You are way off the mark. Managers do have more meetings. The output they produce is not the number of meetings, but the results from those meetings. When done over teleconference, those meetings take a toll on the people involved. The managers were attending as many people interactions as before - just that the medium over videoconference makes it more tiring.

I wasn't suggesting their actual output was meetings :)

More that as we transition to remote, there is a higher internal desire to signal worth to offset not being in the office. Which on the surface is easily accomplished by adding meetings to your calendar.

This might be true, but I haven't felt it that way. My experience the past two months has been that my avg meetings/week has spiked from about 30 to 45, with avg time spent in meetings per week at 30 currently. The result is that I don't have any time to do Real Work(tm) because I'm constantly in meetings.

Why has this happened? My estimation is that it isn't "because I'm a manager" or "because I'm trying to create artificial face time to indicate my value", but because the broader organization hasn't matured enough culturally to know how to handle itself when everybody is WFH. Examples of things that haven't happened yet:

1) Top down declaration of any core hours, to reduce need for early morning and evening meetings 2) Adjustment of business objectives 3) Formal recognition that there is inequity across sub-populations when it comes to WFH effectiveness/capability (type of work, family situation, living situation, infrastructure access, maturity, mental state, ...).

The perception most within the org seem to have is that, while we pressed pause on some activities (proactive sales outreach, for example), we are accelerating others, and this is coming without much regard for human experience.

Imho, there's also a difference between normal WFH -- as a previous commenter noted -- and this cv-forced WFH. I think there's real fear, that well-founded, from workers who know they can't be 100% productive right now, but don't know if that fact will be adequately recognized by their employer or have clarity around how it will impact future performance ratings, compensation and promotion decisions. As a result, many folks are struggling with balance because they feel obligate to structure their lives in an unbalanced way.

Well, managers who do that signalling are poor ones, IMO. They are analogous to developers who split a single PR into multiple frivolous PRs to signal higher productivity.

Producing the results managers achieve over videoconference meetings takes more meetings (nothing as hoc now) and is physically tiring. Maybe that is what managers in your circle have been talking about.