Say it LOUD, and say it PROUD, once more for the people in the cheap seats: We incentivize management as a control mechanism rather than a motivational and organizational mechanism in an organization, meaning that most middle managers are glorified cops. This is the fulcrum point on which all the pants-shitting about remote and hybrid work resides. Productivity does not truly matter to people in organizations; they know the top two salespeople and the back-of-house software suites will be productive enough to keep the revenue quarters humming. What matters is control of the people. That is where the relevance of the bosses emanates from.
Think about this: if you are a boss and you have employees physically on-site, you can call them into a conference room and essentially berate them, or “course correct them,” and others generally know that’s what is happening inside the conference room. To some managers, this is a form of fucking glee. They might get a little aroused. I had a boss once who called me into a conference room because another employee had seen me have a mimosa on a Friday morning before work. I’m 6-6, 350. I think I can probably handle one mimosa, but that boss was drilling me like Brittany at the SAE house over this, and he loved the fact that people knew what was happening in the room.
Now let’s say you’re a hybrid middle manager. You can ping someone on Skype and berate them, sure. It’s kinda cool. But like, is it super cool? No. And can you really walk behind people and see what they’re working on or reading? No. So now you have to admit all this stuff you’ve been fed is a complete lie: people don’t always work eight hours a day, sometimes they work on side projects or for other people, “full-time” isn’t always “full-time,” and now, GASP, you have less control. But the control only came from being a cop. It only came from the corporate surveillance state anyway. It didn’t come from being good at your job, or respected by your team, or anything else. You’re a cop. And hybrid threatens that.
Ironically we’re having a societal blow-up over the role of cops at the same time we’re having a societal blow-up over the role of managers, and the beautiful irony and hysterical, hyena-type laughter is that these are only issues because both professions are about control and little else, and cops often want guns and middle managers want bigger salaries and titles, but neither bucket fully knows what they are supposed to do to make their entities and those they protect better … they just know the assumptions and myths that have fed their professions for years. It’s interesting to watch.
As long as managers get their own nut by “making the trains run” and “keeping an eye on people,” they are getting incentivized around control, and that’s where the freakout has commenced over hybrid and remote models. Control at distance is harder, and less fun.
