There have been thousands of articles on remote work since the pandemic but perhaps one thing that is overlooked is the psychological dynamics in hierarchy that have nothing to do with worker productivity. Boooooring! Well, you want the trend to grow or be back to the office?
You see, sadly, most of humans are not geniuses, nor great at something, although they love to shower each other with compliments as a social butter to oil the cogs, however processes make sure people of different pedigree effectively iterate and produce tangible results. Most humans are humanly average and that brings one issue to rule them all — self-awareness. Before you can think of all philosophers writing about the voluntary servitude those at the bottom of hierarchy provide to those at the top, remember, you would be no better perhaps, and sometime seven worse.
It might not be your fault you are the way you are but it is your responsibility to make sure your actions have measured negative outcomes and unmeasurable positive. This alone elliminates thousands of people from the race of action and therefore casts them into fate of reaction. Winners and losers is just that. You lose when you give up in face of failures and react to consequences, rather than act. It is, after all, better to prevent than to remediate.
Now, hierarchy in office is by far the most futile work progress mechanism, and in most cases it fails it. Think of companies that became stellarly successful and their unconventional office practices. Suddenly everyone wanted to work for them from a lavatory cleaner to a CEO. Remote work is decentralised labour that requires no master and no commander. It requires ability to delegate responsibility, responsibly.
Clearly, one thing business world has difficulty accepting is delegation of responsibility, those who claim otherwise should revisit the management 101. This stems from top-down inability of leaders to delegate due to lack of personal skills to sort individuals into those who are worthy of responsibility and their desire to keep everything under control, which generally stems from childhood traumas and unfulfilled desires that manifest unconsciously during the work process.
Down-up issue is of voluntary servitude for fear of personal potential being jeopardised due to superior’s perception of self and of you, of worhipping that which you aspire to and your boss having it. Of course, if a retard-in-chief can get you fired you will not argue with them and that is a suicide to a business process. This is the source of mistakes you have to weed as soon as possible. Clearly hiring good leaders is difficult because HR is not made out of leaders. Personal wild card observation. They learn what leaders ought to be and thus tremendously fail in hiring, costing millions in gains never to be achieved, effectively handicapping the organizations they serve. Rarely a good HR exists and when you stumble upon one you will not know that you are being recruited. A standard, many HR should aspire to, and many head hunters reject for whatever reason. Perhaps it will make them less renowned; as my best guess.
This much remote work brings to the forefront the many issues that can be solved with one classic yet effective tactic. Screw the metrics people make to make themselves employed, you need only one tactic and one matrix to filter the labour. Simple does not mean useless or lacking in depth. It is mostly a gateway to the complexity of choice. This tactic reverts back to something many would not expect but it is by far the best way to delegate authority and yield superb results. I employ it myself wherever I can. It is the auftragstaktik a.k.a. directive control.
In line of many Prussian genius ideas, Moltke’s tactic is by far the most effective. What this means is that you are bound by the objective or a task and it doesn’t matter how you will achieve it, the important is that you do so within a deadline. Thus the only two limits for performance become deadlines and goals. These are not limiting, but orienting in focus within the business processes just as it does in military. This allows the potential of every individual to be maximized within roles they perform. Unbound and uncoerced by the superiors.
The complementary effect is leaders have time to actually be leaders and those who are poor leaders become evident as they cannot hide behind micromanagement. Delegate, coordinate, automate. This is what leadership is about. Context jobs are not content jobs and decentralization of labour allows to highlight inefficiencies within the hierarchies. Most managers are unnecessary.
Now, a second Prussian idea is the matrix, originating in armed services and well employed today in many domains. The Hammerstein-Equord matrix is by far the best guide to organizing. We can say we went far from the original but I disagree as it pinpoints basic human nature in relation to performance and environment. It is the broad brush strokes at the background of organizational psychology.
The clever lazy were dubbed “Commanders”, they make the right things happen in the easiest way possible. The clever industrious were “General Staff Officers” which would direct the right things to happen. These are the context roles. The upper management jobs. Best movie focused on the dynamics between the two in a crisis situation is a classic called “Margin Call”, which I highly recommend.
The stupid lazy were offered menial tasks. They are run-of-the-mill soldiers following orders to perform routine tasks done by officers. And finally, the stupid industrious were simply to be eliminated from the processes due to the damage they could infoict by making the wrongs things hppen. Think of a child that happily comes over to you after trashing your favourite hobby set and asks for validation. Funny enough, “Forrest Gump” is a movie about a stupid and industrious individual who only ends up with a succesful outome. This contradiction is what grabs our attention due to reality in the observable environment. It is primarily about hope for those at a disadvantage compared to rest of society.
Thus, stupid industrious are perhaps the only eligible to return to the office or have as little negative impact tasks as possible assigned to them of simple repetitive nature. The rest must be set free as the positive impact on their quality of life is evident. As long as deadlines are met and goals are reached, you should have no questions towards performance. If not, find why, what can be done to not happen again and how should one go about it next time. Predatory goals and deadlines to power trip as a manager and as a little despot will become more prevalent so minimum performance standards should be humanly possible not by the best performers in the roles, but by average, since most labour is average, for whatever domain it is. Law of Large Numbers.
Three times it happens, the fourth you go out! This cannot be demanded from say trainees or apprentices the same way it is from experts in the field and it should be reflected in the salaries. Everything else is a loss to companies that need to adjust their real estate policies and stop acting high and mighty towards the labour force. Clearly one cannot work from home if employed at say construction site, but office jobs? Those can die happily ever after.
I hope I managed to explain this as if you were a young child or a golden retriever…
Stay hard!
