That’s just eavesdropping and meddling with extra steps and is more a case for remote work.
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“And I would have stayed behind on that project too, if it weren’t for you meddling coworkers!”
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They are both good examples of bad management practices. So-and-so shouldn’t be the only person that knows how to do something (or their manager shouldn’t think they are the only person) and the issue is mostly a result of poor internal communication and work flow. The 2nd is also poor management, if the boss can’t explain X properly, but it is their responsibility to know X it sounds like they just suck.
Uhhh… have you never had the experience of reporting to an actuary before? The extroverted kind who looks at your shoes when talking to you? What about the extroverted shoe-staring actuary for whom English is a foreign language?
I mean, even the best trainer in the world will occasionally struggle to find the right words to communicate some particular concept to some particular person. But actuaries are not exactly known for having stellar communication skills and some of those non-stellar communicators make it into management. So my scenario can happen even with someone who is good at training… just less often than a typical actuary who is less good at training.
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To follow up, yes I know there are a lot of actuaries who are bad managers. You don’t seem to be recognizing that all of your examples, and most that I have seen, is bad managers and management practices, not in-person vs remote work.
I think we can all agree those are bad management practices. It’s not optimal to mitigate them with eavesdropping in person, but I dont think you can say that bad management will disappear because people work remotely. Far from it, in my experience. I think the technology we have for remote work can accentuate the good qualities of good managers and do the same for the bad qualities of bad managers.
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mgmt struggles to imagine how coworkers would build a sense of community among themselves at the company if they aren’t building it in actual presence of each other. there’s a point where I think it is old fashioned and out dated, but there is a side I see.
i think people build better lasting relationships and understanding of who each other are by being present together. 5 days a week isn’t necessary, but some regular contact is good IMO. having the number dictated sounds like a way to piss people off IMO.
in the extreme, if we are all remote, training and onboarding are new and different. people could get a ton more mobile if all a job is is a new laptop and new virtual zoom background - and I think that terrifies bosses. many bosses struggle to think anyone could become them by doing anything different, regardless of how much personal time it completely wastes
Ok, well I think that you have to assume that in every single business on the planet, management is going to be something less than 100.00% perfect in every scenario.
And remote work makes the problem of imperfect managers worse.
It has other benefits and I’m not making a judgment about whether the plusses outweigh the minuses. But that is a real cost of remote work.
I don’t know anyone how claimed that.
I disagree. Remote work creates different issues related to bad management. It doesn’t necessarily make the general issue of bad managers worse. For one, it can help to highlight where bad management was able to continue with in-person work because no one that needed to know about it became aware given someone else overheard a conversation and fixed that 1 specific issue. If that specific issue hadn’t been addressed right then, perhaps it would have resulted in someone realizing the “bad manager” was in fact a bad manager and changes needed to be made.
That may be difficult to follow, but I am too lazy to fix it.
But Chatgpt isn’t too lazy…
I disagree. Remote work brings attention to bad management issues that may have gone unnoticed in an office setting. In-person work sometimes allows bad management to persist because only those present are aware of it and can address specific problems. However, remote work can help uncover such issues by requiring more transparent communication and making problems visible to a wider audience. By addressing specific issues promptly, it becomes possible to recognize a bad manager and take necessary actions to make improvements.
Hopefully, it retains the meaning of what you said. I’m too lazy to check
I’m going to disagree with that.
It’s an example of the serendipitous learning that we still haven’t managed to recreate in a remote work situation.
Tools like Teams/Zoom/Slack, and the increased familiarity with them have done a lot to help with providing a virtual way to recreate the “quickly stop by someone’s desk to ask a question” style communications for virtual work. Between that and more people being familiar with working from home, my WFH experience has become less isolating and awkward. (I was WFH for several years pre-pandemic.)
But we still don’t have that serendipitous experience of learning-by-overhearing that comes from working in an office.
WFH works well for me due to life balance considerations, and because my team is scattered across five countries / three continents. But I do miss some of the intangibles from working in an office (but not enough to spend 90-120 minutes each day commuting to a hotel cube in the local office).
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But isn’t that the point?
The opportunity cost of these potential “gains” is far too large.
Makes more sense to try improve on the remote working aspect vs reverting back to the old way of working (and have a large part of your employees miserable. Thats going to be awful for employee retention).
I am also 99.999% convinced these diktats by the CEOs are mostly due to their “want” of shoring up commercial rents (a shoe that is currently dropping heavily in the UK. Many larger companies are reducing their office footprint).
But we still don’t have that serendipitous experience of learning-by-overhearing that comes from working in an office.
Like you people sit around eavesdropping and then injecting yourself into others worklows, unasked. And apparently it’s a big part of your job.
Seriously.
I mentor. Its not that hard.
Also offered as proof that this is nothing…the last three years of increased productivity AND increased personal life.
If people can’t figure out how to do this with technology, they’re going to be left with employees that need to be babysat. Because everyone else will already have WFH jobs.
That probably reads harsh. Lemme rephrase. If you can’t quantify something, it’s not a very good counterpoint.
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There are certainly plenty of people in my department who set their status to “busy” from 8-5, so they always have a red dot
A couple of experiences from my time in an office:
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Back when I was doing pricing/product work, I learned a lot just by sitting near my underwriters. Hearing how they work informed the design of some of the tools I built for them. Yes, we could have had Teams meetings to discuss what they needed vs what I needed, and gone a few rounds…and those meetings did happen… but the entire process was made much more efficient because I already knew some of the functionality concerns they had from hearing how they worked.
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I built the tool that our HR department used for several years to handle the accounting necessary for taxes and benefits for employees who worked in multiple states. I picked up that project because I happened to be walking past HR while a couple of their folks were struggling with Excel. One looked up and said, “hey, there’s Maphisto; he’s an actuary, maybe he can help…”
Really, they should have gone to IT to build a tool (and eventually they did do that, but at the time we were extremely constrained in IT resources), and/or they could have thought to look up friendly actuaries/finance people and gone fishing for someone who could at least answer their stupid Excel question…but this was something I was able to knock out in like a half-hour, probably less time than it would have taken then to figure out who to ask.
- My first job was at a teeny-tiny weird little P&C carrier. I was clueless when I was hired…but I learned so much about the business simply because we had such an open floor plan. I sat in the “finance/accounting” area, but my desk was near where finance/accounting, underwriting, and claims intersected on the floor. Hearing the line underwriters and junior claims folks on the phone / doing their work… I learned a lot about the business.
These are not sufficient experiences to say that we should all go back to the office 5 days a week. However, these are the sorts of things that I don’t think translate well to WFH.
It’s a trade-off. It’s not enough for me to justify spending 90-120 minutes in a car to go into the local office on a regular basis…but it is part of the reason why I make a point of regularly making the 5-8 hour trek to the offices where some of my team members are .
I’ll interject here that I do see one improvement to “serendipitousness” from the style of hybrid work my employer has adopted: since those of us who aren’t in the office at least 50% of the time don’t have assigned cubes/offices, we have some flexibility about where we sit. We tend to cycle around to different floors / different parts of floors in our offices – “today let’s sit over by commercial actuarial / corporate actuarial / risk management /…” If enough of them are in that day… And indeed, in our daily team huddles on Teams we’ve had more than one agenda item start “I ran into so-and-so yesterday, and…”
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Again, not quantifiable, and frankly easily remedied through technology and talking to people. We spend a decent amount of time Involving folks in areas they don’t directly work in, and allow them to contribute. And we talk non shop stuff. And I ask them what they want to do or what they want to provide input for. Jeezus it’s not like we jump on IM like robots and say Task! Complete!
The answer here is not to stick to one’s guns. The answer is to take your objections and either cast them aside as unreasonable, not required, or solve them some other way that fits into a WFH environment.
110% what MS said.
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