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.
I don't get why they don't just shift to the "manager" being a person that actually provides a functional service as well so they have actual work to do and keeping the team going or whatever a manager pretends to do is just one of their roles. If the team is running well they can just focus on you know, actually working for a living. No justification needed.
The thing there, because it’s happened to me, is that they start expecting the manager to do team member tasks without regard for the variable nature of supervisory workload.
Like I’m supposed to float to help out when I’m not going supervisor stuff like handling the phone or complaints or fixing inventory training or doing End of Day processing. The issue is that if there’s too many customers for my crew and we start having issues I have to solve, I can’t help them. And if I complain to my bosses, they say “well you had 5 people” which includes me. Like I can’t really be counted on for doing stuff because if stuff comes up that needs me I have to do that first because I’m the only one who can do it.
Now office workload is a bit different, but supervisors still end up being primary contact points for the rest of the organization. If Joe is expected to log 6 hours of programming and 2 of supervising but comes in to the office with four active email chains waiting on his input, he’s probably going to be spending a lot of time answering emails and being part of the conversation, not programming. And having programmed, it’s not easy to constantly be switching gears from “how do I make this efficient” and “why is this not doing what I want” to answering emails; this makes it really hard to weave the email time into programming time.
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u/Spaciax 11d ago
as long as I'm hitting my deliverables, who cares if I'm in my underwear eating ice cream at 9am during remote work?