The above tweet brought several questions to my mind.
- If a remote employee hired someone else to do their job, would you even know?
- How would you know?
- Why would you care?
Let's deal with the last one first. There's an emotional reaction. "How could they do this? It's not fair!" But how valid is that emotion?
Isn't the agreement between employer and employee such that "I'll give you so much money, and you'll give me so much work?" Is it a different relationship than with a contractor? If so, how? What are the things you give to an employee that you don't give to a contractor? What do you expect from them that's different? Are those differences spelled out in any way or are they just assumed?
That brings up the other questions. If you would know the difference between your employee and their sub, how? It's been my experience that too many managers are not explicit enough with what they expect from their employees to tell if they're doing their job or doing it well. They just have a "feeling" of how it's going. And they feel better if they can see that employee at their desk 40 hours a week (or more). No wonder performance reviews are such a cluster.
What I mean by "explicit enough" is that the output you expect is described in detail such that you and they can agree objectively whether the work is up to snuff. That usually means explaining the output you want, a description of the quality you expect and the quantity and/or timeliness you need.
John Wilson found out because the work was sub-par.
And he found out within three weeks.
That tells me that someone on his team is a pretty good manager. But I am curious about his solution - requiring everyone to be in person. If the work had been excellent (or even good) how would that have changed things? NOTE - he did say this was only part of the reason for the in person requirement.
If it were you, is your response to this situation strictly emotional?
Why this matters
The reasons this is important is because the pandemic has shown many people that remote work is not as remote as they thought. (See what I did there?)
- Some like not having to commute.
- Some enjoy the flexibility.
- Some employers like the savings on rent.
The popularity of remote work is increasing; not for all jobs or all people, obviously. In the future you may find that some remote work option is important to retain good employees. But as John Wilson found out - managing remotely has additional pitfalls. So it's wise to be prepared.
UPDATE from John Wilson: To be clear - we aren’t requiring everyone be in person. We are still going to have a 10% of workforce be remote. The solutions we presented to catch it are “camera always on” and a few others. We didn’t revert on partial remote.
