being told to fuck off, presumably.
Our company had record profitability and productivity when people were working from home so of course upper management wanted to change that…
Said a random employee of Leopards Eating Faces, Inc.
See also small businesses consistently blocking bike lanes and pedestrianization despite that being repeatedly shown to massively boost profits, because people in cars just fucking drive to walmart.
So tey didn’t do their job.
Not enough data vs actually talking to their team…
I worked for a self-proclaimed data-driven company. They didn’t understand how to use data and just used it to justify arbitrary decisions. They hated their employees so much, it was wild. They taught their people managers to use data to gaslight employees by telling them they were happy (most of us weren’t). If you don’t feel your employer appreciates you, do what you can to leave.
wow that’s crazy, workers have standards for themselves and now the bosses can’t push us around and force us back to the office? wonder what would happen if we had those standards for more things…
Article:
Most bosses regret how they mandated workers return to the office. They blamed it on not having enough data
Jane Thier 5–6 minutes
Why aren’t workers particularly appreciating—much less adhering to—return-to-office mandates? Probably because adults don’t like being ordered around.
“People do want structure, and people like boundaries,” former Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield told Fortune editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell last year. “But they don’t like to be told what to do, so I think the secret is to not make them feel like their autonomy is being denied or that their ideas aren’t important, while still giving some structure.”
If only managers had taken the hint. Four in five (80%) of bosses told workplace software firm Envoy that had they had a better grasp on their workplace data, they would have taken a starkly different approach to their return-to-office plans. The problem, they said: They didn’t have access to data that would help them make their decision. In a white paper report, Envoy surveyed 1,156 U.S.-based executives and workplace managers whose employees operate on some form of hybrid schedule.
Over half (54%) of managers told Envoy they’ve had to forgo making a critical decision about the workplace because they lacked the requisite data to support it. Without that data, nearly a quarter of them admit to making decisions based on “gut instinct,” which naturally leads to resentment and disappointment. Fifty-seven percent of bosses said if they had better access to data, they could better measure the success of their in-office policies.
One such example is Amazon, whose RTO plan was admittedly prompted by the feelings of senior leadership, not hard data. “It’s time to disagree and commit. We’re here, we’re back—it’s working,” Mike Hopkins, senior vice president of Prime Video and Amazon Studios, reportedly said of in-person work. “I don’t have data to back it up, but I know it’s better.”
It’s difficult to ascertain just how effective in-person days are compared to at-home days, especially when actual productivity could vary based on any number of factors not necessarily related to location. It’s even harder for companies who operate on an ad hoc basis, letting individual teams decide for themselves when to come in. Though experts speak highly of this kind of “organized hybrid,” it can be difficult to assess its effectiveness at a company level. “With so much variability, it’s difficult to know how to improve efficiency in order to save critical budget,” Brooks Gooding, a workplace experience program manager at a software firm called Braze, said in the report.
Braze operates on a hybrid plan with little consistency in attendance rates, which, as Envoy wrote, can make it “impossible for workplace managers to know how many people are on-site on any given day, and how to best allocate space and resources across the organization.” The RTO mismatch
Envoy’s data lays bare a fundamental mismatch that’s endured since the earliest days of the pandemic: Most bosses would rather have their workers where they can see them. Most workers demand a bit more latitude than that.
Granted, there are solid arguments for both time spent in the office and time spent on the couch. On one hand, remote work is proven to be between 10% and 20% less productive and can weaken morale and bonding, especially among younger workers and new workforce entrants. But people still overwhelmingly prefer at least a few days per week at home, arguing that physical office presence is more trouble than it’s worth and is rarely necessary to complete a task.
Ideally, a mix of both options—at the workers’ discretion—should fix the problem. Workers are flocking to jobs with flexibility, which has quickly become a must-have for most white-collar industries rather than a nice-to-have.
But many bosses are getting impatient, and many are using the approaching Labor Day holiday as an occasion to officially put “work from anywhere” policies to bed, whether workers like it or not. Alongside the usual suspects (like JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs), those even include formerly quite lenient companies, like Meta, Google, and Salesforce.
Despite the fact that remote workers make more money and have fewer expenses, lower stress levels, and more time for family and errands, the office isn’t likely to disappear. In fact, workers can even be excited by the prospect—if they think it’s their idea. Data from Unispace found that a third of workers felt “happy, motivated, and excited” about an office return, but felt none of those things when the return was mandated.
As Atlassian’s Annie Dean put it, productivity, innovation, and creativity are “how-to-work problems, not where-to-work problems,” which will be solved only by an overhaul of how we understand work.
“This is a watershed moment of innovation of how work gets done,” Dean told Fortune, “but we’re still talking about the f–king watercooler.”
Subscribe to Well Adjusted, our newsletter full of simple strategies to work smarter and live better, from the Fortune Well team. Sign up today.
🤖 I’m a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:
Click here to see the summary
Four in five (80%) of bosses told workplace software firm Envoy that had they had a better grasp on actual employee preferences, they would have taken a starkly different approach to their return-to-office plans.
Over half (54%) of managers told Envoy they’ve had to forgo making a critical decision about the workplace because they lacked the requisite data to support it.
“With so much variability, it’s difficult to know how to improve efficiency in order to save critical budget,” Brooks Gooding, a workplace experience program manager at a software firm called Braze, said in the report.
Braze operates on a hybrid plan with little consistency in attendance rates, which, as Envoy wrote, can make it “impossible for workplace managers to know how many people are on-site on any given day, and how to best allocate space and resources across the organization.”
But people still overwhelmingly prefer at least a few days per week at home, arguing that physical office presence is more trouble than it’s worth and is rarely necessary to complete a task.
Despite the fact that remote workers make more money and have fewer expenses, lower stress levels, and more time for family and errands, the office isn’t likely to disappear.
The example of Amazon’s mandated RTO has been much discussed elsewhere as a notable exception to that company’s normally data-driven approach. As I saw commented elsewhere:
“If we have data to show that mandated RTO is more productive then let’s share and act on that. If we’re going with opinions then let’s use mine”
The elephant in the room here is that ‘the data’ doesn’t exist, and for good reason: ‘Productivity’ is subjective in most jobs to begin with, and even where it isn’t Remote vs Office is not a significant variable.
Consider some ‘traditional’ proxy measures for productivity- punctuality and attendance. It’s pretty clear that if someone isn’t at work then they aren’t productive and many employers will put employees through formal processes to dismissal in response. Why don’t we see this being highlighted with remote work? Should be easy and obvious to measure and demonstrate right? Could it be that these things improve with remote work?
Consider also the pandemic impact on remote work and that we are talking about a return. It’s clear that many organisations could manage perfectly well, as they themselves have proved.
Paywall and no alternate.
Thank you!
My employer has thankfully taken the opposite approach. They decided that the only people who had to return to the office were those who needed to interact with directly humans or physical objects. Anyone who could do their job from home was free to do so. My boss said he was happy that employees could live where they wanted instead of within an hour of one of the offices. I took him at his word and moved from California to British Columbia.
