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JJ's avatar

In-house HR attorney here. (Disclaimer: none of this is legal advice!). I agree with all of your assessments. The issue is HR and management have never been trained to manage a remote workforce at most companies. It requires skill that these people were never trained to do and it ties back to the other issue you’ve written on lately - that “managers” are usually just high performing contributors. They don’t really know how to manage anyone, but they can fake it well enough when everyone is in the office based on seating arrangements and physical proximity. Ask these people to manage their employees based on work alone? That’s a tall order. I actually had one SVP tell me directly that he wanted all of his team back in the office because “HR doesn’t know how to train managers to manage remotely.” I think this is probably widely true. It doesn’t mean people shouldn’t try, but I think a lot of the issue is managers aren’t qualified to manage to begin with, and, to the extent HR has trained them to manage, they have only been trained to manage in person.

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Antonia Malchik's avatar

I read somewhere last week an analysis that a lot of people weren’t looking for jobs because they had significant savings or their spouse made enough to tide them over for a while. (I think the article was about the continuing lack of workers—which made the article weird on its own because it didn’t include lack of childcare and affordable housing, not to mention the pandemic or really anything that indicated they were looking at anything but a narrow slice of office workers.) It did make me wonder if a lot of companies don’t want to make changes because people will run out of cash and need to accept whatever conditions are offered.

Though JJ’s point below about managers seems pertinent. My spouse works for a big international, and I’m a self-employed freelancer, and we’ve been realizing how important good project managers are. My clients’ project managers tend to be excellent, while the full-time a lot of the ones my spouse’s company hires are less so. (Project managers not direct people managers, but it seems relevant!)

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