For the most part management fails when it comes to supervising positions where THOUGHT is the primary work product. Management wants to see physical actions to denote that the employee is actually working. Management cannot see the thought process the employee is undertaking to come up with the proper physical action to solve the issues that are presenting themselves to the employee. With this failing, it makes no difference if the supervision is remote or up close and personal.
A couple of examples from the computer field:
In Lundstrom’s book, “A Few Good Men from Univac”, he had an example of how having a few engineers sharing an office helped productivity by allowing instant communication verbally and visually. For instance, one engineer could tell the group that he needed a particular signal and another would reply “you got it, use label XYZ for the signal”. He had a counter example of where a project was split between two locations resulting in multiple foul-ups.
Intel had great counter-example with the 8086/8087 design, where the 8086 was designed in Santa Clara and the 8087 was designed in Israel. One glaring fault of the overall design was the 8087 had no way of signaling that the stack was full and had to waste time checking for a full stack. Related to that was no provision for pushing bottom of the stack to memory.
General advantage of working with personal contact is dealing with new situations, where members of the group know each other’s strengths and weaknesses, e.g. “Harry probably has some insight on this”.
All true, at least if the manager is a bean-counter type who only can see productivity, etc. with metrics.
On the other hand, in-person contact can cause distractions and impair performance sometimes, especially when the work is done by a team.** I once had a patient who worked for Bell Lab > Lucent, where teamwork was de rigueur. Often it slowed things down and look what happened to that once proud outfit.
** The concept of Social Loafing has been demonstrated repeatedly in social psych research dating back over 100 years but especially to Latane in 1979.
Bean counters happened. Bean counters can’t comprehend anything other than busy work. They have to see hands moving or keys clicking - and never give any consideration to the thought processes necessary to have the hands move productively or the key click to also be productive.
The concept of co-workers collaborating on ideas is ethereal, whereas office space rent is real money. I wonder which a manager will chose.
Two railfans that also happen to work in Acoustics meet by chance in the lounge car of the eastbound Cincinatti Limited and…
see: http://proaudioencyclopedia.com/manfred-schroeders-frequency-shifter-an-audio-milestone/
Activated the link. It’s a very interesting article, Dave.
http://proaudioencyclopedia.com/manfred-schroeders-frequency-shifter-an-audio-milestone/
Interesting story on CBS Sunday Morning today. They interviewed both those who thought workers would go back to offices, and those who thought working from home was here to stay. It seemed the CEOs would decide based on which style they favored. However, just like activist investors have forced companies to shed costs thru layoffs and other savings, I think they will next target office rental costs.
Some transit systems are at 20% of pre-pandemic ridership.
As far as remote work…I doubt punch in time clocks will ever go away…and sucking up to the boss is easier by going into the office than by zoom…