A manager presents some papers to a team of employees sitting around a table. Not actual story subjects.
A manager was happy to have changed the culture of their team through making numerous tweaks to how they worked day-to-day. One of the most obvious changes was that everyone logged off work at 5:30 PM, decreasing the level of burnout that employees were feeling.
They felt that this was a reasonable adjustment, especially as they still hit their targets. However, upper management decided that this was a reason to limit the bonuses that the team received, because there were other teams who were working later. They didn't think that this was an acceptable thing to do.
Upper management is penalizing my team because we do not work until 8 PM in panic mode
I have managed a design and frontend team of eight people for the past two years. When I took over the department, turnover was forty percent and everyone was burnt out. I restructured our sprint estimation, set realistic client buffers, and absorbed executive fire drills myself so my team could actually focus. Over the past two years, we brought turnover down to ten percent. We hit one hundred percent of our roadmap deliverables most quarters, and even when we slip, it is never by more than five or ten percent.
everyone on my team logs off at five thirty with their work finished.
Last Thursday during our executive calibration meeting, our VP informed me that my team was receiving the lowest discretionary bonus allocation in our division.
A group of four employees working in a casual workspace with a high table and stools. Models pictured are not representative.
When I pushed back with our quarterly delivery metrics, he told me that another department was showing way more PASSION. That other department has missed three product releases this year, but their manager constantly sends frantic Slack messages on Saturday mornings and keeps her engineers in the office until eight at night fixing production bugs.
My VP literally told me that because my team looks relaxed and leaves on time, leadership assumes our workload is too light.
I spent two years building a healthy operational system, only to learn that executives reward visible panic over competence. You should of heard him praise sixty-hour weeks like a badge of honor.
How do you manage in a corporate culture that mistakes chaos for hard work?
Overhead view of employees sitting around a table as a manager presents to them. Models for explanatory purposes only.
Good leadership is invisible, but bad executives need to see bl**d and sweat to believe work happened. If they reward mismanagement over delivery, your best move is to take your highly functional team somewhere else.
Malicious compliance. Message your boss at 1 am on Sunday mornings.
Ask Management and HR to quantify how passion is measured in comparison to productivity, which they seem relatively unimportant.
Then find another job.
Classic executive brain rot. They measure dedication by drama instead of actual results, which is a massive red flag.
Maybe trying sending more "updates" to upper management about what your team is producing? Is it stupid to need to do that? 100%! But it could be that they just want to "see" what is happening and if you are just quietly working away they don't "see" work being done.
What is the point of all these metrics if they only make decisions based on their thoughts and feelings. I hate people like that the most. Take your team and run.
A manager looks at some papers as employees sit around a table in front of him. Representative only.
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