I feel like I can just share the titles of these two articles and make my point. But I will add this one thing. As work moves to a more remote, work from anywhere, model, you have a choice on how to manage your people. You can define the work they need to do, explain how it will be measured and trust them get it done, or you can treat them like children.
Which one do you think will make for better engaged, mentally healthy, employees?
Do the calculation yourself. What do you ask employees to tolerate versus what they get from the job, and consider what you’ve asked them to put up with during the last year versus what they get from the job. The calculations have changed. As it turns out, those employees were watching you, and watching how much you valued their health and safety.
Consider the possibility that you didn’t show them what they wanted to see, and that’s why they’re not coming back, and why no one else wants to work there too.
Maybe they’ll come back to work when they have no other options, for a short time, but they’ll never be committed to you again. You’ve lost that, and in many cases, you deserved it.
Of course, the reality is, and everyone who has ever been passed over for recognition and promotion by someone who “looked” like they were getting a lot done when they really weren’t, know this, most managers who relied on “seeing” their reports while walking around were never really that good at identifying who is doing the best job.
But now, that people will continue to work all over the place, and using collaborative workspaces that have data available about who is doing what, and who is communicating with whom, it’s going to be all about the data. The tools are there. Will managers use them, and get better at managing talent?
What does it look like when I know, for example, that I get more work done in less time than the folks on my team who get celebrated for working so hard and so many hours? It looks like a massive cultural shift across an entire industry, one that is probably a long time coming.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of people out there scaring people into thinking that if they don’t get back to the office, they’ll have a very lonely life with no friends. After all, most adults make most of their friends in the workplace nowadays. I know I’ve made plenty myself. But, part of that is because we spend so much time in the office, and nowhere else, that we struggle to maintain any relationships outside of work.
Who has time? Between our 9-10 work day, another hour commuting, and all the extra work we do at night and on weekends, what time are we going to spend with other people?
It doesn’t have to be that way though. Many of us can get our work done from elsewhere, and spend more time in a location that is more conducive to keeping in touch with our friends. That’s the ultimate promise of remote work, and something that employees, and employers, should be considering when we think about what our office policies are going to look like.
I’m sure these statistics will not surprise anyone: “American workers’ productivity has increased dramatically since 1973. What has also increased sharply during that same period is the pay gap between productivity and pay. While productivity between 1973 and 2016 has increased by 73.7 percent, hourly pay has increased by only 12.5 percent. In other words,…