How the Era of the Remote Worker Complicates Management
How do you manage a team when you don’t know exactly what they’re doing or where they are at every given moment?
By Vivian Giang
New York-based startup Muck Rack is a team of 50 people who can work from home whenever they want. About one-third of the company’s team is based outside New York and therefore, always remote. CEO Greg Galant says he set Muck Rack up to be a completely remote company, meaning that if the startup’s building burned down tomorrow, business would go on as usual the next day.
“My friends always say to me, ‘How do you know if anyone is really working?’ and I always ask them, ‘How do you know if anybody is really working if they are at the office?’” says Galant. “Because the reality is, you can see somebody at their desk and they can stay late, but that doesn’t mean they’re really working.”
As flexibility in the workplace increasingly becomes the most sought-after work arrangement, we see companies scrambling to put a flexibility policy on the books. What ends up happening in the fluid workplace, though, is that workers have more autonomy, which ends up complicating management. After all, how do you manage a team when you don’t know exactly where they are? All of this is further…
