‘Return to the office’ rhetoric needs to end
The truth is a significant portion of managers, in my experience, are not particularly well suited to the task or are incompetent on some level. Usually their domain level knowledge of what is happening is lower than it should be, so they struggle with leading teams because they’re not as good at knowing what’s going on as they should be.One way to mask that incompetence and lack of domain level knowledge, in my experience is to come by the workers and look over their shoulders and ask questions.This is not a problem managers who are experts in what their workers are doing have. But those people in my experience are a minority. They are hired by high performing companies, everything in the middle and down get the cruft.High performing managers don’t need this, because they know what’s going on even if everyone is at home. They can see who’s slow, who’s fast, who’s delivering what they need. And they know why and how to fix things very quickly.Poor performing low domain level knowledge managers struggle with this, because they can’t “look over the shoulder”, and ask questions until they have some understand of what’s going on that allows them to (attempt to) fix things.Thus low to mid performing managers do poorly at WFH while high performing managers are fine with it (in my experience). Having the “over the shoulder” view does indeed allow for lower performance managers to get a grip on a project so I understand why they want to keep it.