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In order to survive, managers, in other words, will need to start proving that they actually do something. With large swaths of people working from home some or all of the time, managers will be assessed not on their ability to intimidate other people into doing things, but on their ability to provide their workers with the tools they need to measurably succeed at their job. In my eyes, that looks like a world in which the power dynamics of the office are inverted. Many office workers-particularly those in industries that rely on the skill or creativity of day-to-day employees-are entering a new world where bureaucracy will be reduced not because executives have magically become empathetic during the pandemic, but because slowing down progress is bad business. This type of “hall monitor” management, as a practice, is extremely difficult to execute remotely, and thus the coming shift toward permanent all- or part-remote work will lead to a dramatic rethinking of corporate structure. Across disparate industries, an overwhelming portion of management personnel is focused more on taking credit and placing blame rather than actually managing people, with dire consequences.Įd Zitron: Why managers fear a remote-work future While this is not the only form of management, based on the response to my previous article and my newsletters on the subject, this appears to be how many white-collar employees feel. We have built corporate America around the idea that if you work hard enough, one day you might become a manager, someone who makes rather than takes orders.
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We have a glut of people in management who were never evaluated on their ability to manage before being promoted to their role. As I’ve written before, management has become a title rather than a discipline. The United States, more than anywhere else in the world, is addicted to the concept of management. workforce (and 30 percent of the workforce’s compensation) was made up of managers and administrators-an alarming statistic that shows how bloated America’s management ranks had become. And yet, at the time of the story, 17.6 percent of the U.S. Their story mentioned several case studies-a successful GE plant with 300 technicians and a single supervisor, a Swedish bank with 12,000 workers and three levels of hierarchy-that showed that reducing the number of managers usually led to more productivity and profit. In a 2016 Harvard Business Review analysis, two writers calculated the annual cost of excess corporate bureaucracy as about $3 trillion, with an average of one manager per every 4.7 workers.