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© 2022 Fairygodboss. All rights reserved.
Last night I was listening to a story on NPR of employers who were going to great lengths to show employees they didn't trust them.
One employer made spying software mandatory for anyone who wanted to keep their job and work remotely during the pandemic, while another employer asked employees to keep video conferencing live throughout the work day so they could ensure employees were on task. These employers are obviously not aware that an environment of trust is crucial in any workplace, and trusting employees actually empowers them to do a better job. Click through to see the infographic about the psychology of trusting remote workers.
Anonymous
05/17/20 at 8:49PM UTC
I, too, worked for a company that did not trust their remote workers. They did "permit" working remotely, for a maximum of one designated day per week. When I was physically present in the company, I rarely saw my immediate supervisor. It was ridiculous.
My supervisor's boss made a comment once that I thought was very telling. She said, "It's not what you hear, it's what you OVERHEAR in the office that is valuable." So, basically, she thought it was important for us to be physically present so that we could all eavesdrop on one another. Pathetic, in my opinion. I stayed with the company, because at that point I already had over 30 years with them, and I was coming up on early retirement (which I did achieve).
Now I freelance - 100% remote. I'm on task, because if I waste time, it's doesn't hurt anyone but me. Amazing how the times have changed.
Maggie KimberlBe the change you want to see in the world.
139
05/21/20 at 1:33PM UTC
Wow, what a story!
Barb HansenStartup Product, Growth & Strategy
6.23k
05/14/20 at 4:05PM UTC
a lack of trust is usually a sign of bad (or lazy) management.
My last corporate stint was working for a small company that was spending way too much money on office space. We all worked from the cloud, they had an online task management software, they had a few remote employees so team and company-wide conference calls and videos were common, so there was no technical reason we couldn't work from home and save the company some serious money (when we were pivoting into a new platform and saving money was paramount to every manager)
When I mentioned scrapping 90% of office space and having most people work from home, I was met with another VP saying that there was no way she could manage her team remotely because she couldn't trust them to do their work effectively and she would have to spend more of her time "tracking" them.
I mentioned to her that she really didn't know if her staff was working effectively while they were in the office, to which she did not respond well.
Side Note: She was a lovely person but an awful manager and as an outcome of that her staff was not working effectively.
She was constantly having them track their time on specific tasks, she reworked their personal workflows for them about twice a year, and her department was always dealing with missed deadlines and dropped projects, she had individual daily 15 minute checkin calls with her staff of 5 so she was correct in the abstract --- her department would not function well remotely but that would have been a continuation of the same disfunction she was fostering when her team worked together in the same building.
We ended up scraping most of our office space after 3 years. I moved on from this company early in 2019 but i did see that they gave up the rest of their office space last fall.
Maggie KimberlBe the change you want to see in the world.
139
05/15/20 at 12:36PM UTC
That's so interesting! And I totally hear you about not knowing whether someone is working just because they are physically present. If you hire people to do work, you have to trust them to do it no matter where they do it from!
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