Is Your Company Anti-WFH? This May Be Why
by Lisa Bodell for ForbesWomen
Earlier this month, hundreds of Better.com employees were fired over Zoom for working only “two hours a day,” according to CNBC. The mortgage company’s CEO claimed that such metrics as low meeting attendance and missed phone calls validated his decision to terminate around 9% of his workforce. Setting aside the CEO’s seeming lack of empathy and poor timing, this report illustrates two issues amplified by the pandemic’s stay-at-home orders: a lack of trust from leadership in their WFH employees and a skewed definition of what “productivity” looks like.
As a workplace simplification author and host of a popular virtual course on productivity, I’ve studied the growing divide between superficial productivity and actual productivity. In organizations where bureaucrats are more valuable than innovators or achievers, you’ll see nonstop meetings and emails instead of measurable progress toward business goals. And when enough insecure managers are rewarded with promotions across the business, you get a workplace rife with mistrust and poor communication.
Fear-based work cultures also tend to favor ineffective metrics like “number of hours worked” rather than “number of goals/quotas achieved.” The appearance of being hard-working — camera on at Zoom meetings and no email left unanswered — ends up replacing the actual work you were hired to do.