I’m sure at some point, Elon Musk thought for sure that he could buy Twitter and do a better job of content moderation. I’m sure most of us have had a similar thought. We just didn’t have $44 billion lying around.
He did, and now he gets to realize something the rest of us should know by now. There’s no easy way to do it.
Suppose you or your management forces staff back into the office because you need the face-time. Or because you don’t think your team can collaborate, you don’t know who is being productive, etc. Instead of forcing it and running the risk of losing your best performers, ask yourself if what you need to do is manage differently.
There’s no reason for promotions to be based on face time. With all of our technology, there is also no excuse for not collaborating or communicating effectively. Managing a remote team is not impossible. It’s just different. It requires that you change the way you manage.
It’s true. There are times when we need to meet virtually. With each other, or with a customer. A lot of our work, however, simply doesn’t require us to be in a meeting to get it done, and yes, that includes reporting on the status of projects. There’s no reason much of our work can’t be done asynchronously, and if people felt free to work that way, they would get more work done instead of showing up to meetings just to be marked present.
As I read about various companies and hear stories from a variety of peers, it becomes obvious that there might be two mindsets when it comes to managing people. One says these are human beings and should be treated as such. The other says these are labor costs and anything I can do to get more productivity from these “tools” for less money is good for my business.
Those might seem like extremes, and they are. I’ll have more to say about these extremes in a later blog post, but if you fall on the side of seeing your people as people, take a look at the suggestions. I truly believe that even in a company that does want to recognize the importance of mental health and support employees, it is still really difficult to talk about. It shouldn’t be that difficult. Consider how we can make it more acceptable and comfortable for everyone to prioritize their mental health.
Think about how we organize our days. Is having someone sit in one place learning or working all day a recipe for mental fatigue? Of course, it is. That also means that the longer a person goes without taking some significant breaks, the less they are learning. Or, in the workplace, the more mental labor required to do your job, the more likely it is that you’ll start to make some bad decisions and mistakes after a certain point.
So those 12-hour days are probably not doing anyone any good. You’re simply doing lower-quality work instead of doing what your brain wants you to.
I think we should look at the research around sleep, mental fatigue, meeting fatigue, etc. We might just find a better way for everyone to be more successful.
However, the article below goes on to note that Meta has options. It could create hurdles, it could delay and fight it. Neither of those would likely make much difference in the grand scheme.
Eva Galperin from the EFF, though, offers the best solution. She points out that tech companies can’t turn over what they don’t have.
It’s the collection. It’s the lack of end-to-end encryption. It’s all the information they keep about all of us forever. If they didn’t do that, it wouldn’t exist to be turned over.
They made a choice, and anyone using their services to communicate private information made theirs.