Google and JPMorgan have each told staff that office attendance will be factored into performance evaluations. The US law firm Davis Polk informed employees that fewer days in the office would result in lower bonuses. And Meta and Amazon both told employees they’re now monitoring badge swipes, with potential consequences for workers who don’t comply with attendance policies – including job loss. Increasingly, workers across many jobs and sectors appear to be barrelling towards the same fate.
In some ways, it’s unsurprising bosses are turning back to attendance as a standard. After all, we’ve long been conditioned to believe showing up is vital to success, from some of our earliest days. In school, perfect attendance is often still seen a badge of honour. The obsession with attendance has also been a mainstay of workplace culture for decades; pre-pandemic, remote work was largely unheard of, and employees were expected to be physically present at their desks throughout the workday.
Yet after the success of flexible arrangements during the pandemic, attendance is still entrenched as a core metric. What’s the point?
If you manage professionals and can’t tell how well your team is doing unless you see them in person daily, you’re a terrible manager.
Alternatively, If I have to bring the people who report to me into the office for them to get their shit together, they’re a lost cause anyway.
Got a better one:
If you’re a professional and need to be managed, you’re not actually a pro.
A good manager is like the coxswain of a row boat. Their job isn’t to provide more power, or tell the rowers how to row. Their job is to keep all the rowers synchronized, and pulling in the same direction.
A good manager does a similar thing. They keep the team both aligned with each other, and pointed in the required business direction. There are a LOT of bad managers out there, however.
Yeah… no. You should be competent enough to contribute where you’re needed without paying a manager to figure it out for you.
This is why Valve has such a unique business structure.
Lmao this is not how human beings function. The smarter and more skilled your employees are, the more they will conceptualize their own direction from the limited information available to them. Keeping 5, 10, 40+ highly competent people pulling in the same direction is very challenging.
Good teams need good managers the way professional athletes need coaches.
Depending on the business situation, that would be a complete disaster. You don’t want 10 people working on a 5 man job, when 2 more jobs are both languishing, and time critical. A good manager can make the calls about which work can wait, and which needs to take priority, and how to balance things. They can also work as primary points of contact between different teams and companies. This keeps information flow clear and stops people being left out of the loop.
While all of these can be done without a manager, the efficiency plummets as the number of people grow. By the time you’re dealing with large, inter-company politics, a manager is critical to take load off the workers. I don’t want to spend 80% of my time keeping people informed, when I can spend 2% and get on with my actual job.