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by PragmaticPulp
1807 days ago
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> The owner is most comfortable in an environment where they can wander by and create an immediate change-of-priority at the individual level; there are many middle managers and executives everywhere who also have grown to their positions of power/influence with the same style. I worked in a mixed office/remote/distributed company before the pandemic. At first we had a lot of travel and in-person meetings to continue with some face to face influence. Like you said, the in-person meetings often felt like managers flexing their power and influence because they saved big changes for the in person meetings. Later the company tried to reduce or eliminate travel to save money and speed up communication by making it all digital. At first I was excited to have an opportunity for full remote, but I quickly came to miss those in-person meetings. Some of the managers and executives completely lost touch with the human side of the employees they no longer saw in person. It was too easy for them to fire off Slack messages that demanded last minute changes or crunch time because they didn’t have to look us in the eye to deliver the bad news. They also couldn’t read the room or see reactions when they made unreasonable demands. Full remote also created an environment where too many people just wanted to withdraw socially and stay hidden as much as possible. It took extra work to make sure everyone was communicating properly and to ensure that the load was being distributed evenly. Working part-time in office solved a lot of these problems. Remote can and does work with the right team in place, but having done it (pre-COVID) I’ve come to believe that proper candidate selection and mentoring is crucial, as well as a willingness to do the hard thing and let employees go if they can’t work or communicate effectively in a remote environment even after being mentored. Remote isn’t for everyone. |
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> Some of the managers and executives completely lost touch with the human side of the employees they no longer saw in person.
As a remote worker I don't care too much about the human touch either. I have a business relationship with my client. I do believe most employers are reasonable however and if a remote worker /on average/ delivers good results, it'd be stupid for a company to refuse adapt around some incident in a remote workers' life.
> It was too easy for them to fire off Slack messages that demanded last minute changes or crunch time because they didn’t have to look us in the eye to deliver the bad news.
As long as the managers understand that change of plans might result in more time needed for deliverables, I think this is fine. This might be a point for the remote worker to communicate back to the manager though, just to prevent any misunderstanding to develop later on. I always try to be very clear with my clients that if plans change, my delivery schedule changes as well.
> Full remote also created an environment where too many people just wanted to withdraw socially and stay hidden as much as possible.
As an introvert I like to deal with other people as little as possible as well. I prefer people in a business relationship to mostly communicate work-related issues with me (not too much smalltalk). I'm fine with communicating every day on my work (sending out a Slack message, perhaps with a few screenshots or a build), but apart from that I like to keep communication limited. I am glad to say that my current and previous clients were happy with this mode of working as well.