To ask the pointed question, How do the employees you manage feel about the change?

Because for me the concept of managers 'just walking around' gives me that itchy feeling on the back of my neck.

And at the end of the day if the employees who write code/produce output are doing that efficiently that is the goal right.

> And at the end of the day if the employees who write code/produce output are doing that efficiently that is the goal right.

That is the short term goal. But it isn't the only goal. I want my reports to trust me so that if things change or they are having problems that they'll be honest with me and provide feedback so I can make things better. I want my reports to feel valued and emotionally satisfied with their work. This means understanding their career goals and what makes them feel happy so I can make sure that they get the kinds of rewards that matter to them. These sorts of things are important for the long term sustainability of a team even if a team is delivering efficiently at a given moment.

Good one, actually most of my employees feel the same way.

You might have a bad case of a micromanager there, but here‘s my definition:

> Management by walking around emphasizes the importance of interpersonal contact, open appreciation, and recognition. It is one of the most important ways to build civility and performance in the workplace.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318016170_Managing_...

Your definition of success might be technically right, but doesn‘t resonate with me.

What good does it do if some code works but the employees behind that aren‘t happy, don‘t feel valued and we can‘t celebrate success together?

Fair enough then, sounds like your team would be happy with a balance of WFH/Office.

I thankfully no longer have to deal with micromanaging, but have in the past (hence the itchy neck feeling).

I should have specified happiness in there somewhere because I agree that the efficiency should come with happy team members.

In my case if theres something I need to make me happier as a team member I'll just ask, but I guess that isn't the case for everyone.

I started doing the "walking around" bit after negative feedback ~20 years ago, and stopped again pretty soon after it was clear that while it works, it's a band-aid for getting people confident that it's ok to talk to you whenever, and the real problem was that I'd been pretty burnt out and shut myself off for a while, not that I didn't literally walk the room.

With remote teams what I've done as a workaround with some teams have been to enforce a short 1-on-1 weekly, and tell people if we don't have anything to talk about, then we make it brief. It prevents team members who are reticent about taking your time from having issues build up because they feel it's too small or too personal to schedule a meeting about when they have a time slot they know you'll schedule regardless. For some it was almost always a 5 minute annoyance of me asking if there were any issues, them saying they had nothing to talk about, and for us to leave it at that. But it acted as a safety valve, and every now and again something absolutely critical would get brought up in those calls.

And many times when they had "nothing" to talk about, I'd ask them followup questions about small stuff like e.g. how they got on with specific people, or how a certain project was going, and suddenly it turned out they had plenty of things to talk about.

In teams where you know everyone will speak up, you can dial back both the actual and "virtual" walking of the room, knowing they'll come and tell you, but "walking the room" effectively acts as a way of lowering the barrier to bring up an issue, because they're not "bothering you".

I started a job as a manager during the pandemic, with everyone working from home. It sucked. On top of the usual difficulties with onboarding remotely, I had to deal with getting to know everyone around me in a 360 degree sphere, and forming relationships when most people had already been able to get to know each other in person.

Can not wait to get back to being able to meet people in person, even if remote and WFH is allowed and accepted in the future, which I think it will be for all but the most dinosaur of companies.

> I mean, nobody opens a Zoom call to just chit-chat about mundane stuff. Well, some do but I‘m sick of taking any additional video call beyond the 4h I’m enduring every day.

Some indeed do, but for some reason it requires more effort than meeting physically did. I never did that, but I had co-workers who did it regularly even pre-pandemic.

What more people do, though, is chit-chat about mundane stuff on IMs. Depending on the company, your subordinates may already have their own #random / #offtopic channel. Of course, as a manager, you need to stay away from it and pretend you don't know it exists :).

But I wonder if there's a space for managers to create a second off-topic channel for their team - one that contains the manager as well. Most of the casual talk will of course stay on the original #random (the boss/subordinate separation cannot be bridged, everyone knows it's there even if they pretend it's not), but the #random+boss chat could capture the kind of conversations you'd ordinarily have on the corridor/around the doors to your office. I know I had plenty of semi-casual chats like this IRL with my boss back in my office days, and they were good for morale. I think this concept didn't translate well into pandemic/forced-WFH world.

Of course, if you don't like casual IMing and prefer synchronous communication, then that's not an option for you.

> I can see how this benefits introverts and people with social anxiety, but as for extroverts me, I‘m getting more depressed every day.

I sympathize. I hope this will end soon, and that we all find balance again. Your company may not return to full-office, but when the restrictions end, it'll be easier to see people IRL even if everyone's mostly working from home.

For what's worth, I'm more on the introvert end, and yet I sometimes feel I'm on the verge of losing my mind - we introverts have limits, too, and this pandemic situation is stressing them.

> What more people do, though, is chit-chat about mundane stuff on IMs. Depending on the company, your subordinates may already have their own #random / #offtopic channel. Of course, as a manager, you need to stay away from it and pretend you don't know it exists :).

Why is that? At all the companies I have worked at the managers would join in with these kind of things same as everyone else (not all of them, but then not of all the ICs were interested either).

You're asking that as a manager or employee? If the former, I suspect there were channels you didn't know about. If the latter, I don't know - but maybe they were channels you didn't know about :).

But the reason is, these chats are for conversations you won't feel comfortable having with your boss around. Cat pictures, stupid jokes, random topics. Even if people felt comfortable with such topics around their manager, they might still be worried that the volume of communications will be seen by the manager as evidence that people are slacking off.

There's pros and cons. But I've seen it be useful for teams to have a "manager-free" space where they can shoot the breeze and complain about stuff without feeling like they are being watched or judged or that their complaints will be taken too urgently.

> without feeling like they are being watched or judged or that their complaints will be taken too urgently.

I guess my feeling is that if your manager is doing that then they aren't a good manager (of course there are plenty of not-good managers, but it's not part and parcel of being a manager)

We have an open slack chat during the day.

Looking forward to going to the pub with colleagues when it reopens in a couple of weeks, but nobody wants to go to an office to sit around.

> Well, some do but I‘m sick of taking any additional video call beyond the 4h I’m enduring every day.

Looks to me like that is the root problem you're having...

"managing by walking around"

Always reminds me of meth lab enforcers walking around and intimidating illegal immigrant meth cooks on a meth assembly line.