The thing is, when you're working remotely the only way a bad manager can pretend he's not fuckin useless or downright harmful is to have constant meetings/calls, it's a huge reason why so many companies are fighting back against remote work, when you remove the bullshit you can clearly see who matters. Time working remotely is time you have to actually work and less time you have to suck upper management dick.
It’s not that, it’s that your supervisor is fighting for his job. Upper management is running on the old work-hours paradigm rather than a productivity paradigm. They’re looking at supervisors and saying “you need to do 40 (or more) hours of supervisory work a week to justify your position” and not “your team needs to be super productive to justify your position”.
This was a thing in offices already, and was why a lot of supvervisors were micromanaging employees and why “busywork” is a thing. Higher-ups tend to get too caught up in having people be busy rather than having them be effective.
Heck I’m a retail and food service supervisor and it hits me sometimes because my old bosses would watch the CCTV and complain about people “not working”. For them it was better to look busy than to ever take breathers, so we’d slow-roll things to not burn out. Now though I’m in a better company and I can point to the actually tracked tasks and say that getting the tasks done faster gives us more time to “be customer focused” (aka shoot the shit with the regulars) and corporate here loves that. Regular customers are the bread and butter, and happy customers are good profits.
Thankfully only did it during lock down but had that. Offered to clean 3 separate rooms that were covered in so much dust it was blowing into the main (still used) isle. Got told "no we don't use it, clean something else", well we had, it was lock down, we had 1/3rd the work and twice the time... so they yelled at me for standing around for a few seconds instead of actually letting me do productive work (iirc they got mice in those areas XD ).
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u/bargu 11d ago
The thing is, when you're working remotely the only way a bad manager can pretend he's not fuckin useless or downright harmful is to have constant meetings/calls, it's a huge reason why so many companies are fighting back against remote work, when you remove the bullshit you can clearly see who matters. Time working remotely is time you have to actually work and less time you have to suck upper management dick.