Does Remote Work Make It Obvious Who is Getting Work Done?
Regarding technology flattening the organization, I would agree with Ed. Where I’m going to disagree is in assuming every workplace has figured that out and taken advantage of it.
Bad managers are still bad managers, even if they are remote. If the management style at your company is to measure work by, what Ed calls, the “appearance of work”, you’ve probably struggled with remote work. Or, you’ve got everyone in meetings, or at least available online all day, every day. On the other hand, if you’ve switched to remote work and also switched the way you measure your directs, you’ve probably been very successful and might even be willing to accept remote work permanently. It’s all about understanding that what we do with teams when they work in-person doesn’t work with remote teams and adjusting.
Remote work isn’t compatible with management that measures workers by the hours they spend at their desks or how many people like you. Those measurements kind of go out the window. So it would be best if you had new, better measurements. I’d argue that you need the measurement you should have always been using, but I digress. … Read More
Linked: Mental health check-ins
As a manager, you are in the best position to notice, and help directs when they are struggling with mental health. Unfortunately, I’m also betting that any business management, or leadership, classes you’ve taken never mentioned mental health, let alone taught you much about it.… Read More
An Example of the Complex Pressures Facing Law Firms
So, if you are a firm with Morgan Stanley as a client, maybe the easy thing is to just say “hey, our huge client wants us back in the office and wants to have in-person meetings, so you’ve got to come back”.
But it’s never really that simple, is it? What do you do if your staff and lawyers really don’t want to be in the office full-time? What if some of the same people who first attracted Morgan Stanley to your firm are willing to leave to work at a firm that is more flexible?
Now that you are only recruiting among the legal folks who want to be in the office five days a week, is your talent up to snuff to keep Morgan Stanley as a client?… Read More
Oh Look Someone On Wall Street Doesn’t Understand How People Learn
Let me fix it for you, what JPMorgan is really doing, is weeding out anyone who might actually want to work differently than the way Wall Street has always worked.
It’s almost like they have no interest in actual diversity, employee mental health, or work-life balance. Of course, we know they don’t. Wealth Management isn’t about the people who work for you, it’s about how much money they bring in, period.… Read More
Your People Are Routing Around Your IT Security
That combination of things points to one, larger, issue. There’s a pretty large communication gap between IT and business users. The security restrictions that exist are getting in the way of people getting work done, and rather than ask for them to be changed, users simply work around them using their own tools, maybe even their own laptops, or network connections, and the IT folks don’t even know this is happening.
That’s a recipe for disaster. It might be time to work on communicating with your users, and of course when I say “communicate” that absolutely means listening too.… Read More
Linked: Spyware meant to track terrorists was used against journalists, too
Yeah, no one ever misuses these kinds of tools, right? Nope, nothing to worry about here, they are only ever used to target bad guys. You have nothing to fear from them.
Whatever.… Read More
Linked: Brain Research Confirms Stupidity Of Back-to-Back Meetings
The research just proves that we already know from first-hand experience, right? We’ve all been in back-to-back meetings, leaving one Microsoft Teams or Zoom call just to click the link to another, and it’s obvious which team members have done that and aren’t mentally prepared for the current meeting.
We all know it. We all schedule our meeting to end at 25 or 55 past the hour so that we don’t make people do that, and then we still run to the top or bottom of the hour anyway. Sometimes even over.
Proving, once again, that we suck at meetings. And yes, I include myself in that.… Read More