Kids to daycare. Commute. Etc. for 360 seconds of face-to-face meeting. Right. Employees Are Quitting Instead of Giving Up Working From Home
A six-minute meeting drove Portia Twidt to quit her job.
She’d taken the position as a research compliance specialist in February, enticed by promises of remote work. Then came the prodding to go into the office. Meeting invites piled up.
The final straw came a few weeks ago: the request for an in-person gathering, scheduled for all of 360 seconds. Twidt got dressed, dropped her two kids at daycare, drove to the office, had the brief chat and decided she was done.
She had a new job - 100 percent remote - before she turned in her resignation.
Why do employers want their employees under their watchful eye? Because managers don't know how to manage. "Mamagement by walking around" was an actual management strategy. Probably still is. State of the art 1960. But it has little to do with work, tasks, results, etc. It does make managers feel like they are doing something. But if you walk up to a worker involved in a problem and want to randomly discuss the company's values (one of the "benefits" of MBWA), you are stopping that employee from getting work done. What value does that serve? I know, you just expect them to work late.
If anything, the past year has proved that lots of work can be done from anywhere, sans lengthy commutes on crowded trains or highways. Some people have moved. Others have lingering worries about the virus and vaccine-hesitant colleagues.
If you've been vaccinated but you're afraid of people who have not been vaccinated, does that mean you don't believe in vaccines? Seems like you don't, but that is a question for another day.
39 percent of workers would consider quitting over the commute, and 49 percent of Gen Z feel that way.
Commuting serves very little purpose for a lot of people, it is ecologically a disaster, and it's a disaster for the people stuck in traffic. (At one time I had a 90 minute commute that would expand to 2 hours on Friday afternoon), and for a lot of people being in the office doesn't make it easier to get the work done. It does let the manager-class prove they are doing something, at least to themselves.
I now teach at a college and honestly it is better to teach face to face then online, but when I was in the IT industry there was little that I could not do at home with the proper resources then I could do in the office. Biggest plus was the water coller effect
ReplyDeleteIf you've been vaccinated and are afraid of people who haven't ... You're a moron.
ReplyDeleteOr it proves that they don't believe in vaccines...
DeleteManagement By Walking Around works if you practice it as intended and documented in the book. It really just described what was already happening with good managers at HP (iirc, been years since I read it. For that matter, it's been a decade since I managed people, but I did MBWA.)
ReplyDeleteFor some teams and tasks the only way for a manager to know what the team is actually faced with is to be there with them. I've short-circuited hundreds of little and big issues by seeing with my own eyes what an issue looked like, and then getting the team whatever they needed. And it saves the team a crapton of paperwork, reports, and meetings.
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